Southwest Airline's Spirit Magazine is my favorite of the in-flight magazines. Every time I flip through an issue, there's always at least one or two articles that are right up my alley. This month, there's a nice, long feature on the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. From Spirit Magazine (photo by Phil Torrone of MAKE:):

“My brother and I learned to fix the machines using the Machinery’s Handbook,” (museum founder Tim Arnold) says. “Back then, in the early ’70s, you could buy a broken-down machine for 50 or 100 bucks, fix it up, nurse it back to health, and make 20 bucks a week off it. We ended up renting an 800-square-foot storefront in East Lansing. There were some minor details: Pinball was still illegal in Michigan, and we were under 18. We were putting machines in bars we weren’t supposed to be allowed into. My brother and I saw ourselves as bandits. It was organized crime, except that we weren’t very organized.” This was an impressive bit of technical entrepreneurship when you consider that the average college graduate in electrical engineering needs two years of tutelage under a skilled repairman to master the art of fixing old games.

Now all the games are beginning to bear the patina of yesterday. At the height of the pinball era in the early ’90s, the industry produced about 100,000 machines a year. Today only one company, Stern Pinball, remains, and it makes about 10,000 machines a year. “We have a saying: The last ice man makes the most money,” Arnold says. “Back in the ’20s, you had thousands of ice men in every city, delivering ice to every home. Then refrigeration came along, and nearly all the ice men went out of business. Nearly all. You still have a guy delivering ice to bars and restaurants. There’s room in every town for one ice man. That’s what the Hippie and I are.” He peered at me through his aviator glasses. “We’re the last of the ice men.”

Link to Spirit Magazine article, Link to PT's photo post on MAKE:

A 14-year-old boy in Lodz, Poland allegedly hacked a TV remote control so that he could control parts of his city's tram system. Sounds like he identified the infrared pulses used to override the track switching. Four trams were derailed but nobody was injured. From The Register:

"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change," (said Lodz police spokesman Miroslaw Micor.)

"He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed...

The youth, described by his teachers as an electronics buff and exemplary student, faces charges at a special juvenile court of endangering public safety.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's come out in the British House of Lords that a pair of twins, who didn't realize they were siblings, were married. Once the couple found out how close they really were, the marriage was annulled. The matter was discussed during a debate on the legislation surrounding human fertility and embryology. From CNN:

"They were never told that they were twins," (a senior British lawmaker) said during the Dec. 10 debate... They had been adopted by separate families and "met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

No further details about the couple have emerged, and it is not known when the marriage took place or how long they were together before they discovered the truth.

Adoption groups said Friday the case proves the need for openness and transparency during the adoption process.

Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)

UK unicorn club girl by photographer Alistair Allan, via fashionista.com (thanks Susannah Breslin).

Søren Ragsdale has been traveling through Asia and sharing some interesting video and photos with friends. He also happens to be one of the folks behind waterboarding.org. He writes:

While we were in Cambodia this winter I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng is one of the few places where you can see a real actual waterboard in the room where it was used to torture prisoners. I've created a 'waterboardingdotorg' Flickr account and put a link up here.

Nice to know America has something in common with the Khmer Rouge -- something that isn't torture, of course. Among the photos in that set, this chilling shot of a poster on the wall of the Khmer Rouge's chief of staff, now covered with graffitti -- and this sign reprimanding less-than-reverent visitors; "no laughing allowed."

Previously:

* What Waterboarding Feels Like
* Senator Kit Bond: Waterboarding is "like swimming"
* Waterboarding.org

It was only a matter of time before super-popular office productivity killer, Scrabulous, was sued by Hasbro for infringing upon the Scrabble trademark. A shutdown notice was sent two weeks ago, although, as of right now, Scrabulous is still operational (hurry up and finish up your games). Founded in 2006 as a standalone website by two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, Scrabulous' growth accelerated significantly when it launched as an application for Facebook. As the 9th most popular application on Facebook, Scrabulous boasts over 2.3 million active users with over 500,000 of them active daily. While Hasbro does indeed have a strong legal case against the Agarwalla brothers, they are missing out on a key opportunity by pursuing this litigious route. Although Hasbro recently licensed the digital rights of its games to EA, no online version of Scrabble exists right now. So, by shutting down Scrabulous, Hasbro would be angering 2.3 million of Scrabble's biggest fans. Instead, why not hammer out a compromise and turn this into a win-win-win situation? Unfortunately, most likely, history will repeat itself, as this is not the first time Hasbro has chosen this route -- in 2005, they shut down popular online Scrabble site, e-scrabble.

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Noah Shachtman writes,

Just before the holidays, I took a trip up to iRobot's headquarters, outside of Boston, to take a look at the machine that'll form the heart of the Army's $286 million "unmanned surge."  Along the way, I caught my first glimpse of robot yoga.

Link.

Salon: "What Huckabee has lacked is a top-level adviser to layer some intellectual heft and policy realism onto the candidate's make-it-up-every-morning improvisational style."

NY Times: "The Democratic presidential primary in New York on Feb 5 is shaping up as the state's most competitive since 1992."

Today, Friday, January 11th is the sixth anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. The ACLU and a number of other organizations asked members today to "wear orange to protest this stain on America's reputation." Snip:

Closing the prison and ending torture and indefinite detention without charge is a first step towards restoring our reputation in the world.

