Interesting Drug

It’s Official: eBay Acquires StumbleUpon for $75 Million:

“The markets just closed and eBay officially announced they have acquired StumbleUpon for $75m”

Hieronymus Bosch Action Figures:

“You love the paintings; now buy the action figures! Hieronymus Bosch Action Figures that depict sin and moral failings as pictured in the infamous Garden of Earthly Delights 1504. Bring on the playful and portable images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke confusion and fear in evil men. Like the paintings the action figures are highly original, imaginative symbolic figurines and iconography, that might even inspire you to start your own surrealist movement. You too will soon realize that human beings, due to their own stupidity and sinfulness have become prey to the devil himself and like Bosh, you’ll be tempted tempted to dream up fantastic punishments of the various types for sinners. Or hell, scare the hell out of that special neice or nephew by planting one of these in their Barbie Dreamhouse.

these are really funny…JB

Originally posted by Jocko from Jockohomo Datapanik, ReBlogged by FLUXXlab on May 30, 2007 at 02:47 PM

”

Google Maps is spying on my cat, says freaked out BB reader:

“Xeni Jardin:

BoingBoing reader Mary Kalin-Casey says,

The new Google Maps zoom feature zooms all the way into my living room window. See cat on cat perch.

I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I’m going to look into whether it’s possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. Meanwhile, I’m happy to show bb readers the photo in the interest of illustrating creepy privacy violations. Heck, the whole world can see him anyway.

Link. Dang, it’s so detailed, I can even see he’s a tabby!

Reader comment: Rich Gibson warns us of the global threat of ‘delusional cat fanciers,’ and their dastardly luddite cartel:

Mary Kalin-Casey may be sane, but I doubt it, and it is a Good Thing
that Google now provides ‘Street View.’ Google, and contractors (and
several other mapping companies), are driving vans with cameras up and
down the streets.

Please don’t support the paranoid rantings of deluded cat fanciers who
want to have public data censored to serve their own psychosis.

You don’t have a right to ‘privacy’ over what can be seen while
driving the speed limit past your house. Boing Boing regularly blogs
about evil security guards beating down poor photographers who just
want to take pictures of pretty buildings. How is the case made
different when the ‘poor photographer’ is replaced by a van of camers,
and the evil security guard is replaced by a person who, if not evil,
is certainly a cat owner, which is pretty suspicious in itself?

danKissam says,

I was looking at it and it dawned on me: if she succeeds on removing her home from Street View it will be a real-world ‘404: site not found’ proffered by Google. I kind of hope this happens as I’m sure it would be surreal.

KevinQ says,

There could be even more privacy issues than ‘they can see my cat.’ For example, the link provided here shows a car sitting in a driveway, and you can read the car’s license plate clearly. I don’t know exactly what you could do with that information, but there it is.

Daniel Terdiman from CNET News says,

Riffing on–and linking to–your post about the cat that is being spied on using Google Maps Street View, we’re looking for submissions for the best examples of this dynamic, and we’ll post a story and/or gallery of the best in a couple of days. Link.

Anonymous says,

Here is a humorous image concerning a method to ask Google not to show your home (that’s the ‘grammar’ used in the robots.txt standard to ask robots not to index your website).

Pen Waggener says,

Interesting story. Has nobody else noticed that there’s a _person_ in the crosswalk beside this apartment complex? Following the link in the story to Google Maps, Zoom out 1, then click the little arrow to the right to see her, and then you can zoom in 4 times to clearly make out a high level of facial detail.

Mark says,

The ironic thing about Mary Kalin-Casey’s submission, is that her name and home address are now spread across the internet, which is a much more significant privacy concern than a view of a cat in her window.

Bob Arctor says,

Here’s a detailed picture of my neighbor taking out the trash. At least he can use it to prove to his roommates that he actually does some work around the house!

Invisible BB reader says,

There is a way to have an image removed from Google’s Street View — or at least an interfact that allows you to report an inappropriate image. If you hit ‘Street View help’ from the image window, there’s a link at the bottom that allows you to ‘Report inappropriate image.’ One of the options is ‘this image infringes on my privacy.’

