Favorite: First Contact, by CMGW Photography Loved the look here

First off, my intention is not to fight you on this. You have more cars than I have dollars, and so I know I don’t stand a chance legally, and on top of that, I don’t really understand how legal stuff works. But the truth is you kind of fucked up my shit and I need to talk to you about it.

"I mean... it's a cute mohawk. But it's a ladies-only mosh pit, man. Ladies-only." (122:20)

The ArchiveTeam Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts.

@textfiles: An attendee of last night's talk made a link page of everything I touched on. http://t.co/rzcYJjgL ... I am friggin' ECLECTIC

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it's lost forever. Along the way, we've gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we've gotten the message out: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

Again, here are some things I learned from @textfiles at @aadl, tonight:

Actually, I learned about a bunch of stuff from @textfiles tonight. Here are some links from my notes.

Both URLs load and use about 200MB in chrome. In nightly they use >1GB and the browser hangs, not rendering any frames.

I want to help port the MESS and MAME emulators to Javascript.

Mirror of the MESS codebase, plus efforts to port MESS to Javascript

You are looking at a javascript version of the MESS emulator, a program that emulates hundreds of machine types and will, eventually, be capable of running most known computer software programs. What you see here (and if you don't see anything, we apologize) is a Colecovision emulator running the homebrew Colecovision cartridge "Cosmo Fighter 2", in demo mode.

The 11th Annual Music And Gaming Festival
4 Days of Non-Stop Games and Concerts

6 years ago, John Gilmore (yes, That John Gilmore) saw that IUMA was in a zombie state and very unlikely to ever get out of the ICU. So he grabbed a copy of all he could – which wasn’t all of it, of course, but it was a hell of a lot of it. He stored them on some backup tapes, and as the site went down, disappeared, and faded into the mists of memory, he looked for a chance to have someone get a copy up somewhere. I was that person.

The Internet Underground Music Archive was better known by the acronym IUMA. The IUMA was started in 1993 by three students at the University of California at Santa Cruz: Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord. The three men worked together to create an online music archive that would help musicians and bands who weren't signed by a major label. The site allowed these unsigned artists to upload files and send them to fans. The site also enabled the artists the opportunity to talk with their fans. The IUMA was first part of the Usenet newsgroups.

Founded in 1985, the DNA Lounge (Dance Not Art) has provided live music acts as well as DJs and special events to the San Francisco area, and is one of the longer-surviving clubs of its kind. In 1999, the club was purchased by Jamie Zawinski, remodeled extensively, and re-opened in 2001. Since that time, it has hosted thousands of performances, all of which have been broadcast over the web and available for a short time after the event. These broadcasts have been downloaded over the last decade and compiled into this archive of shows, matched with information from the DNA Lounge website.

The development version of Wget can write its results to a WARC (Web ARChive file format) file, just like Heritrix and other archiving tools. With the WARC format, it's possible to save both the request and the response headers. It also provides a clean way to store redirects and 404 responses.

git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.

A fluoroscope was a metal construction covered in timber approximately 4 feet (1.2 m) high in the shape of short column, with a ledge with an opening where the child (or the adult customer) would then place his or her feet in the opening provided and while remaining in a standing position, look through a viewing porthole at the top of the fluoroscope down at the x-ray view of the feet and shoes. Two other viewing portholes on either side enabled the parent and a sales assistant to observe the child's toes being wiggled to show how much room for the toes there was inside the shoe. The bones of the feet were clearly visible, as was the outline of the shoe, including the stitching around the edges. The exposure time would have been around 15 seconds.

At the Wagah border post that separates northern India from eastern Pakistan, the distance between the throngs of Muslims that gather on the Pakistan side and the mostly Hindus and Sikhs congregated on the Indian side is but a few feet. But it feels like miles for those old enough to remember the days when they could walk from one side to the other without ever leaving India. And although the nightly border guard ceremony here may be grounded in a bloody history of partition conflict, for locals and the occasional tourist it remains a symbol of a peaceful back-and-forth between two neighbors who have fought each other in three wars. And for Pakistan, the changing of the flag ceremony represents a rare refuge of decorum amid the swirling chaos that engulfs their country.

