Shared posts

02 May 00:52

Ifixit flunks Apple's new educational Ipad as nearly un-repairable

by Cory Doctorow

Apple's education-centric new Ipad is meant to be used in rambunctious classrooms where drops and other abuse will be commonplace; it is also meant to compete with relatively easy-to-service Pixelbooks that school district IT departments can fix themselves or get repaired by a wide variety of independent, local service depots whose community-based technicians do repairs onsite and also keep local tax dollars circulating in the community. (more…)

23 Aug 16:03

Bronx cops can steal anything they want by calling it "evidence"

by Cory Doctorow

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In the Bronx (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere) when your belongings are seized as "evidence," it can be impossible to ever get them back, even if you're never charged with a crime. (more…)

07 Aug 23:47

Drone footage of gray whales and calves

by Andrea James
Photographer Mark Carwardine got this lovely drone footage of a pod of gray whales frolicking off the coast of Baha California. Unfortunately, the boaters then approach and touch the whales. Read the rest
07 Jan 18:21

How to build a 1-string cigar box diddley bow

by Mark Frauenfelder

If you like what you hear, build one. It will take practice to play as well as Justin Johnson does, but even a rank beginner can make good music with a diddley bow. (Watch Justin play a full song at the 16:00 minute mark). (Thanks, Kent!)

29 Jul 12:01

Warren Ellis's Dead Pig Collector excerpt

by Cory Doctorow

Tor.com's posted a long excerpt from Dead Pig Collector, Warren Ellis's forthcoming novella about an assassin who is being hunted. It will be published in full on July 30.

Mister Sun was almost forty thousand seconds behind the moment when he finally emerged from the shiny, sad pens of LAX into the wet heat of the late afternoon. It takes forty thousand seconds, more or less, to fly from London to Los Angeles and then negotiate the boxes and runs of the airport. That’s how he thought of it. Eleven hours would be a sleep of exhaustion and a leisurely breakfast. It didn’t carry a sense of urgency. Forty thousand seconds sounded to him like time running away without him, leaving him stuck in a dim and disconnected past. A lot could happen in forty thousand seconds.

Mister Sun put his shades on. It had been winter in Britain for the previous eighteen months or so, and he only saw authentic daylight when he traveled, or on television. Los Angeles light, stinging as it was, had a familiar quality to him. It was a strange thing, he reflected, to recognize a certain flavor of daylight from afternoon films in the Sundays of his childhood.

Dead Pig Collector