firehose

Yoga Joes

Donald Bell over at Make posted about this great tutorial for a drawbot!

You may not know it, but your old computer CD ROM drive is a treasure chest of useful components. Inside you’ll find stepper motors, rare earth magnets, bearings, and coils. It’s enough futuristic-looking greeblies to construct your own Star Wars prop, or maybe even your own portable CNC drawbot.

To prove the point of what can be done with a few repurposed CD ROM drives, Norbert Heinz popped open a pair, stacked them perpendicularly, wired up their stepper motors to a pair of H-bridge driver boards, and controlled his new creation with a Raspberry Pi.

The result is a CNC Pen Plotter that can move on an X/Y axis. To take it further and add the ability to have the pen automatically lifted from the surface (on the Z axis), Norbert added a simple servo to lift or drop the lightweight metal arm that attaches the pen to the unit.

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn’t. That might foul up your mobile web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.

The Verge is an especially egregious example, but this is incredibly commonplace.

I’m interested in running a content blocker not because I don’t want to see ads, but because I feel the need to fight back against being opted in, without my knowledge or consent, to third-party collecting, tracking, and selling of my personal data just by following a link.

And if such blocking becomes a big problem for publishers, it’s up to them to switch to ad delivery methods without these privacy invasions.

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thegeneha:

I’ll be at #GenCon doing writers panels next week! And yes, this includes the formerly woman-less Women Friendly Comics panel. Thankfully folks noticed and the much abashed organizers are adding actual WOMEN to that panel.

This is the first time that the Writer’s Symposium has included a “Comics Track” and I’ll be there a bit as a newbie writer, and mainly to represent for professional comics artists. Here’s the schedule in text:

Gen Con Writer’s Symposium
Writing Comics Panels
Indiana Convention Center
Room 242
THURSDAY July 30
1pm Authors & Artists
2pm Writing Women Friendly Comics
3pm Stop Doing This To Your Artist
FRIDAY July 31
1pm Web vs Digital vs Paper Comics
3pm When Only Batman Will Do
4pm The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome
SATURDAY August 1
1pm Writing Serialized Stories
3pm Write Until It Hurts

Find the full schedule at the link below:

http://www.genconwriters.com/schedules/2015_GenCon_Symposium_Schedule.pdf

I said it before and I will say it again, there was never the slightest doubt in my mind that neither Gene Ha nor Jim Zub would appear on a Women Friendly Comics panel if they knew there were no women on it. No way. These guys are absolutely 100% supportive of women in comics and have shown it over and over again.

It may be true of the other guests as well, but I don’t know most of them. 

Anyway, just sayin’. 

Countdown is a minute countdown timer [for OS X] that fires up instantly and gets out of your way until it’s done.

It also lets you choose whether to pipe audio to the default output or the system alert output.

App Store

Historical Diagram: Piccadilly Circus Tube Station by Renzo Picasso, 1929

We all know that I love a good cutaway diagram, and this example – drawn by Italian architect and urban designer, Renzo Picasso (no relation) – is just superb. Drawn in 1929, coinciding with the opening of Charles Holden’s sub-surface circular booking hall which replaced the original 1906 above-ground Leslie Green-designed station building. The unusual perspective, halfway between the platform level and the (invisible) roads above, permits a wonderful level of clarity in the drawing. 

The only slight drawback with the digram is the strange mixture of English and Italian labels: “east bound” and “west bound”, but also “scala di servizio” (service stairs) – but this in no way detracts from the amazing quality of the draftsmanship.

The label above the famous statue of Eros – A “World Centre” – might perhaps be referring to a contemporaneous mural by artist Stephen Bone in the concourse that showed the world with London at its centre (naturally!).

Source: The Renzo Picasso Archive’s Facebook Page

Dr. Joseph Maroon has a 30-year history with the NFL, something he failed to disclose in study downplaying the risk of long-term neurological disease among former players.

It's been a while since we heard from Pittsburgh Steelers team neurosurgeon and CTE naysayer Dr. Joseph Maroon. In a March appearance on the NFL Network, he was doing his best to convince viewers that the well established fact of long-term neurological damage among football players was "over-exaggerated." Maroon is back in the news this week after a study he co-authored failed to mention that he has a long-time, paid relationship with the Steelers and the NFL.

In February 2015, Maroon and five of his colleagues from the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center published a study in the multidisciplinary scientific journal PLOS ONE called "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Contact Sports: A Systematic Review of All Reported Pathological Cases." They failed to disclose the full extent of Maroon's 30-year relationship with the NFL and seven-year stint with the WWE. They issued a correction to the article's interests statement in June.

The authors also issued corrections for two statements made in the article relating to their review of literature related to CTE.

Maroon's CTE study argued that the only risk factor "consistently associated with CTE" was a history of mild traumatic brain injury. It also went on to say that their "review reveals significant limitations of the current CTE case reporting and questions the widespread existence of CTE in contact sports."

That's a slightly more clinical way of saying Maroon's most ridiculous talking point from that March appearance on his employer's television network:

"It's a rare phenomena. We have no idea the incidence. There are ... more injuries to kids falling off bikes, scooters, falling in playgrounds than there are in youth football. I think again, it's never been safer. Can we improve? Yes. We have to do better all the time to make it safer."

One of the corrections to the Maroon Six study was forced to note additional research, conducted after their review, including one study that found evidence of CTE in the brains of recent veterans exposed to blasts. You have to wonder how Maroon would compare the risks of combat with riding bikes and climbing on monkey bars.