The Wagah (Punjabi: ਵਗਾਹ) border closing 'lowering of the flags' ceremony is a daily military practice that the security forces of India (Border Security Force) and Pakistan (Pakistan Rangers) have jointly followed since 1959.[1] This ceremony takes place every evening before sunset at the Wagah border, which as part of the Grand Trunk Road was the only road link between these two countries before the opening of the Aman Setu in Kashmir in 1999. The ceremony starts with a blustering parade by the soldiers from both the sides, and ends up in the perfectly coordinated lowering of the two nations' flags. It is called the beating retreat border ceremony on the international level. One infantryman (Jawan) stands at attention on each side of the gate. As the sun sets, the iron gates at the border are opened and the two flags are lowered simultaneously. The flags are folded and the ceremony ends with a retreat that involves a brusque handshake between soldiers from either side, followed by the closing of the gates again. The spectacle of the ceremony attracts many visitors from both sides of the border, as well as international tourists.

Cheevos for Firefox is an addon for Firefox that makes learning about different parts of the browser fun, as well as giving you the opportunity to brag to your friends about your pro-level web surfing.

The WARC (Web ARChive) format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archival file together with related information. The WARC format is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC File Format [ARC_IA] format that has traditionally been used to store "web crawls" as sequences of content blocks harvested from the World Wide Web. The WARC format generalizes the older format to better support the harvesting, access, and exchange needs of archiving organizations. Besides the primary content currently recorded, the revision accommodates related secondary content, such as assigned metadata, abbreviated duplicate detection events, and later-date transformations.

TIL from @textfiles that there's a @dnalounge Live Collection on

@dresdencodak: The fact that we allow basically all human beings to drive cars at all is kind of baffling to me sometimes.

According to documents recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the RIAA was asking for damages of about $72 trillion dollars, a figure that the judge in the case said is "absurd." Judge Kimba Wood wrote in a recent decision that, "An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to 'more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"

UPDATE: The jury verdict is in. They found no infringement of the patents!

But "loss prevention" officers at the Target on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino had never seen anyone take an interest in bar codes quite like Thomas Langenbach, a top Silicon Valley executive with the global software giant SAP. Prosecutors charged Monday that Langenbach used the tools of his trade -- computer codes and the Internet -- to steal a Santa's workshop worth of Lego toys. They say Langenbach brought his own bar code stickers to the store, used them to cover up the real ones, and then purchased his plastic prey at enormous discounts.

Recurring nightly.

Dear MSM: OWS does not "clash with the police" we are unarmed, peaceful protesters who are savagely attacked by the police. #MSM #noNATO

Creating QR codes is a quick and easy process using a few model signals and the PyQRNative port. The hardest part of this implementation was finding a way to use the Django ContentFile object to save the generated QR code using our selected storage backend. This was important because you would not have to worry about changes to your system architecture effecting your QR generation code. An example would be moving from local filesystem storage to S3 using Django Storages (django-storages).

Program design: The program hung at an angle, so the names were rotated accordingly to ensure optimal readability. The hole was drilled in the bottom gutter of the booklet so it could be easily flipped through while attached to the lanyard.

Testing out my Tweet button... I earned the badge "Mozilla Webdev" on badg.us! #badgus

More »

Don Draper is no longer Mad Men's hero. That honor now belongs to Michael Ginsberg, the young Jewish copywriter whose work has already upstaged Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's longtime brilliant creative director. More »

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over a 13-year period studied, there "was a significant inverse association between coffee consumption and mortality," meaning that people who drank coffee had a lower risk of death, particularly from "heart disease, respiratory problems, strokes, injuries and accidents, diabetes and infections." More »

When nine-year-old Josef Miles spotted members of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church doing their hate-mongering thing on the Washburn University campus in Topeka, he asked his mother, Patty Akrouche, if he could stage a small counter-protest to their message of intolerance. More »

It's graduation time and that means various notables are giving commencement addresses like nobody's business. Last week, Mitt Romney spoke at Liberty University, which provided Bill Maher with a jumping off point on tonight's Real Time. I know this is gonna shock you, but Maher isn't a big fan of any part of it.

