Posts Tagged ‘makers’

Just look at it. Contest entry – Pie

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Just look at this banana cream pie ad.

From the humor site NewsBiscuit, a brilliant set of security guidelines for naming your first pet, so that when your bank uses “what was the name of your first pet,” in order to verify your identity, you will be safe. Banks are now advising parents to think carefully before naming their child’s first pet. For

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High-security first pet naming guidelines

“Death by Degrees,” a thoughtful piece in N+1, compares the inherent injustice in a system rigged to produce unequal wealth distributions to the injustice in a system that demands expensive, time-consuming higher education in order to access professional and political life. The authors present this as a blind spot for the left, who criticize poor

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Credentialism is just as screwed up as corporatism

BitTorrent Labs have released the alpha version of their “OneClick Chrome Extension,” a Javascript-based Web app that obviates the need for a separate BitTorrent client. Using their plugin, you can download BitTorrent files as though they were regular, server-hosted downloads. As Patrick Williams explains in a blog post on GitHub, I stumbled upon the Chrome

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Clientless BitTorrent downloads in your browser, using Javascript

Megan, a cake designer, sports her wonderful zombie/T-Rex tattoo. It was inked by Jeff Addz at Generation X in Daytona Beach, Florida, who worked freehand. Zombie T-Rex Tattoo Shoulder Tattoo (via Geekologie)

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Zombie T-Rex tattoo

I’m very taken with James Charlick’s photo, “The Grand Library,” shot in an abandoned house during an urban exploration expedition. The Grand Library

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Library in abandoned house

An internal memo from Scientology’s “Office of Special Affairs” (notorious for being a dirty tricks bureau) asks adherents to the faith to find message-board comments on stories about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s divorce that criticize the church and try to have them censored by complaining about violations of online services’ “codes of conduct,” which

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Scientology memo asks members to censor critical web comments with trumped up "code of conduct" complaints

Paul sez, “I’m the writer and presenter of the hit BBC3 show ‘The Real Hustle’, and I’ve just released a new video to promote my one-man show, ‘Lie. Cheat. Steal. Confessions of a Real Hustler’ at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. ‘Free Drinks Forever’ teaches nine entertaining proposition bets for you to fool and fleece

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Nine bar bets you can’t lose

Rand and Ron Paul have penned an Internet Freedom manifesto that is pretty terrible. It pans the idea of net neutrality, arguing that the phone companies who receive gigantic government handouts in the form of cheap (or free) rights of ways and hold natural monopolies over our connectivity should be able to use that government

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Rand and Ron Paul denounce net neutrality and the public domain

MrBrickLabel has a Flickr set of absolutely gorgeous vintage Chinese firecracker labels. I have been collecting firecracker and firework labels since I was 5 years old (1968). I appraise, buy, sell and trade firecracker labels. Everything you see here could possibly be for trade. I will try to post everything eventually.

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Vintage Chinese firecracker label-art

Street Tucker, a series of photos of “Food found on the streets of New York City.” There’s a whole genre of “food left on bike seats.” Street Tucker (via MeFi)

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NYC is paved with leftovers!

Dana Cooper writes on behalf of They Might Be Giants: “They Might Be Giants is calling on fans across the globe to help create a music video for their new, bonus extended version of ‘Alphabet of Nations,’ and you can be part of the action! The band has asked fans from various countries to snap

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TMBG wants your global help to make a new "Alphabet of Nations" video

Tom Greto, a Redditor’s young cousin, performs a quite wonderful rendition of the Trololo song. What a treat! So I was browsing my cousin’s YouTube videos when suddenly… (youtube.com)

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Young man performs "Trololo"

Rob posted earlier about a EU high court ruling that upholds the right of people who buy downloadable games to resell them. Many people will point out that this makes it much harder to pursue certain game-distribution business models. This is true, but so what? There are lots of business models that might thrive if

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Public rights, private rights, and downloads

My latest Locus colum, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” asks why music copyright is such a hot potato on the Internet, even in the post-DRM age, when most tunes are $0.99 on Amazon in MP3. The short answer: music’s ancient compact is not entirely compatible with contemporary commerce, and the industry has tried to “fix”

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Why we still fight about music and copyright on the Internet

I often get asked by people involved in startups whether they should be patenting the stuff they’re working on. Many times they recognize their core idea isn’t really patentable — it’s obvious, it’s trivial, or it’s been done before — but their investors tell them that they can probably sneak it past the USPTO’s overbusy

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Startups want to make stuff, not patents

Remember Righthaven, the copyright troll whose ass was handed to them by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, who got a court to declare that fair use exists, you can’t license the right to sue over a copyright without licensing the copyright itself, and terrifying random bloggers into turning over their life’s savings for quoting

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Righthaven: copyright troll zombie!

Shapeways contributor Isohedral came up with this awesome design for a two ounce stubby rocketship/espresso cup, which is available as a 3D print in ceramic: Rocket Espresso Cup 3D Printed in Ceramics All Systems Are Go!!!!

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3D printed rocket-ship espresso cup

Dan “Mediactive” Gillmor sends us his latest Guardian column, a thoughtful and fascinating manifesto for what the role newspaper ombudsmen could morph into, in order to maximize the relevance and centrality of newspapers and news organizations on the Internet: • Aggregate (quote and link to) every thoughtful critique of the organization’s work that I could

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What news ombudsmen should do to make the news part of the Web, and vice-versa

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, “My Favorite Bit is a feature where I invite authors, artists, and other creators to talk about their favorite bit of their newest work. This can be a scene, a sentence, a character, or a bit of world-building. It can even be a piece of research that never made it on

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Writers show off their happy places

The Telegraph’s obit for Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld recounts the florid and exciting life of the aristocrat turned French resistance fighter turned UK special forces killer turned escape artist turned colonial enforcer in Indochina. In particular, La Rochefoucauld was a skilled escapologist, and ballsy as all hell about it: Dropped into the Morvan with

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Obituary for a French superspy

Keio University’s robotics group have demonstrated a set of remotely-controlled facial elements designed to be worn as rings. These could be directly controlled by the wearer, or could be remotely controlled by a piece of software that was portraying a character that inhabited your hand like a sock-puppet or Senor Wences. “First of all, this

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Robotic rings turn your fingers into a face

Microsoft has (kind of) acquired Netscape, buying many of its key patents and assets from erstwhile owner AOL. Early Netscape employee JWZ calls it “brand necrophilia” and adds, “I assume that this means that ValueClick will now be suing Microsoft over the cookie patent instead of AOL, if that’s still going on. There are no

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Microsoft buys Netscape (sort of)

Parents in America are taking out loans at interest rates of up to 20% in order to pay for their children’s private K-12 education. The average loan from one provider, Your Tuition Solution, is $14,000, while the Lake Trust Credit Union lets you carry up to $40,000 in loans for your child’s primary and secondary

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American parents take out student loans for their kids’ kindergarten education

There’s not much detail in the description for this video, but the performance speaks for itself. The Professional Tea Boy (Thanks, myiosprinter!)

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Playing a delightful tune on teacups