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About this nifty "Onion Pi" HOWTO just published at Adafruit, Phil Torrone says, "Limor and I cooked up this project for folks. We are donating a portion of any sales for the pack we sell that helps do this to the EFF and Tor."

Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. This is fun weekend project that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi. Using it is easy-as-pie. First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network.

A while back, I wrote about the QuNeo, a reasonably priced, multitouch music controller, packed with triggers and modifiers. The folks at Keith McMillen Instruments were kind enough to set me up with a QuNeo so I could put it to the test.

The QuNeo itself is a lightweight and compact USB/MIDI/OSC controller, measuring just 9-1/2″ (w) x 7-1/4″ (h). It’s just over 1/4″ thick and weighs under a pound, so it can easily be tossed in your backpack if you like to travel and perform. It’s also been designed to be spill-proof, an added bonus if you like to have the occasional drink while playing.

The controller itself offers 16 touch-sensitive trigger pads, as well as nine virtual sliders, two virtual wheel controls and 17 additional programmable buttons. It’s ideal for controlling software like Ableton Live, Traktor, and even can be used with Garage Band.

What makes the QuNeo unique is the fact that its pad can sense pressure, velocity and location, which means you can have fine-grained control over your inputs, not available with most other input devices. One of my favorite things is that you can use this technology to do things like pitch bending when you move your finger across the surface of each pad. Each input is backed by colored LEDs, which can provide visual feedback when playing or adjusting settings.

One thing you’ll quickly learn with the QuNeo is that each of its 16 drum pads is actually comprised of multiple trigger points. So you can set not just each pad to trigger a sound, but each of its four corners can act as a trigger. Though if you prefer that the entire surface of each pad trigger the same note, you can set the QuNeo into one of its drum controller modes. Each pad can be used to sense velocity so depending on how hard you hit the pad, the note or track you play can change in amplitude.

To use the QuNeo, I had to simply install the latest software (PC or Mac), select which music apps I use, and connect the device to an open USB port. There’s also a small amount of configuration in each music app to tell it which controller you want to use. I then selected which of the 16 pre-installed preset modes I wanted by pressing the mode button in the top left corner, then selecting the pad which corresponded to the preset number. Factory preset modes include predefined drum and grid modes as well as settings for popular music applications including Serato, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Traktor, Reason, Battery, and even for controlling Korg’s iMS-20 and BeatMaker iPad synthesizers.

Once in Ableton Live 9, I was able to use the default Ableton Live presets, which provide easy access to clip playback and track recording controls. This allowed me to quickly play, mute and manipulate clips by touching the corners of each button. I was also able easily assign individual buttons, sliders and wheels as MIDI trigger using Ableton’s standard MIDI assignment interface if I wanted to override the presets.

I did find it a little tricky to assign triggers to MIDI inputs directly in Ableton, only because each one of the QuNeo’s pads outputs multiple trigger codes based on where you press. That said, you can always build a proper set of presets using the QuNeo preset editor if you want to skip Ableton’s built-in MIDI assignment screen. QuNeo’s editor allows you to create your own set of assignments for any of the triggers, providing a tremendous amount of control over how the interface is used.

Overall, I’ve found the QuNeo to be incredibly flexible and robust. Since it’s completely programmable, you can truly make it match your individual workflow, whether you’re into live performance, or are looking for a controller for studio recording.

However, with great power comes complexity. First off, you’ll definitely want to watch the video tutorials for your music software of choice up on their website. You’ll also need to really familiarize yourself with all of the presets which are listed in the manual, and then memorize which triggers are assigned to each button, slider or wheel. This isn’t a unique challenge to the QuNeo – all programmable controllers have similar constraints. Someday, I’d love for the buttons on these things to have OLED or LCD screens in them so you could see what’s assigned to each one at a glance, instead of relying on memorization.

Since I wouldn’t consider myself an expert musician by any stretch of the imagination, here’s a video showing off some QuNeo performance techniques from some talented performers:

The QuNeo lists for $199(USD) and is available from a variety of retailers, including Amazon. Keep in mind that if you want to connect the QuNeo directly to a MIDI synthesizer, you’ll need to purchase the optional MIDI expander box for about $50.

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Disclosure: Keith McMillan Instruments provided the device for review in this article. However, all reviews are the unbiased views of our editorial staff, and we will only recommend products or services we have used personally, and believe will be good for our readers.

Earlier this year, a woman in Pennsylvania was expecting to get her first paycheck from her new job at McDonald’s, but rather than an envelope containing cash or a check, she received a prepaid debit card from Chase. This did not go over well.

When she asked her boss about the card — which has fees like a $1.50 ATM charge, a $5 charge for over-the-counter cash withdrawals, $1 per balance inquiry, and $.75 for online bill payment — she was told it was the only option. And so she took her issue to the franchisees, who she says confirmed that she had no choice but to take the card.