Sixteen years ago, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin wrote The Case for Mars, outlining his plan for a manned mission to Mars. Since then, we haven't put a human on the Red Planet or returned to the moon, and Zubrin argues that one reason is that we are too obsessed with the safety of astronauts.

Zubrin's article "How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?" appeared in the February issue of the magazine Reason. The gist of his argument is laid out in the video above: that NASA fails to perform an appropriate cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to send astronauts on missions, instead valuing the life of the astronaut above all. Zubrin notes that other government agencies do these analyses all the time; for example, the Department of Transportation will reject a safety improvement proposal if the proposed expenditure will cost more than $3 million per life saved. Even if we valued an astronaut's training and skills at $50 million per astronaut, Zubrin argues that doesn't justify, for example, the cancellation of the mission to save, repair, and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004 due to risk of astronaut death.

Zubrin is arguing in part for allowing astronauts to decide for themselves whether to accept the risk of manned missions to Mars and the moon, but also for risking human life to maintain and improve pieces of our space research infrastructure. I suspect, though, that NASA is considering not only the individual worth of an astronaut, but also how the death of an astronaut affects the public's view of the space program. It will be interesting to see if, with the advent of commercial space ventures, astronaut death will become a more routine aspect of space exploration, and whether the public at large will accept those deaths as a cost of human expansion into space.

What is an Astronaut's Life Worth?: An Interview with Robert Zubrin [via reddit]

Matt Mechtley is responsible for this maker’s dream project: getting a classic Nintendo Power Glove to work with custom games by replacing it’s brain with an arduino, implanting an accelerometer for motion detection, and using a bluetooth modem for wireless connectivity. He’s outdone himself with downloadable code, schematics, this awesome video, and an Instructable to top it off.

According to law enforcement sources and police reports obtained by the Tribune, the arrests were the result of a monthlong investigation into a group suspected of making Molotov cocktails — crude bombs usually created by filling glass bottles with gasoline.

But the National Lawyers Guild criticized the police raid, saying the nine NATO protesters only had beer-making equipment in their possession.

Client: We won’t be paying. We didn’t use your material.

Me: You didn’t? I saw the brochure today, it is exactly what I designed for you.

Client: No, it isn’t. You sent us a PDF of the document. We did not print the PDF, we took a screen capture of it and pasted it into Word. That’s what we printed.

Me: Regardless of format, I designed it. I delivered what we agreed upon in the contract you signed.

Client: Well, we didn’t print from your file, we used it in a different format. 

Me: Okay, I think you’re misunderstanding something. I’ll have my lawyer explain it to you on Monday.

@davewiner: @lmorchard -- you'll get a lot of good ideas on the ride

@carlfish: My explanation for carrying a Pokémon poster began: “I was buying Magic cards…” because that makes it LESS NERDY, right?

So now I'm on the cusp of releasing a tool that allows you to write directly onto the web in an outliner. The distance between the content on your machine and it being on the web is one mouse-click. That's exactly how far you want it to be. My father is not alive to see this, but if he were, he'd probably die from excitement. This is something he and I shared, at a genetic level, in our DNA, is this idea that the human mind can reach outside of itself, onto a computer, to make even more powerful and useful intellectual structures. Honestly, I wish he were here to share this with me. permalink

But my Commodore 64 is mobile now, like yours, and the modems are invisible, and the internet is the air all around us. And the good friends, the real friends, are finding each other, and connecting with each other, and my Mom is turning out to be more right than ever.