This link will allow the cat in question to report the image as ‘inappropriate’.

Incidentally, a little ways south down the street, the camera captured a lady getting into her car. You can identify her, and her license plate, with excellent clarity. Left as an exercise for the reader.

David Herman says,

I think this lady may have a cat in a plastic bag. She’s right down the street from the cat in the window.

Mike Outmesguine says,

Looking into the Belagio in Vegas… Why? Link.

Scott Beale says,

Just to follow-up on your post about the new Google Maps Street View feature, someone has located San Francisco’s legendary Frank Chu and another person is trying to track down world famous street busker Bushman. Link.

Goudenvacht50 says,

Here’s a toll booth operator at the Golden Gate Bridge. This is truly frightening.

Elinor Mills of CNET News.com says,

I wrote this article before being alerted to your item on Google maps spying on a reader’s cat. Coincidentally, I included photos of my former front windows where you can see the pillows my cats loved to sit in, but no cats in the shot. Pity.

Bryan Eisenberg says,

We just posted on our blog pictures of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel where cameras are not permitted since 9/11 but street view has images with traffic.

Bill (Digitaleejit) says,

Of all the times to be coming out of a strip club: Link.

Ryan Singel from Wired News says,

I’ll do Daniel one better. Come submit and vote on your favorite inadvertant, urban snapshots here: Link.

See also:

Gear clock:

“Cory Doctorow:

The Wall Gear Clock (out of stock) is pretty snappy. I’m a sucker for any exposed clockwork mechanisms.

Link

(via OhGizmo)

”

WiFi slurper grabs up to six open networks and makes one connection:

“Cory Doctorow:
The Slurpr is a giant, homemade WiFi access-point that uses several WiFi cards to grab all the open networks it can see and combines them into a single Internet feed for your network. Mark Hoekstra, the maker is taking pre-orders for €1000.

Well, the idea is to bundle all the traffic from these six wireless network interfaces (and maybe a wired interface too) into one big connection which, if you keep the wireless interfaces down to five, otherwise you need to hook up to it by wire, could be retransmitted into one powerful new connection! *^_^*

The box at this moment happily boots Debian and the bonding of all the network traffic is done in a load-balancing way, but the other way around. Instead of balancing the load of one connection over multiple servers, we balance multiple connections into one device.

Link

”

The Secrets of Firefox about:config:

“jcatcw writes ‘While Firefox is very customizable, many of its settings aren’t in the Options. Each setting is named and stored as a string, integer, or Boolean in a file called prefs.js and accessed via about:config from the nav bar. Computerworld provides instructions on 20 tweaks for speeding up page loads, making tabs behave, reducing memory drain, and generally making the interface act the way you want it to. Customization also comes through the must-have FF extensions (but be sure to skip these).’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

”

Man arrested, cuffed for using $2 bills at Best Buy:

“A man trying to pay a fee using $2 bills was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail after clerks at a Best Buy store questioned the currency’s legitimacy and called police. According to an account in the Baltimore Sun, 57-year-old Mike Bolesta was shocked to find himself taken to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, Md., where he was ha”

World’s largest MP3 store launches:

“Cory Doctorow:

PayPlay has just launched ‘the world’s largest MP3 download store’ — a store selling more than 1.3 million indie music tracks, with a search engine that allows you to search for your fave artists and get similar indie artists in the catalog. Previous to this PayPlay sold only DRM-crippled WMAs for $0.77, the MP3s sell for $0.88. I guess that we could take that as a tacit admission that DRM makes music worth less, but it does seem a little weird to charge a premium for music that doesn’t treat you like a crook. The service says that this reflects the cost of retooling to host MP3s instead of WMAs. Another unfortunate legacy is the service’s name, which reflects a time when the business was built on DRM and tried to offer artist the opportunity to get paid for their work. But ‘PayPlay’ doesn’t really sell the service to the public, who don’t perceive having to pay as a benefit.