And so she quit her job and found an attorney, who has subsequently filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the single mom and other employees. The plaintiffs allege that the debit card requirement allows the franchisee to earn “ill-gotten gains contrary to justice, equity, good conscience and Pennsylvania law.”

Section 3 of the Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection Law (PDF) states that employees are to be paid their wages on a regular basis and that “The wages shall be paid in lawful money of the United States or check.” The plaintiffs contend that a prepaid debit card is neither cash nor a check.

“I need to receive all the money I earn,” says the former McDonald’s worker, who had been making only about $.19/hour more than minimum wage. “I can’t afford to lose even a few dollars per paycheck. I just think people should be paid fairly and not have to pay fees to get their wages.”

For its part, the franchisees say they value their employees and “are committed to providing them the best possible work environment so they can deliver the fast, reliable service that our customers expect.”

McD’s worker sues: Don’t pay by debit card [Philly.com]

The last time James Turrell staged a major installation in a New York museum, lawsuits ensued: two visitors, who ostensibly didn’t realize what they were in for, sued Turrell after they became disoriented and fell inside of an installation in 1980. Thankfully, that hasn't stopped Turrell manipulating our senses—in fact, this month, he'll unveil what critics are calling one of the most daring installations ever attempted.

If you’re an American reader, odds are pretty good that you live within driving distance of a museum showing one of Turrell’s pieces right now. Last month, the 70-year-old artist opened a major show in Los Angeles, as well as one in Houston. His New York exhibit, which will blanket the circular Guggenheim space in luminous fabric, opens in less than a week. That’s a grand total of 92,000 square feet of exhibition space, according to The New York Times Magazine, which ran a long and fascinating profile on Turrell this weekend.

Turrell's Rice University pavilion, Twilight Epiphany, created in 2012.

It’s hard to describe Turrell’s work without resorting to cliche—we’re hampered by words, in this case, when his work should experienced without them. His medium is always light—and the sky it passes through—but the mode of delivery varies. He has built dozens of “Skyspaces,” simple rooms that frame the sky using square- or ellipse-shaped holes carved in their ceilings.

He also frequently branches out into architecture, with projects like his new pavilion at Rice University, a two-story space that uses subtle LEDs to manipulate the experience of the sky above a performance space. “I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin,” he told Interview Magazine in 2009. “And I mean, we are literally light-eaters.”

A Perceptual Cell, seen here at the Gagosian Gallery, in 2010.

Turrell’s work grows out of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s, which was concerned with manipulating perception. But unlike many of his contemporaries, he references diverse scientific and mathematical sources, ranging from Riemannian geometry—which deals with the curve of the earth—to Ganzfeld experiments, in which a person’s perception of space is manipulated by creating a space of one single, static color (the term is often used describe snow blindness).

In his assaultive “perceptual cells,” visitors have to sign a form saying they have insurance, and that they won’t sue in the case of “serious injury, including… partial or total disability, paralysis, death, and/or severe social and economic losses.” You lay on an MIR-like bed, inside of a spherical structure, where your vision is severely manipulated using extreme colors. Some compare it to being stoned—others argue that the cells are "invasive."

The Roden Crater, in Arizona, which has been under construction for nearly 30 years. First image via.

Turrell’s masterwork is a 400,000-year-old volcanic crater in the Arizona desert, which he purchased in 1979. There, he has spent the past 25 years carving a network of rooms and tunnels inside of the crater, which is (somewhat controversially) long overdue to open. Curator Michael Govan told the NYT that Roden is “as important as any artwork ever made,” saying, “I know I’m going out on a limb here a little bit, but I think it’s one of the most ambitious artworks ever attempted by a single human being.” Turrell, for his part, recently described his intentions for Roden in an excellent interview (including rare footage of Roden) with LACMA, saying, “my desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.”

We’ll be reporting back from Turrell’s piece in New York after we see it on Thursday. But for now, check out a series of images from his back catalog, below, or read The New York Times story here. Or, even better, check it out the three-part retrospective for yourself if you’re in New York, Houston, or LA this summer.

Turrell's Rice University pavilion, Twilight Epiphany, created in 2012.

Afrum (White), 1966, at LACMA.

The Roden Crater, seen from above.

Turrell's installation at the Gagosian Gallery, London 2010.

The Wolfsburg Project, installed in Wolfsburg, Germany, in 2009.

Speculative rendering showing what the Guggenheim installation may look like.

James Turrell: The Light Inside from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Vimeo.

This is a homemade money shredding alarm clock (previously: a conceptual one). After the alarm goes off you have ten seconds to disable it before the thing starts eating your money. I mean, provided you were actually foolish enough to put money in it in the first place. I'd just put all my credit card bills in there and then sleep through it. Hit the jump for a video of the money gobbler in action.