Whether you've always wanted to learn or you're a veteran looking for a fun new way to practice, get ready to join the thousands using Synthesia.

Huh. DragonDrop looks like a nice reimplementation of the old NextStep Shelf idea with a UI that doesn't suck.

The Shelf is an interface feature in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, and is used as a repository to store links to commonly used files, directories and programs, and as a temporary "holding" place to move/copy files and directories around in the file system hierarchy. In Mac OS X, items may be dragged onto the sidebar area of the Finder while holding the Apple key, but these do not behave as placeholders and cannot be manipulated in the below manner.

Dragging and dropping is a great way to get stuff done on your Mac, but DragonDrop makes it even better. DragonDrop lets you set down what you're dragging, leaving you free to find your destination without worrying about keeping the mouse button held down.

Also, I've wanted "Just is a four letter word" embossed on a baseball bat, for years now. (h/t @carlfish)

The new native Android UI version of Firefox does not ship with a dedicated Error Console. Instead, all console messages are redirected to the Android system log – also known as logcat. If you have the Android SDK installed, you already have a way to view the logcat:

You're watching one of the various Law & Order shows, the story is starting to pick up, and as the detectives start going through the usual Red Herring suspects, they interview the victim's mom and it's Angela Lansbury. Or their poolboy is Ian Somerhalder. Or William Mapother. Or "Trey" from The O.C.. Even though the detectives pass them over at first, you just know that they're going to be important in the episode, because they wouldn't have paid to cast a well-known actor in a throwaway role. It is very common that the most recognizable actor is the guilty party.

Holy crap, @textfiles is going to be near my hood next Wedsneday.

RT @textfiles: Heads up: Next week I'm a speaker at the Merit Member Conference: and I'm at the Ann Arbor Library h ...

Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?

what a nice reenactment of every one of my highschool memories

Dear Minecrafters: Do you see this when you close your eyes?

the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac

@EnglishMossop: @lmorchard shh, you'll put us out of a job!

@davedash: @lmorchard "First, you have to realize that you can make a CPU can do things on your behalf-" gi joe....

@hillzy: Thank god we have @lmorchard http://t.co/JuVVhwiN

@deadsquid: Les nails it. Self-sufficiency leads to understanding; is the important part RT @lmorchard: Please do learn to code. http://t.co/GzZWyOHi”

It appears to be dawning on clients who control the U.S.'s major ad budgets that if your marketing content is interesting enough you don't need to advertise on Facebook. Advertising on Facebook is free, if you can create something compelling enough to go viral without a major media spend behind it.

@davedash And the other half is VIOLENCE

But Judge Alsup wasn’t convinced. He told the court he had learned to code in Java for the trial — implying that he knew other languages as well — and he said that he had written some of the infringing code at least a hundred times since Oracle filed its suit in August 2010. “I can do it. You can do it. It’s so simple,” he said, adding that it takes less than five minutes. Then looked directly at Boies. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America — how can you make that argument?” he demanded.

The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during the course of the trial) that it's just a few minutes work for a competent programmer.

Please do learn to code.

The transformative power of "source always included" in JavaScript is a major reason why I coined – and continue to believe in – Atwood's Law. Even if "view source" isn't built in (but it totally should be), you should demand access to the underlying source code for your stack. No matter what the documentation says, the source code is the ultimate truth, the best and most definitive and up-to-date documentation you're likely to find. This will be true forever, so the sooner you come to terms with this, the better off you'll be as a software developer.

@progrium: I found an email from @chaddickerson in 2006 replying to my registration for the first Yahoo Hack Day saying they were fans of SHDH.

@Commodork: Failed advertising: while watching Seinfeld on Crackle, Crackle interrupts the show to tell me Seinfeld is available on Crackle.

This "please don't learn to code" thing has me wishing there was a current printing of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib

@Mauriat: @lmorchard actually it wouldn't hurt if ppl knew how data pipes worked as well

@willcage a2mmf2012 means Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire 2012