- Gallery: Digitizing the Past and Present at the Library of Congress (BoingBoing) — amazing pictures and stories about preserving and protecting the Library of Congress, it’s papery past and its pixellated future. We can’t afford any damage to anything,” said Eric Hansen, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division. “Never take a sample; be completely nondestructive. … We know there will be advances in technology and that current techniques will become outmoded.”
- Mark Frauenfelder on The Colbert Report — It’s great to see Make and DIY culture getting an articulate outing on national television, but I’m entranced by the useless device. Its motion is so emotionally evocative, I’d swear it exhibits shyness. Reminded me of EJ Park’s work.
- Copyright Elephant in the Middle of Glee — if the TV show Glee were real life, the characters would have racked up millions on penalties from their infringing actions. In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
- Sikuli — a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). (via liza on Twitter)
"Make" entries
A World's Faire for Makers
A preview of Maker Faire New York.
The first Maker Faire on the east coast takes place this weekend on the grounds of the New York Hall of Science in Queens, the site of the 1964 World's Fair. Here's a preview of talks, events, and performances.
Detroit 2.0: Motor City to Maker City
Maker Faire Detroit opens this coming weekend at The Henry Ford in Dearborn. Our goal is to create a fun, family-friendly event and showcase talented makers from Michigan and aroundthe Midwest. I also think the event gives us an opportunity to consider ways that makers can be part of re-inventing Detroit from the ground-up. This Thursday, just before Maker Faire…
Detroit Can Do Camp – July 29
As part of the week leading up to Maker Faire Detroit, we have organized Can Do Camp for Thursday, July 29 at Eastern Market in Detroit. Can Do Camp is an informal day for makers to meet each other and explore the DIY mindset. This mindset is a powerful and positive force for building hands-on communities as well as fostering innovation and developing a diverse, creative culture. Can Do Camp will bring together what President Obama called “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.”
Four short links: 10 June 2010
Adventures in Digitization, DIY on TV, Copywrongs, and Web Testing
Four short links: 8 October 2009
DIY Baby Rocker, Unix Systems Glory, Encrypting Ephemera, and Explaining Creative Joy
- Linux Baby Rocker — inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command … (via Hacker News)
- I Like Unicorn Because It’s Unix — forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it poorly.
- Encrypting Ephemeral Storage and EBS Volumes on Amazon — step-by-step instructions. (via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
- You Have No Life — if a video smacks even slightly of concentrated effort or advance planning, someone will inevitably scoff that the subject has a) “too much time on his hands” or b) “no life.” Ten times out of ten. […] After six years I lack a succinct, meaningful response to my students’ defensive, clannish embrace of mediocrity, though I’m grateful for this tweet, which comes pretty close: dwineman: You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”
Four short links: 11 September 2009
Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator
- Healthspottr Fellow — outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
- jsMath — Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
- Google’s Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer — Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
- Tweeting Kegerator — network connected keg that tells you when it’s about to run out.
Four short links: 9 September 2009
SMS Data Collection, Love of Math, Anti-File Sharing Rubbish, Open Manufacturing
- RapidSMS — a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. UNICEF’s mobile data collection framework, as used in Malawi and other proving grounds. (via gov2expo)
- Groceries — read this and you will realize that Dan Meyer is the math teacher you wish you’d had. He has the geek nature, and his excitement must be great for his students. The express lane isn’t faster. The manager backed me up on this one. You attract more people holding fewer total items, but as the data shows above, when you add one person to the line, you’re adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that’s “tender time” added to “other time”) without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you’d rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person! I can’t believe I’m dropping exclamation points in an essay on grocery shopping but that’s how this stuff makes me feel.
- How the UK Government Spun 136 People into 7 Million — a radio show looked into the government’s claim of 7 million illegal filesharers and discovered it came down to 136 people in a survey admitting they’d used it. (via br3nda)
- Idle Speculation on the shan zhai and Open Fabrication (Tom Igoe) — shan zhai have established a culture of sharing information about the things they make through open BOMs (bills of materials) and other design materials, crediting each other with improvements. The community apparently self-polices this policy, and ostracizes those that violate it. Open hardware, business, recovery, and more in this fascinating speculation.
Four short links: 19 August 2009
Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM
- Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias — “Burying the other evidence: […] Doesn’t most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School’s famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks’s success? (via Hacker News)
- A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies — insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
- s3cmd — commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
- DIY GSM Network — wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)
Four short links: 22 July 2009
Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches
- ARtisan — AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
- How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% — A/B testing from 37Signals showed that “See Plans and Pricing” got twice the clickthroughs of “Free Trial!” and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
- Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector — another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
- Launchpad Opensourced — Canonical’s code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.
Four short links: 16 July 2009
Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills
- Transparency Camp West — a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
- Meeting Ticker — count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
- More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines — Tellingly, ad companies don’t run ads for their products. “[W]e haven’t bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you’re doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It’s that whole “I haven’t got any money, so I’ll have to think.” It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
- 18 Essential Skills for a Maker — 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)