In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through ironic clothing revivals, we commend to the garbage our brother the Ed Hardy brand of clothing; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, Jon Gosselin tattoo t-shirt to Jon Gosselin tattoo t-shirt. The Lord bless the Ed Hardy brand of clothing and keep him at Macy’s, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and inspire new t-shirts, maybe with the Lord’s face riding a tiger made of skulls and crossbones, just please don’t tell Jon Gosselin about it. He’s done enough. Amen. From the New York Post:

Perhaps it was Jon Gosselin, the reviled reality TV dad of eight, who first turned us against Ed Hardy. In 2009, when photos of him frolicking on a yacht in Cannes wearing an array of T-shirts with Hardy’s signature tattoo art appeared on blogs everywhere, any credibility the ink-stained legend had went out the window.

It didn’t matter that Madonna and Adrien Brody also wore clothes with his art. Gosselin was the uncoolest person on the planet, and now he was synonymous with Ed Hardy.

“That Jon Gosselin thing was the nail in the coffin,” says the actual Ed Hardy. “That’s what tanked it. Macy’s used to have a huge window display with Ed Hardy, and it filtered down and that’s why Macy’s dropped the brand.”

Awww. I sincerely hope that Jon Gosselin does not get word of this. I don’t know a whole lot about his life (aside from this moment, which I will never forget), maybe he DESERVES to have Ed Hardy betray him, who knows, but I have to imagine that his life isn’t going the way he always imagined it, and then to have his #1 favorite clothing brand blame its demise on his appreciation?!? “FINISH HIM!” – Mortal Kombat about this moment in Jon Gosselin’s life, I bet. Stay strong, friend. We’ll keep you in our thoughts and prayers.

Biologists at University College London say they now know why cancerous cells group together and spread to different parts of the body. And shockingly, it appears that the malignant cells are migrating by literally chasing healthy cells that are trying to get away.

Read more...

Rogue.

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Although the IRS scandal has been perhaps somewhat overshadowed in the past couple of weeks by the roiling vortex of Scandalmania and especially the NSA surveillance story, Congress has been making steady progress on investigating what really went down at the Internal Revenue Service during the two-plus years that Tea-Party groups were consistently and specifically [...]

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"Yuck! Don't get your nasty cooties on me!" Loki the kitten wipes kisses off her face. (via Daily Picks and Flicks)

[Reinis] has a Volvo S80. One of the dashboard features it includes is a 6.5″ LCD screen which periscopes up to use as a navigation system. The problem is that Volvo stopped making maps for it around five years ago and there are no maps at all for Latvia where he lives. So it’s worthless… to you’re average driver. But [Reinis] is fixing it on his own by replacing the system with a Raspberry Pi.

That link leads to his project overview page. But he’s already posted follow-ups on hardware design and initial testing. He’s basing the design around a Raspberry Pi board, but that doesn’t have all the hardware it needs to communicate with the car’s systems. For this he designed his own shield that uses an ATmega328 along with a CAN controller and CAN transceiver. The latter two chips patch into the CAN bus on the car’s On Board Diagnostic system. We didn’t see much about the wiring, but the overview post mentions that the screen takes RGB or Composite inputs so he must be running a composite video cable from the trunk to the dashboard.

 

Filed under: gps hacks, Raspberry Pi, transportation hacks

Customers of McDonald's Australia can now find out where exactly their fast food came from — for a limited time, at least.

Anyone with an Apple iPhone or iPad can download "Track My Maccas," a free iOS app that enables McDonald's patrons in Australia to track where menu items were sourced.

"Maccas" is a common nickname for the fast-food chain in Australia. 

The McChicken burger, Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, and three, six or 10 packs of Chicken McNuggets became traceable in January. Since March, McDonald's has added large and medium French Fries to the list. 

Customers can locate the origin of their takeout meals using the GPS locator on their phones and an image scanner on product packaging. 

The reason only a limited number of menu items were chosen was because the application could only support five different scannable images, according to McDonald's Australia.  

McDonald's said it would shut down the app June 30.

SEE ALSO: 17 Of The Highest-Calorie Chain Restaurant Items >

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You don't always see someone hit a hole-in-one at one of the world's biggest golf tournaments. But even when you do, it's never this ridiculous

PGA Tour rookie Shawn Stefani had one of the most incredible aces you'll ever see on Sunday during the U.S. Open at Pennsylvania's Merion Golf Club

What makes his shot so amazing? As you'll see in the video above, the ball doesn't even land on the green originally, instead hitting the rough, taking a fortuitous reverse-bounce and then rolling some 50 feet into the cup. It's the first U.S Open hole-in-one ever at Merion. It, of course, also made Stefani a viral sports hit online Read more...

More about Golf, Entertainment, Videos, and Sports

Digg will begin rolling out its new reader product next week and open up the beta version to everyone on June 26, the company said in a blog post Monday.