That aside, I got a $20 voucher for the MP3 store last week and spent it all on some pretty great music. I searched for one of my favorite teen punk bands, The Forgotten Rebels, and found a band called Ultimate Power Duo that self-identified as Rebels-esque. I downloaded a handful of their tracks, and was instantly transported to my wasted youth of listening to ‘In Love With the System’ over and over again in my friend Mike’s basement while drinking hard cider that we got the taxi driver to buy for us.

The recommendation system is the key to PayPlay, since it’s unlikely you’ve heard of most of the artists in their catalog. The artists self-identify, citing their musical influences. Searches for better-known artists — David Byrne, Tom Waits, Talking Heads — yielded less fruit: there were so many artists in the search results and many of them appeared to be quite adept at, um, hiding the extent to which they were influenced by some of my favorite acts.

Still, it was easy to fill my basket with $20 worth of $0.88 music, all of which I’ve enjoyed immensely. PayPlay also features an admirable artist split, with artists taking home an average of $0.59 per track, (artists signed to labels average about seven percent of the price of an iTunes Store download), which means that your purchases at the store are pretty good karma, too.

Link

”

Hit Me Baby One More Time: Games Without Equals or Sequels:

“With the absolute glut of video games sequels showing no sign of ending any time soon, I often think back to games gone by that haven’t received the number 2 treatment. Kyle Ackerman over at Games.net has compiled a list he calls ‘The 49 Best Sequel-Less Games,’ and there’s hardly a game on there that I haven’t pined for an update to. Legend of Dragoon. Planescape: Torment. Advent Rising (possibly just me.)

Hit the link and read through his list…or just skim the titles and imagine adding a 2 to the end of any one of those games, enjoying the pleasant little shivers the thoughts bring. Then come back here and discuss what games you’d like to see a follow up to - or just throw insults at each other. The power is in your hands. Michael Fahey

The 49 Best Sequel-Less Games [Games.net]

”

Contestants Vie For Kidney On New Reality Show:

“A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a program in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys.

Political parties have called for The Big Donor Show to be scrapped, but broadcaster BNN says it will highlight the country’s shortage of organ donors.

‘It’s a crazy idea,’ said Joop Atsma, of the ruling Christian Democrat Party.

‘It can’t be possible that, in the Netherlands, people vote about who’s getting a kidney,’ he told the BBC.

”

Manhattan Landfill:

“Among other interestings things to read in Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles – who will be speaking at Postopolis! on Thursday afternoon – is the fact that part of Manhattan is actually constructed from British war ruins.

[Image: Winston Churchill visits the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, 1942; courtesy of the Library of Congress].

Toward the end of the book, Byles describes how ‘[m]ore than 16 million people saw their homes wrecked by bomb destruction during World War II, with more than 4.5 million housing units completely toasted.’
Further, ‘[w]ith London and Coventy knee-deep in rubble by the fall of 1940, a phalanx of 13,500 troops from the Royal Engineers got busy ripping down war-ravaged structures.’
But what to do with all that rubble…? Byles:

Around that same time, New York’s FDR Drive was being constructed, which ran along the east side of Manhattan. ‘Much of the landfill on which it is constructed consists of the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Second World War by the Luftwaffe’s blitz on London and Bristol,’ the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote. ‘Convoys of ships returning from Great Britain carried the broken masonry in their holds as ballast.’

When you’re driving around on the FDR, in other words – or, for that matter, when you’re simply looking out over the east side of Manhattan – you and your gaze are passing over fragments of British cathedrals and London housing stock, flagstones quarried from Yorkshire, the shattered doorframes and lintels – and eaves, and vaults, and partition walls, and bedroom floors – of whole towns, pieces of Slough and Swindon perhaps, embedded now in asphalt, constituting what would otherwise have passed for bedrock.
Down in the foundations of the city are other cities.

