I've written before about Datamancer, a master steampunk maker whose creations are some of the finest-wrought examples of the form. Now he's posted his latest creation, an elaborate steampunk fancy of a laptop, along with build-notes. It's really something.

This may look like a Victorian music box, but inside this intricately hand-crafted wooden case lives a Hewlett-Packard ZT1000 laptop that runs both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. It features an elaborate display of clockworks under glass, engraved brass accents, claw feet, an antiqued copper keyboard and mouse, leather wrist pads, and customized wireless network card. The machine turns on with an antique clock-winding key by way of a custom-built ratcheting switch made from old clock parts.

Link (Thanks, Datamancer!)

The steampunk, as it has been noted in this compendium

Update: Jake von Slatt sez, "Doc (Datamancer) exceeded his bandwidth but he sent me the files for the laptop page and I set up a mirror for him here."

Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica reports on a new study that suggests not only that certain areas of the mouse genome undergo more changes, but that changes to those areas are more tolerable by the organism than changes in other areas. Recently published in Nature Genetics, the study examined the certain copy number variations of the C57Bl/6 strain in mice that have been diverging for less than 1,000 generations. The results were a surprising number of variations. While the study does not address it, Ars Technica goes on to recount suggestions that genomes evolved to the point where they work well with evolution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, I posted about Shannon Malloy, a car crash victim who survived internal decapitation. In this rare injury, the skull and spinal column are dislocated but soft tissue and skin keeps the head on the body. Amazingly far along in her recovery, Malloy's biggest trouble is that her eyes are still screwy. The accident left her cross-eyed. One recent surgery temporarily fixed the problem, but after just three days her eyes ended up turning completely outward. She's hoping another surgery will fix the problem for good. From KGTV San Diego:

When her eyes are corrected she has one simple thing on her "to do" list.

"You know what the first thing I want do when I get my eyes fixed? Read the new Harry Potter book," said Malloy. "I've tried reading it, but it's just too hard." Link

For several months, Malloy blogged about her recovery, but this summer she wrote that her lawyer advised her to "stop doing blogs." Her previous posts are still online. Link

Previously on BB:
• Woman survives internal decapitation Link

Art collective Henry VIII's Wives restaged historic photographs with elderly volunteers as the models. All of the models in the series, titled "Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century," live in a home for the elderly in Glasgow. From the Henry VIII's Wives site:

A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. Each of these images represents an immediately recognisable cultural leitmotif of its époque, the representation that overshadows the event it documents.

Link (via Laughing Squid)

theodp writes "To train a new generation of leaders, Google sends its young associate product managers on a worldwide mission. Newsweek's Steven Levy tagged along and reports on the APMs' activities, which included passing out candy, notebooks and pencils to poor Raagihalli children, a 'Rubber Ducky' group sing-along at 2 a.m., and competitions to find the weirdest-gadget-under-$100 in Tokyo. The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the experienced hires."

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ThinkingInBinary writes "The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order."

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einhverfr writes "According to an article in the IEEE Spectrun, the synergy between batteries and capacitors — two of the sturdiest and oldest components of electrical engineering — has been growing, to the point where ultracapacitors may soon be almost as indispensable to portable electricity as batteries are now. Some researchers expect to soon create capacitors capable of storing 50% as much energy as a lithium ion battery of the same size. Such capacitors could revolutionize many areas possibly from mobile computing (no worries about battery memory), electricity-powered vehicles, and more."

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Roland Piquepaille writes "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This two-disc set of Soviet propaganda cartoons (subtitled "American Imperialists and Fascist Barbarians," and "Capitalist Sharks and Communism's Shining Future") looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Just ordered mine!

From the early days of the Russian Revolution to the final days of the Cold War, the Communist party were experts in propaganda art. Using sophisticated animation techniques the Communists won the hearts and minds of the Russian people in their battle against capitalism and their desire to portray Communism as the shining vision for the future. The undermining of capitalist sharks and the evangelical praise of the communist regime were masterpieces of animated art and propaganda. This collection of animated propaganda was recently recovered from Russia's television vaults. For the first time in ninety years the West can now see how the Soviets portrayed them. This unique documentary collection brings together the original animators and propaganda films such as Mister Twister, What Hitler Wants, Fascist Boots on Our Homeland and many others. Included in the box is a 24 page collectors booklet featuring background information on every propoganda film.

Link (Thanks, A.Simmons!)

The Stopped Clocks campaign aims to get Britain's public clocks running and on time again. Many handsome old public clocks are visible from the streets of London, but it often seems that these grand old timepieces are dead and rusted, ground to a halt years in the past. This site sports a map of stopped clocks, along with vigorous discussion of the best way to get the time running again. Link

(Image credit: Urmston, from Moblog.co.uk)

DeviceGuru writes "Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes "A group from Newcastle University has released work that significantly improves the Draw-A-Secret method of creating passwords. The basic concept behind Draw-a-Secret is that humans excel at image recognition and memory, so 'passwords' should be designed to leverage that ability. The people behind the new work have refined the technique by parsing the shapes with a flexible grid and using existing images as a background to reinforce memory of the password. Imagine having your password be a graffiti-laden alteration of your favorite politicians campaign photo..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Cuban suggests that Facebook license their API.

Steven Levy on what it's like to work at Google.

NY Times's BlogRunner has an RSS 2.0 feed; I'm subscribed.

First, overall I like the way it works, but I'd like to see some improvements (or maybe pointers if I missed a feature).

1. WordPress has a very good feature that allows you to set a pref that requires a commenter to get approval the first time he or she posts. I want that here too.

2. I'd like an option to receive a copy of all comments via email. I think this feature exists, but I haven't been able to find a way to turn it on.

3. Spam hasn't been a problem yet, but it will be. What has disqus done to prepare for this?

4. I want to be able to maintain a copy of all the comments on my server in case I decide to switch later, and I'd like it to be in a format that a competitor can import. At some point, if this feature isn't there, I will switch to one that offers this feature. I don't support data lock-in.

To the disqus people, please don't send me private email, just respond in the comments here. Thanks.

AlexGr writes "Jeff Gould raises an interesting question in Interop News: Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid support, but it does track Red Hat updates and patches closely, and usually makes them available within a few hours or at most a few days of the upstream provider, which it refers to for legal reasons as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Free support for CentOS can be found in numerous places around the web, and a few third parties offer modestly priced paid support for those who want it."

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netbuzz writes "It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone either, as the number of inconsiderate dolts who yammer away oblivious to the disruptions their yapping is causing those around them continues to rise. Pocket-sized cell jammers are becoming a hot item, while proprietors of restaurants and the like look to defend themselves as well. Yes it's illegal, but given that the rudeness is pretty close to criminal as well, it's unlikely to stop any time soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night, and well, it completely slept through Saturday. It appears to have rallied, however, and amid firm declarations of "I'm never doing that again", Feedfetcher has started diligently reporting subscriber numbers to us, early this morning Pacific Time. FeedBurner publishers' subscriber counts should be closer to what you'd normally expect starting with reports that will be available on Monday morning.

baegucb_18706 noted that ABCs 20/20 has a lengthy article on the saga of the Hans Resier murder trial. I'm not sure if this article provided any information that you might not have known if you read the earlier wired interview, but it's still a really strange story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.