Digg, which is owned by Betaworks, announced in mid-March that it would develop an RSS reader, shortly after Google announced plans to kill off Google Reader. Since then, Digg's team has apparently received feedback from 18,000 on how to design the product.

SEE ALSO: Betaworks Vision For the Future of Online News

"For our first public release, in time to (just) beat the shutdown of Google Reader, our aim has been to nail the basics: a web and mobile reading experience that is clean, simple, functional, and fast," Digg's team wrote in the blog post. "We’re also introducing a tool that allows users to elevate the most important stories to the top." Read more...

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via

 

Cute young ballerina wannabe gets a painful fail

Imagine, with the wave of a hand, adjusting the thermostat without getting out of bed, or turning up the music in the other room while in the shower. WiSee, a new gesture-recognition system, aims to harness the ever-present wireless Internet signals blanketing people’s homes to allow remote control of all their electronics.

Read more...

submitted by Mme_Wiggles [link] [268 comments]

The British Government is determined to be seen to be doing something (anything, really) about pornography online. The current incarnation of "something must be done; there, we did something!" is based on blaming "Internet companies" for not doing enough to prevent children from seeing porn, and demanding an expansion of the existing program of blocking a secret and unaccountable blacklists.

They're monumentally unsympathetic to the argument that these lists don't work ("something must be done; we are doing something"), and even less interested in the fact that these lists end up catching stuff that isn't porn. The Conservative MP Claire Perry said that overblocking is "a load of cock."

What sort of cock is in that load, though? Jim from the Open Rights Group writes, "After UK MP Claire Perry helpfully described problems with blocking as a load of cock the Open Rights Group have listed some recent blocking reports, including, startlingly, YouTube on Orange. These sites are blocked by 'default' and users may need take a passport to their mobile shop and ask to have the 'porn' switched on in order to read the Jargon File or watch YouTube."

Jargon File blocked by O2, YouTube by Orange (Thanks, Jim!)

(Image: Cocks, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 18261299@N00's photostream)

Straight Outta Cape Cod: "an incident involving Police Chief Jeff Jaran and a rap song about police brutality playing at a restaurant he was at on May 7. ... Jaran said he was not familiar with the song, but as he listened he became uncomfortable and offended." [via Gawker]

submitted by jaycrew [link] [191 comments]

submitted by likwitsnake [link] [47 comments]

Last week, we thought it was ridiculous enough that the DoD (of which the NSA is a key part) had reminded all staff that they were not allowed to look at any of the leaked NSA documents, even if they came across them in the press. If they spotted any, they had to alert various security officials and delete what they saw "by holding down the SHIFT key while pressing the DELETE key for Windows-based systems and clearing of the internet browser cache." As we noted at the time, pretending these documents aren't public does not make much sense, and suggests a government agency that does not want to live in reality.

Now we can add Congress to that list as well. Senate staffers have now been told not to look at the leaked documents, and similarly that they need to "contact the Office of Senate Security for assistance" if they happened across any of the documents accidentally. Once again, this is insane because it means Congress should deny reality and pretend to live with its collective head in the sand -- which is no way to govern.

However, the much bigger deal is that if this were actually obeyed (and it's not), this would effectively hinder Congress's required duty of oversight of the NSA to prevent abuse. If the very Congress that's supposed to monitor the NSA's practices, and which has already been directly lied to by the intelligence community is now being told that it can't even look at the leaks to understand what's going on, how the hell are they supposed to do their oversight job?

Furthermore, last week, we pointed to some video of Rep. Grayson on the House floor giving an impassioned speech about the leaks... and displaying many of the leaked NSA docs blown up on an easel. If Congress isn't allowed to look at them, but Congress is also presenting them on the floor of the House and broadcasting live on C-SPAN and YouTube for the world to see... was the rest of Congress just supposed to avert its eyes while Grayson spoke? Is that a reasonable world?

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submitted by hypnocious [link] [77 comments]

kenobi-wan-obi:

Milky Way Shows 84 Million Stars in 9 Billion Pixels

Side Note: The two images shown above are mere crop outs from ESA’s recent hit: The 9 Billion Pixel Image of 84 Million Stars. These two focus on the bright center of the image for the purpose of highlighting what a peak at 84,000,000 stars looks like.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500×81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels.

It’s actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory’s VISTA survey telescope, the same camera that captured the amazing 55-hour exposure. Three different infrared filters were used to capture the different details present in the final image.

The VISTA’s camera is sensitive to infrared light, which allows its vision to pierce through much of the space dust that blocks the view of ordinary optical telescope/camera systems.

source

Here we have Brazilian model Andressa Urach going for a run in Miami Beach. She claims that soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo is “obsessed with her butt.” Is her booty worth obsessing over?

Thanks to @SeanGee7