theodp writes "Ready for one-automobile-per-child (OAPC)? India's giant Tata Group is on the verge of launching the world's cheapest car. The People's Car, slated to be unveiled January 10th at a New Delhi auto show, will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500), which some analysts say could revolutionize automobile costs worldwide. The Tata is a pet project of Cornell-trained architect Ratan Tata, which he helped design. The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Trombone Cozy - Link.
• Knit Lobster - Link.
• Fun with Casting Resin - Link.
• Cassette Tape Business Card Case - Link.
• HOW TO - Flat Pack Desk - Link.

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The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the 'free time' activities of their employees via their web presence. "When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have career-altering consequences." The piece likens this activity to the 'Sociological Department' that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Wired article reports on data loss in 2007, and the numbers aren't good. Credit card and social security theft was at an all-time high, with even more losses expected in 2008. Information thieves, it seems, are just one step ahead of IT security. "While companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late. 'More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they're responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company's security and seeing where the holes might be,' said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim herself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

world time server
voco clock
watchismo
clock design
wooden gear clocks (* image shown here)
alunatime
timeline

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Today on Boing Boing tv: Russell Porter already has quite a following in the UK -- his Porter Report videos chronicle alt music culture with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. Today, the "professional chancer and well known layabout" joins us on Boing Boing TV, for an on-the-street and in-the-club exchange with Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, who became YouTubeFamous this year for their track "Thou Shalt Always Kill".

Link to video and comments on BBtv. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow posted (to Boing Boing) an image and link to his Flickr set of photos he took at ComicCon of action figure modders and their cool creations.

Action figures set - Link

Related:

• Mashing up your own action figures - Link
• Hand-made action figures... made LIVE! - Link

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An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Engadget article notes that the Washington Post RIAA article we discussed earlier today may have been poorly phrased. The original article implied that the Association's suit stemmed from the music ripping. As it actually stands the defendant isn't being sued over CD ripping, but for placing files in a shared directory. Engadget notes that the difference here is that the RIAA is deliberately describing ripped MP3 backups as 'unauthorized copies' ... "something it's been doing quietly for a while, but now it looks like the gloves are off. While there's a pretty good argument for the legality of ripping under the market factor of fair use, it's never actually been ruled as such by a judge -- so paradoxically, the RIAA might be shooting itself in the foot here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Woah -- Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat) will play Abbie Hoffman in an upcoming Spielberg adaptation of the Trial of the Chicago 7. I'm a huge Hoffman fan -- his (somewhat fictionalized) autobiography is one of my favorite books -- and Cohen's the kind of merry anarchist who strikes me as the perfect and unlikely casting choice.

Hoffman went on to become an irascible celebrity who, later diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, killed himself with pills in 1989.

Baron Cohen will not have to undergo a big transformation to play the part. Hoffman, who was Jewish, attended Berkeley University in California, while Baron Cohen, an urbane Orthodox Jew more than 6ft tall, cut his teeth entertaining friends at Christ’s College Cambridge with subversive wit and surreal pranks.

Link (via Digg)

EvilRyry writes "In an article for Discover Magazine, Jaron Lanier writes about his belief that open source produces nothing interesting because of a hide-bound mentality. 'Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During yesterday's Why Silicon-Based Security is still that hard: Deconstructing Xbox 360 Security presentation at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, hackers Michael Steil and Felix Domke demonstrated a blown-wide-open hack for the Nintendo Wii. They've extracted the keys for signing Wii code, and now you can run anyone's code on your Wii, not just programs that Nintendo has sanctioned. Incredible as it may seem, there are still companies that think that they should have the right to tell you what you can and can't do with your hardware after you pay for it. Link (Thanks, waltbosz!)

A New York Times story at News.com notes the efforts of American security organizations to help the Chinese government prepare for the coming Olympic games. Critics argue this assistance violates the spirit of Congressional sanctions, and that the technology left behind after the games are over could be used to track dissident elements. "'I don't know of an intelligence-gathering operation in the world that, when given a new toy, doesn't use it,' said Steve Vickers, a former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who now leads a consulting firm. Indeed, the autumn issue of the magazine of China's public security ministry prominently listed places of religious worship and Internet cafes as locations to install new cameras. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, Foxtrot (easily the geekiest of the mainstream comic strips) took a great little swipe at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the notorious 1998 US Copyright law that makes it illegal to break DRM. Link (Thanks, Kim!)

Roland Piquepaille noted coverage of the iSnake Robotic Surgeon which is basically a super flexible robot that can travel through blood vessels and repair the heart. Of course the article isn't exactly clear on what happens if they gain control of the city's sewage system and take over.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some classmates (Byron Lahey and Ryan Brotman) and I just finished up a project where we used wireless handheld electronic devices to control Max/MSP instruments. It's called sGloTaT (sensor Glow-object Trumpet and Tambourine):

The sGloTaT sonic environment allows participants to originate sound by moving physical objects. It encourages novice users to play by naturally gesturing with two tangible user interface objects emulating a trumpet and tambourine. In this sound space, movements by the users generate visual feedback projected on the floor in the form of a three-dimensional rendering of a cone.

Byron built one of the objects from polycarbonate tubing, and I hacked a Bop-it toy for the other controller. Both contain an Arduino mini, BlueSmiRF, and a two-axis accelerometer. The glowing and IR-reflective tape helps the objects be sensed by our motion tracking infrastructure in the SMALLab environment at Arizona State University. You can watch the overview video, download our paper, and look at photos of the objects in progress - Link.

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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan.

First a little background...

My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.

Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.

If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.

This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more.

Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.

So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.

So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating.

So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens.

1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.)

2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot.

Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.