80 people in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits were arrested today at the US Supreme Court, in a protest calling for the prison's closure: Link. Other similar protests organized by Amnesty International took place in other world capitals.

There were also protests in Second Life: Link to screengrab-set by Taran Rampersad.

(image: Matthew Good).

warner cartoon title cards
moo!
weapon of stick figure
riba
rabbit
eastern europe
clemens kogler
ray patin
acme catalog
animated manhattan
cartoon modern

previously on web zen:
animated zen 2007
animated zen 2005

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

bednarz writes to mention that NetworkWorld has an interesting examination of young IT professionals and why many make unreasonable demands for their services. "'The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee's expectation,' he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last November, we noted that the "under new management" major record label EMI was discussing the possibility of scaling back its support for the RIAA and the IFPI, after realizing that many of the group's actions were counter-productive and had helped lead EMI and the other record labels down the wrong path. The moment of awakening for EMI appears to have been Radiohead's experiment. Apparently, EMI is quite serious about this. Reader Jon notifies us that EMI has told the IFPI that it will leave the group at the end of March, if it doesn't shift its strategies towards helping the recording industry, rather than its current strategy, which has clearly not been working. Part of the proposal is that the IFPI merges with the RIAA, rather than having the two act as separate groups -- though, the two often do seem to work together. Either way, this could represent a huge step forward, as it appears that at least one of the major labels has finally realized what plenty of people have realized for nearly a decade: the strategy of focusing on protecting an obsolete business model while suing your biggest fans is more damaging than helpful. Getting EMI to pressure the industry to realign and rethink its strategies is a huge step forward -- even if it's happening about seven or eight years late.

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I spent a few days over the last week trying to get a connection between Frontier and Amazon's SimpleDB.

I got connections going with: CreateDomain, DeleteDomain, ListDomains. They all use the same basic code to handle authentication, and all three work.

But I hit a dead-end with the PutAttributes call. At first I thought I had found a problem on their end, because their JavaScript scratchpad app (a life-saver) had exactly the same problem as my code. I got in touch with the Amazon people, they asked me to download a new version of the scratchpad app, and it worked, but of course my app still doesn't. I compared my parameter list to theirs, and except for the signature and time-stamp they are identical. So there's something wrong with my code, clearly.

Here's a link to a plain text listing of the code. All four of the interface routines use this code to call the Amazon web service. This is the place the problem almost certainly is.

And here's the interface for PutAttributes.

As often happens, the geeky readers of this blog may spot the mistake that I don't, so all suggestions are welcome. I really want to get past this and start building applications that connect with this new web service.

An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, we wrote about Trent Reznor's disappointment in how his "free download" experiment with Saul Williams had progressed. He wasn't completely disappointed. He was quite happy about how much attention the album had received, but he had hoped that more people would choose to pay for the higher quality downloads. He did an interview with News.com yesterday that got some attention for a throw away line about having ISPs pay a $5/month "music tax" to let people download, but most of the interview reiterated the points he made in his original blog post: he's excited about the attention Williams was getting and how many people were listening to the music, but in the back of his mind he had hoped more people would pay.

What's much more interesting, however, is that News.com has now interviewed Saul Williams, and he appears to be much more pleased with the results, and seems to agree with our view that it's way too early to be disappointed:

"I'm actually extremely optimistic. The only thing that I really have kept in mind is that, one, we're two months into a project.... I think it's early in the game. I'm not disappointed at all."

He also notes that, since the music business is all about touring these days, anyway, the direct money from sales is less important:

"the lifespan from my last album, from touring, which is really how I made my income and everything, lasted for two years."

As for Reznor's disheartened response, Williams chalks it up to two factors. First, it's just Reznor's nature:

"I don't think Trent is as truly disappointed as he sounds in that blog. You got to think of him this way...listen to his music (he laughs). In my opinion, oh, he might not like this, but I think he's the king of emo."

Secondly, given the amount of time he's spent in the traditional recording industry, it's hardwired into his brain:

"I think Trent's disappointment probably stems from being in the music business for over 20 years and remembering a time that was very different, when sales reflected something different, when there was no such thing as downloads.... Trent comes from that world. So I think his disappointed stems from being heavily invested in the past. For modern times, for modern numbers we're looking great, especially for being just two months into a project."

It's nice to see Williams recognize that this is a long-term experiment and the early results are more encouraging than disheartening.

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A few years back, we noted that a Canadian court had ruled that the "private copying levy" (better known as "you must be a criminal tax") for blank media such as CDs and DVDs could not be extended to iPods. However, the Canadian Copyright Board seemed to think that such a decision didn't preclude it from going back and adding the levy to iPods at a later date -- and this year it tried to do so, sending the whole issue back to court again. Once again, the courts have said that the Copyright Board is wrong and it cannot put the levy on iPods. Apparently, it took all of about 24 hours to make this decision, pointing out that much of this stuff was covered in the earlier decision a few years back. It's worth noting, by the way, that the recording industry probably wasn't on the side you'd expect in this case. It was so afraid that a private copying levy would "legalize" file sharing, that it came out against the proposal as well. Now it can keep on suing people. Of course, it makes you wonder how it feels about the private copying levy that is still used on blank CDs and DVDs, which seem even less likely to be used for private copying purposes than an iPod.

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statemachine writes to mention that the USDA and farmers took part in a 5-year study of switchgrass, a grass native to North America. The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent. "But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. 'To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization,' he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. 'Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.