Dinh.huy

an image from fukung.net

The wonderful folks at the Port City Makerspace had me over to their enormous, beautiful spot this evening, and gifted me with "the keys to the city," in the form of a set of handmade lockpicks from their own Tinker Woodworks. The picks are gorgeous. Seriously.

This is a handmade set of lockpicks with a leather case. The picks are shaped out of old bandsaw blades. I chose the pick shapes based on which picks have been most useful to me in my lock picking exploits. The case is made by soaking the leather and stitching it around a form to fit the picks. The case is about five inches long and fits nicely into a jacket pocket. I can do some simple embroidery on the case similar to the key embroidery in the pictures on one of the cases, or a persons initials, etc. Contact me if you want embroidery on the case. Otherwise the case will be the plain ones depicted. The kit comes with the three picks and two different size tension wrenches.

Lockpick tool set with leather case

The error message reads: “Sorry, this video, which includes music from [Sony Music Entertainment], is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the publishing rights thereto.” @jke

Last week, when the world was watching crazy Russian meteorite videos on YouTube, Germans weren’t.

As a result of an ongoing dispute between Google (YouTube's parent company) and GEMA, the primary German performance rights organization, a number of Russian YouTube videos have been blocked from within Germany. The reason? These videos contain background music playing from a Russian car radio.

This is just the latest example of a ridiculous situation that has developed in Germany. According to a recent study by OpenDataCity, more than 60 percent of the top 1,000 YouTube videos are unavailable in Germany because Google assumes the music rights might be owned by GEMA.

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Update: Speaking at a roundtable session with the press attended by Ars Technica, Shuhei Yoshida stated that "when you purchase the disc-based games for PS4, that should work on any hardware." When asked whether games would require online registration, Yoshida noted that that decision was up to the publisher. When asked if Sony, as a publisher, would require games to be registered online, Yoshida said, "we are not talking about that plan."

While Yoshida's statement leaves open the possibility that individual publishers can still block used games at will, it's just as likely he was simply leaving the door open for the kind of "Online Pass" purchase systems that already routinely limit certain online game functions in used copies of games. So while there's still a bit of wiggle room in Sony's public comments, we'd also caution against reading to much into what Yoshida did (or didn't) say.

Original story: It's been a tense time for gamers who happen to be fans of both Sony and the preowned game market, with rampant rumors (and even patent filings) suggesting that the PlayStation 4 might include a method to let the system block used game discs. Sony didn't directly address the matter during its lengthy PlayStation Meeting Wednesday night, but Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has now publicly put the whole thing to rest: The PlayStation 4 will not block used game discs from being played.

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