(Elsewhere: We learn that the British coast has become geologically French, further complicated our future sense of geological belonging – raising the interesting possibility that one can exist in a state of geological alienation… Psychoanalysts will have a field day. [via]).

did not know this, did you? JB

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, ReBlogged by FLUXXlab on May 28, 2007 at 09:09 PM

”

Attention Pornographers: Lara Is Not A Porn Star:

“When Lara placed a self-portrait taken at age fourteen on deviantART, she never expected it to be stolen by TVX Films and placed on the cover of the DVD porno ‘Body Magic.’ Lara asked the President…

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]”

Twenty Five Years of Tron:

“the_quiet_angeleno writes ‘I have an article in today’s Summer Film Preview issue of Los Angeles CityBeat on Disney’s sci-fi classic Tron, which is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary this year. The piece includes a discussion with Richard Taylor, one of Tron’s visual effects supervisors on the film’s groundbreaking effects, as well as director Steven Lisberger, on how the narrative incorporates the Jungian concept of individuation. Here’s a sample: ‘Visual Effects Society member Gene Kozicki, of the L.A.-based visual effects house Rhythm & Hues, believes Tron’s legacy was in moving computer-generated visuals into the realm of storytelling. ‘Research into this type of imagery had been going on for over 15 years, but it was more scientific in nature,’ Kozicki says, ‘Once artists began to share their ideas and treat the computer as a tool, it moved away from strict research and towards an art form.’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

”

Use the Force, Luke!:

“

Brain-eating zombies invade SF Apple store:

“Blog: A horde of decaying zombies invaded San Francisco’s downtown Apple store on Friday evening, hunting for brains, terrifying the customers, and gnawing on iMacs.”

[Amusing] I-Mockery looks at some of the most absurd pirate toys on the market. Pirate bling?:

“I-Mockery

”

What Happens When You Read Freud to Toddlers:

“Little girl reaching for Peanut M&Ms: I want penis!
Mother: You better stop that!
Little girl: I want penis!
Stranger: Just give it to her, for Christ’s sake!

–Manhattan-bound L train

”

LP Cover Lover:

“Via Jack Babalon: Prepare to lose your entire day to LP Cover Lover: The world’s greatest LP album covers (45s too.)

”

Twenty Must-Have Mac Apps:

“Matthew Cone
Friday, May 25, 2007

Every Mac you can buy these days comes pre-installed with powerful and practical applications. You get the amazing iLife suite as well as other applications like Safari and Mail.app. In fact, Macs include so much software that you could probably do practically everything you need to do without ever downloading or purchasing another application.

But if you did that, you’d be missing out on dozens of freeware and shareware applications that can help you do much more with your Mac. There’s another world out there, and it’s just a download away.

In this article, we’ll share our software favorites. We’ve scoured the Internet for the most useful, user-friendly, and inexpensive Mac applications available. These are the must-have applications that no Mac user should be without!

Adium

Free - http://www.adiumx.com/

We’re huge fans of Apple’s iChat, but it only works with AOL Instant Messenger and .Mac accounts. If you or your friends have Yahoo! Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger accounts, you’re out of luck. Enter Adium, a free instant messaging application that connects to just about every messaging service out there.

Adium is easy to install and configure, and with a very active ‘xtras’ website, there literally hundreds of ways you can customize it.

There’s no question about it: This application will help you stay in touch with friends and family in a way that iChat just can’t. The biggest bummer? Adium doesn’t support audio or voice chat, so you’ll have to call on iChat or Skype for that stuff.

TextWrangler

Free - http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

We said it before, and we’ll say it again: TextWrangler is the best Mac text editor out there. You just never know when you’re going to need this application to take notes, edit Mac OS X system files, or perform a search and replace on a large chunk of text.

TextWrangler can be used for web-editing and programming, but you’ll quickly outgrow it if you’re using it for those purposes. More advanced applications like BBEdit and Textmate provide powerful features that TextWrangler lacks. Unfortunately, both of those applications are expensive and too sophisticated for the average Mac user.

VLC

Free - http://www.videolan.org

VLC is a free, cross-platform media player that supports nearly every video and audio format you can imagine. You can use VLC to watch DVDs and DIVX CDs, play hard-to-watch Windows Media Player files, and even stream media onto the Internet! And, since the player resembles applications like iTunes and QuickTime, you’ll feel right at home.

