Farewell, Harvey Korman
Bonnie Burton of Lucasfilm has posted an homage to comedian Harvey Korman, who died this week at 81 years of age:
I can still remember being on the edge of my seat in the movie theater watching Korman as Captain Blythe in Herbie Goes Bananas. Heck, I even liked him during my full-blown Goth days when he played Dr. Jack Seward in Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
So it really shouldn’t be a surprise when years later, I was brave enough to admit in a crowded Lucasfilm marketing meeting that I was a big fan of the “Star Wars Holiday Special.”
I justified my adoration of the hardly-seen TV show by saying that, in addition to Bea Arthur as the Cantina barkeep Ackmena, it was Korman’s three bizarre characters that made me want to watch the cult classic over and over again. Korman portrayed the Ackmena-smitten Cantina patron Krelman, the multi-armed Julia Child-in-outer-space Chef Gormaanda, and an Amorphian instructor that practically drives Chewie’s son Lumpy to tears.
I was devastated to hear of his passing this week. Not only did an iconic comedian leave our galaxy, but sadly I’ll never get the chance to interview him about those roles he played in “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” I had so many questions for him!
Link to Bonnie's post on the Official Star Wars Blog. Here's the LA Times obituary for Korman.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off
Intel & Micron Show 34-nm, 32-Gbit Flash Memory Chip
Lucas123 writes "IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today's products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel's latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
LaterLoop’s New Airplane Mode: Zipped Bookmarks On The Fly
It was only ten days ago that Mashable first offered a brief peek into LaterLoop, a bookmarking service created by the Greg Hochmuth, founder of Mento and zoo-m.com, which offers easy online/offline access to pages saved for later reading or referral through the use of a FireFox add-on. Users can also integrate the service with an devices called ScrapBook, or even employ a very basic bookmarklet, sans extensions. If you happen to hold a Google account, you can literally be complete new to LaterLoop and begin bookmarking in seconds.
Today we receive word from the company, featured this past week at the Google I/O conference, that it has launched yet another option to users, something it is calling Airplane Mode. Simply put, users can download bookmarks in three varieties - 30 newest, 30 oldest, or 30 shuffled - as a zip file. Once stored locally, users can open the package, click on the front-end HTML page, and and start browsing.
A word of warning. Some pages may prove visually accurate, while the formats of others are horrendously botched. We suggest sticking to fairly simple sites, where text fonts are reasonably large-sized. We tested pages from The New York Times, Wired.com, and Digg. The NYT went into zip format rather nicely (be sure to save from URLs that show stories as a single page, and not those divided into two or more), while the Wired link didn’t fare quite so well when pressed down into Airplane Mode. If you don’t mind stories delivered in bareboned, Google cache style, reading Digg stories and comments won’t bother you terribly.
LaterLoop does note on its website that the new feature is “still experimental and in testing,” so one would gather that formatting issues will soon be remedied. Let us know how your downloads come out.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Web Zen: feline zen 2008
shocking cats
stunt kitty
kitten and his box
plague of kittens
kitten or spider
unagi reviews
chat noir
katnip kollege
catface
talking cats
hugo, cat of 1000 faces
mr. lee cat cam
kitty wigs
lasagna cat
ian the cat
i like cake
and the classics...
going to a gay bar
smoking in paris
and for a limited time...
something for cat
(this will disappear on 06.06.08)
Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off
Computer designed to read thoughts from brain scans
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Zefty Manages Allowances for Kids and Parents [Kids]
Web-based account manager Zefty helps kids understand spending and parents manage what they owe the little ones. Manually or automatically "deposit" money into kids' accounts, and they (and you) can see what they've saved. If your tyke's tech-proficient, they get their own login to enter what they withdrew and why, but parents get a super-user account as well. There's also "Zefty Checks" kids can request money with, and an allowance calculator that determines a reasonable pay rate. Zefty is free to use, requires a sign-up.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off
LastGraph - Visualize Your Last.fm History
Last.fm is a great music service that keeps track of your listening habits. Though you can view stats such as last played tracks, top artists, or most played songs with just words and numbers, it can be limiting in so many ways. We're huge fans of visualization tools, so wouldn't it be cool if you could grab a visual history of your Last.fm stats? LastGraph is just the service for the job.
