The Morning News/ Rosecrans Baldwin

“Brittny Badger’s series of disassembled appliances is a delight: a study in how the inner materials of, for example, an ordinary coffee maker can become abstract art. It’s not too far removed from what Kent Rogowski did to a bunch of stuffed animals, though geared more to the graphic design set, or those of us who love grids and graph paper. As Badger notes below, “I am interested in the idea of viewing everyday objects from a completely different perspective. My inspiration comes from anything and everything that is well designed.”

All images © Brittny Badger, all rights reserved.

The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos

“There’s nothing more satisfying than sharing the joy of music. Disc Drop is your chance to turn a total stranger on to the tunes that changed your life. Who knows? Maybe you’ll change some-one else’s life while you’re at it. STEP 1: Make a mixed CD of your favourite tunes. Somewhere on the disc write: “DISC DROP - cbc.ca/thehour” Be sure to include a track-listing so people can track down more music by the artists on your disc. STEP 2: Drop off your disc in a random public place. STEP 3: Go to the “I Dropped a Disc - What Now”, click on the comments, and write down where you dropped off your disc and the track-listing. Check back later to find out who picked it up, and where it’s heading next…”

“Tiny Showcase Presents the first in a new series of mildly factual, mostly fictitious, educational posters - Our honest and whole-hearted attempt to school you and yours. Inspired by the posters on classroom walls, but free from any commitment to reality, TS Learning Press is dedicated to excellence in education by blurring and/or eradicating the lines where real life meets way better make believe life. With the first poster in our series, we invite Ray Fenwick to guide us towards living a new and far more thrilling life of mystery. A world renowned mystery expert, let Ray take you on a tour of all things mysterious. From secrets to secret passages to footprints that suddenly stop and seem to lead nowhere, after incorperating just a few of Ray’s simple suggestions, you’ll find there’s no longer any excuse (or desire) for leading an inconspicuous life devoid of intrigue…”

The Guardian

“It may not be the most obvious investment choice in these turbulent economic times. But a new venture is seeking to convince music fans to place their savings as well as their faith in rock ‘n’ roll. The music executives behind Kaiser Chiefs and Primal Scream are backing a new website that will allow music fans to invest financially as well as emotionally in hotly tipped new acts. The venture, dreamed up by a music business lawyer and backed by the founder of Friends Reunited, is being billed as the latest innovative funding model that could provide artists with an alternative to major labels. Bandstocks will let the public buy a stake in an artist in £10 increments. Once funding reaches a preordained level, for example £100,000, the money will be released for the act to record an album…”

RollingStone

“One fine day’ — there’s a funny story about that,” Brian Eno says with a smile, referring to one of the 11 songs on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the new, gleaming art-pop album the British producer and occasional solo artist has made with his friend, ex-Talking Heads singer-guitarist David Byrne.

Sitting at a table across from Byrne in the latter’s Lower Manhattan office, Eno says that at a point early in the record’s extended birth, he played a piece of instrumental music in his London studio for Coldplay’s Chris Martin: “Chris said, ‘Wow, I’d love to work on that.’ I’d given it to David a few months before and hadn’t heard anything back. So I gave it to Chris.”

Six months later, Martin excitedly told Eno he had written “the most amazing song” for that track. Ironically, that day, Byrne finally e-mailed Eno an MP3 of “One Fine Day,” Byrne’s space-gospel spin — with a sunny vocal and wry, hopeful lyrics — on Eno’s spongy electronics. When Martin heard it, he surrendered gracefully. “He said, ‘I can’t do better than that,’ ” Eno recalls, chuckling. “Incredible timing…”

My inbox is filling up with the grief-stricken, the angry, the lost and the desperate. Who are they? Sad obsessives who played Scrabulous on Facebook. They had been through a spasm of anxiety a few weeks back when the word game - which some may think resembles a popular offline board game - disappeared from the American site after legal action by Hasbro, but somehow assumed that it would never happen to them.

Now though Mattel - which owns Scrabble outside the US and Canada - has deprived British (and I assume other) users of their drug and they are not happy. One even suggested that the BBC should rouse itself from its Bank Holiday torpor and give ample coverage of this event of earth-shattering importance.

VentureBeat

“When Google bought Jaiku in October of last year, there was some thought that it would overtake Twitter as the go-to lifestreaming/status update site of choice on the Internet. Instead, Google completely and utterly neglected the service and gave its users a product that ranged from laughably inconsistent to unusable. But there’s a sign that’s about to change.