CoverSutra

About $20 - http://www.coversutra.com/

iTunes plays your music, but if you’re like us, you don’t keep the iTunes window maximized all the time. It’s a real shame, because all of our album cover art is stashed away in there, hidden from view. No longer! CoverSutra displays your album artwork on your desktop and lets you change songs without messing with iTunes.

Click on the album cover to control iTunes with CoverSutra’s cool transparent window.

Plus, if you listen to the free Last.fm Internet radio service, CoverSutra will automatically log every song you play in iTunes.

HandBrake

Free - http://handbrake.m0k.org/

iTunes lets you rip CDs you’ve already purchased, but what about the DVDs you own? How are you supposed to get those movies onto your Mac? You’ll use HandBrake, a free application that allows you to copy DVDs to your Mac.

HandBrake lets you tweak virtually every aspect of the importing process, ensuring that you’ll get the right file size for your Mac or iPod. Start storing movies on your Mac today!

Aurora

Free - http://metaquark.de/aurora/

Aurora turns your Mac into an alarm clock, but it also does much more than that. This free application will turn your Mac on in the morning and start playing an iTunes playlist or any TV or radio channel from EyeTV.

At night, before getting into bed, you can set Aurora to play songs for a certain period of time before putting your Mac to sleep. This application takes Mac automation to a whole new level.

RapidWeaver

$49 - http://www.realmacsoftware.com/

Sure, there are plenty of applications that can help you build a website. There’s Apple’s iWeb for newbies, but it’s too inflexible to be really useful. Then there is Panic’s Coda for those who know how to code in HTML. What’s everybody else supposed to use?

Take a look at RapidWeaver, a cheap and powerful website creation application. It’s easy to get it working with .Mac or another hosting-provider. With plenty of hip pre-made themes and templates to choose from, you’ll have a website online in no time!

Vienna

Free - http://vienna-rss.sourceforge.net/vienna2.php

The RSS revolution is upon us, and you should start downloading feeds to your Mac. But which application should you use? We’ll recommend Vienna, a free RSS reader for Macs that blows away the expensive competition.

Vienna lets you access RSS feeds and load web pages directly into its built-in web browser.

Twitterrific

Free - http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific

Do you know about Twitter? It is, admittedly, a completely irrelevant way to send text messages over the Internet. It sounds stupid, but you’d be surprised at how addictive it can be. Twitterrific is a free application from the Iconfactory that brings Twitter right to your Mac’s desktop.

This little application looks sexy and does a great job of getting you hooked on Twitter! Twitterrific makes it so easy to send and receive messages that you’ll be addicted in no time flat.

Delicious Library

$40 - http://www.delicious-monster.com/

You collect books, movies, music, and video games. Now it’s time to use your Mac to catalog, browse, and share them. Delicious Library helps you do just that. It’s easy to enter items into Delicious Library! Using your iSight camera, you can scan the barcode of the item you want to classify. Delicious Library will search for the item and automatically add its information to your library.

This has to be one of the most incredible and useful Mac applications of all time.

xPad

Free - http://getxpad.com/

The Mac note-taking and organization application market is very, very crowded. There are many fine applications to choose from, including Yojimbo, Mori, and Journler. To be honest, all of those applications probably appeal more to power-users in niche markets.

Unsurprisingly, the application that stands out in this market is the simplest of them all. xPad is a free notepad that allows you to take notes, make lists, and jot down ideas. You can even export your notes to your iPod! There really is something to be said for doing one thing, and doing it well. Good job, xPad!

Transmission

Free - http://transmission.m0k.org/

Say you need to download a file - any file - from an Internet source. What application are you going to use? Transmission would probably be your best bet. This free BitTorrent client lets you download files quickly and easily without the hassle or the wait.

You will, of course, still need to find the files to download. Use something like The Pirate Bay, and don’t tell anybody we sent you.

AppDelete

Free - http://reggie.ashworth.googlepages.com/appdelete

One of the problems with Mac OS X is that it doesn’t really remove all parts of an application when you delete it. There’s usually a bunch of junk left behind - stuff like preferences and associated documents, which will all continue to take up space on your hard drive, even though they won’t be used in the future. AppDelete is a free application that will seek and destroy everything associated with the application you’re deleting.