Getting Started
Using the Last.fm API, Andrew Godwin writes and runs LastGraph, a great Last.fm visual history tool. To start, just enter your username to hit enter to get a queue ticket. LastGraph is a beta web app so there are some kinks and issues. A queue happens to be one of them. Fortunately you shouldn't have to wait more than 30 seconds for the page to refresh with a nice selection of visual goodies.
LastGraph grabs the last 20 weeks of data, which is a lot if you happen to use Last.fm on a regular basis like I do. The following stats are available for visual displaying:
- Artist Histories
- Quick Timeline
- Timeline Posters
Artist Histories
Artist histories allows you to see your latest artists sorted by the most played artists at the top. Clicking on a name will display a visual graph showing how many times an artist was played over the past several months. Take a look at my chart for Linkin Park:
If you click on the image to enlarge the graph, you'll notice that that there are some really big gaps in the graph. While Linkin Park is one of my top 5 most played artists, I don't listen to them very often and the gaps in the graph show this. l just recently picked them up again and now they're dropping back off. The great thing about having listening habits displayed in this manner is that you can find out what a user's current listening tastes are. While Last.fm will tell you they're one of my favorites (which they are), LastGraph will tell you that I'm currently exploring other artists at the moment.
Quick Timeline
Quick Timeline is another visual graph that gives you a view of your overall listening habits. Last.FM may record your listening habits, but doesn't provide a way to keep track of how many songs you've listened to within a specified length of time beyond a week. You have no way of comparing how many songs you've listened to in the past month versus this month. LastGraph's 'Quick Timeline' view give a great resolution.
Timeline Posters
LastGraph provides posters of your viewing history. The result is a complicated but useful representation of your listening habits. You can specify a period of time you'd like to have a poster generated for, the color of the poster, and the amount of details you'd like the poster to have ranging from terrible to super. There's another queue for the posters which could take several minutes to render depending on the length of time specified, the detail level, and the number of user requests. The posters are available for download in PDF and SVGZ format. Here's a look my poster for the month of May, rainbow style, with super detail!
Last.FM Should Incorporate LastGraph
All of the data provided by LastGraph is available for exporting in Excel, CVS, and JSON formats. You can even get individual artist data from the 'Artist Histories' page. What I'd like to see next is an expansion from artists to songs. It would be cool to see how often I've played certain songs like Misery Business By Paramore throughout several months or days.
If Last.fm could incorporate all their data in the same manner, you could get an alternative way of seeing your compatibility with other users. The data could be used not only for finding users that match our music tastes overall, but also our current tastes, which could be a more relevant match for users that constantly change their listening habits and music styles.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
Prince DMCAs YouTube To Block Radiohead Song
Enigma2175 writes "CNN is reporting that videos from the Coachella music festival showing Prince covering Radiohead's 'Creep' have been removed by Prince's label, NPG records. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, when told of Prince's action, said 'Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our... song.' No comment from YouTube or Prince yet. Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder and this seems to be just another example of DMCA abuse." As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Interwebs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
SongCast Now Serving Indie Music To Five Top Web Outlets
If you’re part of the indie music scene, you’re often likely to hear that one of the best ways to get your digital media out to the virtual shelves of stores on the Web without much initial investment in distribution is to seek the services of CD Baby. The halfway house built to serve the long tail of the musical landscape represents a great many groups and solo artists and sells albums and singles through venues like iTunes, eMusic, Napster, and Rhapsody. All it requires is a $35 setup fee, plus 9% of any earnings from digital downloads. (CD Baby, as its name suggests, began its life selling CDs to various shops, which it continues to do and takes $4 per disc sold.)
Now, however, there’s a new distributor of digital downloads in the running. Called SongCast, it promises to deliver artists’ songs to a quintet of services. 
Indeed, that clearly results in far fewer consumer channels than are available through CD Baby. Yet it seems that SongCast is offering a connection to one reseller in particular that CD Baby does not list : AmazonMP3.
Of course, many independent musicians may find that CD Baby’s ties with iTunes plenty active. And some many even see SongCast’s limited reach as inhibitive, and thus not worth paying a $25 setup fee and a $5.99 monthly fee. (SongCast artists purportedly maintain 100% of royalties, and the service asks nothing for a UPC code, which CD Baby does to the tune of $20.)