If you try to visit the Jaiku site right now, you’ll be greeted by a bird notifying you: “Folks, we’re offline for the weekend for server maintenance. Now’s a good time to talk to someone you love.”

So why the downtime..?”

Times Online

“The Russian mathematician was 24 years old when he first saw a personal computer, one of only a dozen in the whole Soviet Union. That was in 1984.

A little over two decades later, Arkady Volozh is the chief executive and one of the founders of Yandex, Russia’s most popular internet search engine, a company now valued at £2.5 billion. Widely described as Russia’s answer to Google, Yandex was launched only eight years ago but is now visited by 8m people a day. More impressive still, Yandex and Volozh are credited with humbling Google, by denting its global domination…”

VentureBeat

“Intel is mainly known for its microprocessors, but it’s another technology that was unveiled at this week’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that has a lot of people talking: Wireless power.

To some, the idea may sound like pure science fiction, but it is very real. Various groups of scientists around the world have been working on it for years, but the problem has mainly been the efficiency, or rather the inefficiency with which power is transfered over the air. Most of it is lost before it can reach its destination. On Thursday however, Intel showed that it could transmit 60 watts of power over a few feet while maintaining 75 percent efficiency…”

Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream

“Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information. While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are “eye-scanable.” No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.

We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous…”

TEDBlog: TED

“MIT reports today on the work of professors Yet-Ming Chiang, Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond, who’ve developed a way to build tiny batteries about half the size of a human cell to power tomorrow’s equally tiny devices. The electrolyte of the battery is made of polymers stamped onto a rubbery film. On top of this, a genetically altered virus goes to work, self-assembling to form wires that act as the battery’s anode.

Several TEDTalks delve into the wonders of self-assembly at the microscopic scale. The first half of Neil Gershenfeld’s talk is a quick primer on self-assembly, and its uses in what he sees as the coming world of ubiquitous computing — tiny processors in doorknobs and lightbulbs, doing useful things and talking to one another. (Look for the little blocks that move on their own to spell out “M I T.”) Saul Griffith talks about the elegance of self-assembly — taking advantage of the form that natural materials want to take. Then watch Paul Rothemund twist and fold DNA into triangles, stars, and smiley faces…”

ReadWriteWeb

“In this post we review 10 promising developer platforms for the Web. We’re not talking about the obvious ones either, like Facebook, iPhone, OpenSocial or even Twitter. Those have been covered extensively already. The list below features some of our favorite ‘lesser known’ web developer platforms. There are bound to be other excellent developer platforms not noted below, so as always please use the comments here to point out your own favorites.

We’ve written a lot of times about developer platforms for the Web and we’ve reviewed a fair number of them. A web platform at its simplest is…”

Patrick Cassels: Internet Enthusiast

“Toward the end of the 2000 movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s love-struck record store owner/narrator tells the audience, “The making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many Dos and Don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.” Cusack’s speech is as good an explanation of the mixtape’s virtues as one will ever find. Back when they were still made, the mixtape really was a kind of art. Unless your father was Quincy Jones, the most advanced piece of audio equipment under your roof throughout your teenage era probably required a lot of devotion, flipping the tape or replacing 2Pac with Joan Osborne when the time came. In other words, the creation of a mixtape was one of passion; it was a project that took up your entire evening. It was how you spent your night.

Positech Games

“A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. “Why do people pirate my games?”. It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question. I submitted the bog entry to slashdot and the penny arcade forums, and from there it made it to arstechnica, then digg, then bnet and probably a few other places. The response was massive.

This is what I found: Introduction Firstly it’s worth pointing out that there were LOTs of responses (and they are still coming in now), hundreds of comments on the sites listed, a ton of comments on the blog (despite it crumbling under the strain) and hundreds of emails made it through to me. I read every one of them. They were also generally very long. Few people wrote under 100 words. Some people put tolstoy to shame. It seems a lot of people have waited a long time to tell a game developer the answer to this question. Some people thought my name was chris, or that I developed Braid. But that doesn’t matter :D It’s worth pointing out that the original question was specific to MY games, because I already do the majority of what people complain about (free demos, easy demo hosting, digital distribution, original games, good tech support etc), but the majority of the replies were aimed at games devs in general, not me.

Here is what they said…”

Hacking Truths

“A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool is planning to release it in two weeks.

When you log in to Gmail the website sends a cookie (a text file) containing your session ID to the browser. This file makes it possible…”