Cha-Ching

$40 - http://www.midnightapps.com/

Financial gear-heads have Quicken and QuickBooks. For all the rest of us, there’s Cha-Ching. It’s a simple, up-and-coming money manager that can track your finances, notify you about bills, and help you craft budgets.

We know it’s expensive. If you can’t rock the $40 price tag, take a look at Buddi, a free budget application that isn’t quite as strong as Cha-Ching.

WriteRoom

$25 - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom

Someday, when you’re writing and need to escape your Mac’s distractions, you’ll need to use WriteRoom. This simple application blacks out everything on your screen except text, so you can focus on writing. Think of it! No iChat alerts. No email notifications. No RSS feed updates. Just you and your prose.

If you’re not a writer, or if you want to concentrate on something other than text, check out Freeverse’s Think. It’s a free download, and a great application!

Quicksilver

Free - http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

This free launcher application appeals to power users and newbies alike. With a couple of keystrokes, you can launch applications, open and move files, control iTunes, and perform just about any other application-specific task without ever touching your mouse.

All this power comes at a price: You’ll need to practice to make Quicksilver part of your routine. It’s kind of like learning a new language. It’s difficult at first, but if you can get over the Quicksilver hump, you’ll be able to perform tasks a lot faster!

Graphic Converter

$30 - http://www.lemkesoft.com/

Whether you’re creating simple graphics for your blog or editing clipart, you’re going to need a graphics application. You could, of course, buy Adobe Photoshop. It’s only $650. For those of us who don’t want to sell our cars just to buy an application, there’s Graphic Converter.

It has a lot of the same features as Photoshop, and it costs a lot less. Plus, the unregistered shareware version has nearly all of the same functionality as the registered version.

NeoOffice

Free - http://www.neooffice.org/

A word processor is something new Macs don’t ship with. Apple’s Pages and Microsoft Word don’t come cheap, either. Fortunately, there is a free alternative. NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to the Mac. We’ll be honest with you: NeoOffice is a little slow and buggy for our tastes. But hey, it’s better than nothing, right?

Xtorrent

$20 - http://www.xtorrentp2p.com/

Xtorrent’s website claims it can ‘get anything,’ and we believe it. This peer-to-peer application scours the web for music, movies, applications, and other things you probably shouldn’t be downloading. Xtorrent just makes it so easy to find and download stuff.

Any old application can download stuff. Xtorrent really shines when it comes to iTunes integration, ease of use, and speed.

Comic Life

$25 - http://plasq.com/comiclife

Life without comics would be an intolerable insult. That’s why Comic Life is such a great application - now anybody with a Mac can create their own comic strip! It’s as easy as inserting a picture and adding some text.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Matthew Cone is a technical writer living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his free time, he does the desert rat thing and hikes and road bikes around the Southwest. The rest of the time, he studies straw-bale houses, reads Anarchist philosophy, and pretends to not be working. You can email him at: matt@macinstruct.com

”

Demented kids’ book photoshopping contest:

“Cory Doctorow:

Today on SomethingAwful’s Photoshop Phriday: Children’s book covers made demented.

Link

”

101 Essential Blogging Resources:

“Heaps and heaps of resources for bloggers, from domaining to communication to monetization to statistics tools. This is a must have bookmarked list…”

30 Most Memorable ‘Star Wars’ Quotes:

“In honor of the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the original ‘Star Wars’ — back when the biggest explosion came from the last TIE fighter and Han actually shot first — here are 30 of the film’s most memorable quotations … and no questions asked.”

ZUSE toaster “prints” low-res images:

“David Pescovitz:

Inseq Design’s ZUSE toaster burns a variety of 12 x 12 pixels into bread.

ZUSE doesn’t see itself merely as a compact toasting device but more like a print-maker of the traditional kind… With its candid intention of providing happiness to its owner ZUSE can randomly draw from its repertoire of images encoded in its memory chip.

Link

Previously on BB:
• PlayStation 2 toaster Link
• Transparent toaster ‘celebrates toasting’ Link
• Toaster Fetish photos Link

”