But if AmazonMP3 is the primary market one is looking to serve more than any other, SongCast may be worth one’s serious consideration. It’s not a especially cheap option, relative to CD Baby. And music may not be served to dozens of unique channels. But each middleman has his strength(s). And competition has no downsides in the sales arena.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Giant bunny formed from GPS path
Filed under: GPS
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Lego Cylon
Another excellent entry for the Make a Cylon contest - this Lego figure turned Cylon mini, complete LED visor action - Lego Cylon on DVICE
Don't forget - There's still time to enter the Make a Cylon contest. The deadline is 6/14/08 - so polish off / finish up those BSG projects and submit them to our Flickr pool!
Related:
Star Wars minifig Joule Thief
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in make | | Comments Off
Begging robot creates sound, asks for money
Alexader Gurko's "Begging Bot" plays music just by synching up the sounds a floppy and hard drive makes when spinning their motors. After the song is done, the CD drives opens up and the bot asks for donations from the public. The sound is actually pretty interesting if you watch the above video.
[via]
[Read this article] [Comment on this article] Tags: make, Music, videoRelated posts
May 31st, 2008 - Posted in make | | Comments Off
Stonehenge As a Royal Family’s Burial Site
mikesd81 sends in a report from Newsday about radiocarbon dating of cremated bones excavated from Britain's Stonehenge that, an archeologist said, has solved part of the ancient mystery surrounding the 5,000-year-old site: It was a burial ground for what may have been the country's first royal dynasty. No word on how this work relates to the "Neolithic Lourdes" theory we discussed earlier. "The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected at the site and continued after it was completed... The pattern and relatively small number of the graves suggest all were members of a single family. The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least a portion of southern England during this early period. They exerted enough power to mobilize manpower necessary to move the massive stones from as far as 150 miles away and [maintained] that power for at least five centuries, said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of current excavations at the site... His findings will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic and in the television special "Stonehenge Decoded," to be shown Sunday."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video
Filed under: Cellphones
[Via zodttd]
Continue reading Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Convert Your Gas Mower to Solar Power [Weekend Project]
Web site Appropedia describes in impressive detail how to convert your gas-powered lawnmower to solar power. The process involves some serious hacking of your original push mower and an investment in parts, but when you're finished you'll be hacking down grass with nothing but the power of the sun. Not bad for a weekend project, if a little on the expensive side.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off
People Of New York: Shop Today, Because Tomorrow You’re Taxed
Do you recall that tax bill sent into law in New York State which requires some Internet retail businesses to require customers to fork over some cash and coin? It received the designation of “the Amazon tax” as a result of sheer caliber of business conducted by the online sales giant. Oh, and the fact that Amazon pledged to fight the state on the issue. That raised the profile of the story quite a bit.
Well, the law hasn’t been reversed since it was passed, and it turns out that anyone shopping from within the empire state have a mere eight and a half hours left before the tax is officially enacted. As mentioned by Allen Stern at CenterNetworks, starting June 1st, companies like Amazon and NewEgg will have to levy taxes on customers’ purchases if they opt to continue to have direct or indirect affiliation with New York based entities. Amazon in particular is known quite well as having prolific ties with affiliate sites.
Amazon is not the only Web-based retailer to feel the measure unjust. Overstock has also seen itself fall squarely under the new ruling. It announced two weeks ago that it would cut ties with partner sites based in New York, and, according to Anne Dujmovic of CNET News, announced just this past Friday that it had filed a suit with the New York State Supreme Court against the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, New York tax commissioner Robert Menga, and the state governor. Overstock’s argument falls precisely in line with that of past opponents of the revised tax law. The company’s general counsel, in referencing a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling titled Quill v. North Dakota, said in defense of its case:
“The applicable United States Supreme Court cases on the question of whether the state can collect taxes under these circumstances make it clear that New York cannot constitutionally require Overstock.com to collect these taxes.”
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
China’s Cyber-Militia
D. J. Keenan notes that the cover story of the current issue of National Journal reports in depth on China's cyber-aggression against US targets in the government, military, and business. We have discussed China's actions on numerous occasions over the years. The news in this report is the suggestion that Chinese cyber-attakers may have been involved in major power outages in the US. "Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of US companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to US government officials and computer-security experts..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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May 31st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