This is by no means the first instance of a conflict of interest between the NFL and researchers working on their behalf waving off the long-term risk of brain trauma. Remember when former Jets team doctor Elliot Pellman, a rheumatologist, was also head of the league's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee from 1994 until 2007? Pellman was still involved with the NFL as recently as 2013. In fact, this wasn't the first time Maroon has been called out for a conflict of interest with the league.

He and another colleague at the University of Pittsburgh developed the ImPACT system for assessing concussions in players, software they sell to NFL teams and other sports leagues and got called out for it in 2007.

The league is in the process of finalizing a settlement in the class action lawsuit filed by thousands of retired players claiming the NFL concealed the long-term neurological risks associated with the sport. A group of 90 former players is appealing that decision, and another 200 former players or their living relatives, including the family of Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, have opted out of it in order to continue litigation.

One criticism of the settlement is that it overlooks CTE, including any future payments for players suffering from the disease's debilitating effects.

Rule changes and research grants with an eye toward the safety of players at least look like positive steps beyond the commissioner's usual spew of talking points. None of it matters as long as league employees are still hiding various conflicts of interest and pushing dubious science that seems designed to keep the NFL from having to acknowledge the extent of, or help pay for, a widespread health crisis among players.

alwaysstarwars:

Don’t be so distracted by young Harrison Ford that you fail to appreciate Mark Hamill’s face in the last gif.

DANBURY, CT—Saying she wants no part of the conversation that would inevitably result if she broke the good news, local medical billing technician Jenny Comers reported Friday that she’s keeping word of her recent pay raise from her parents out of fear of proving them right. “If I tell them about the raise, they’ll immediately attribute it to the advice they gave a while back about how being assertive and clearly stating what you want yields positive results—there’s no way I’m giving them that satisfaction,” said Comers, who earlier this week requested a one-on-one meeting with her supervisor, directly asked for a pay increase, and within a matter of minutes received a bump in her salary, a course of action she had previously dismissed as futile and “completely ridiculous” when it was proposed by her mother and father during a phone call three weeks ...

After Uber cowed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—at least for now—the methods it used to effect this political turnaround have come under scrutiny.

In particular, the decision to make the case that Uber is a friend to the ethnic minority residents of outlying boroughs has galled some in De Blasio’s political base. Uber’s top politico, David Plouffe, and a squadron of lobbyists worked to promote the mobile car service as the solution to charges that taxi drivers discriminate against African American riders and the poor service that residents of low-income neighborhoods receive.

But two studies performed by BOTEC Analysis, a firm hired by Uber, help confirm anecdotal observations that Uber serves these low-income neighborhoods better than cabs. The design of the studies, as well as where and when they would take place, were not known by the company ahead of time.

The blind study used matched pairs of riders, with one flagging an UberX car and the other a taxi to go the same destination. In both Los Angeles and New York City, it showed dramatically better service by UberX:

On the cost side, the Los Angeles UberX fleet provided dramatically cheaper service, while in New York City, the researchers said the difference in price was too close to call:

This data suggest that Uber is right to say its service disproportionately benefits low-income neighborhoods, though more information from studies being performed by this firm and New York City itself will be vital to understanding the effect.

But that Uber is providing a better service to under-served customers won’t be enough to win the political enemies it earned with its take-no-prisoners style.

Like any company mixed up in a political system where labor and capital tend to line up on opposite sides, Uber also has critics who say its treatment of its contract drivers and general profit-seeking make it an anti-progressive force, even as it and other platform-based car service companies provided thousands of new jobs by dodging municipal caps on street-hail taxis.

You can bypass Apple's space-age security and gain administrator-level privileges on an OS X Yosemite Mac using code that fits in a tweet.

Yosemite, aka version 10.10, is the latest stable release of the Mac operating system, so a lot of people are affected by this vulnerability. The security bug can be exploited by a logged-in attacker or malware on the computer to gain total unauthorized control of the Mac. It is documented here by iOS and OS X guru Stefan Esser.

It's all possible thanks to an environment variable called DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE that was added in Yosemite. It specifies where in the file system a component of the operating system called the dynamic linker can log error messages.

If the environment variable is abused with a privileged program, an attacker can modify arbitrary files owned by the powerful user account root – files like the one that lists user accounts that are allowed administrator privileges.

Here's the titchy root-level privilege-escalation exploit, devised yesterday by Redditor Numinit:

These shell commands run whoami to output your username (eg: vulture) and then tacks "ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" on the end to form a line like:

vulture ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

It then outputs that line to the file specified by DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE, which in this case is the list of users who can gain root-level privileges: /etc/sudoers. That line tells OS X that your user account is allowed to gain root privileges without a password.

A privileged program – the root-owned set-uid executable newgrp – is run to provide the root-level access to the sudoers file. Finally, sudo -s is executed to open an interactive command-line shell, which will have root-level privileges for your user account thanks to the update to the sudoers file. From there you can do anything you like; modify documents, install malware, create new users, and so on.

This flaw is present in the latest version of Yosemite, OS X 10.10.4, and the beta, version 10.10.5. If you upgrade to the El Capitan beta (OS X 10.11), you'll be free from the vulnerability as Apple has already fixed it in that preview beta. Once again, if you keep up with Cupertino and install (or buy) the very latest stuff, you'll be rewarded.

Failing that, you can install Esser's SUIDGuard to protect your Mac. "Apple ships fixes for security in beta versions of future products, but does not fix current versions," Esser noted.

Other provisions include removing barriers that block ex-offenders from housing and mandating that affordable units be included in new developments.

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It’s been more than a week since The New Yorker published a story called The Really Big One, describing how much of the Pacific Northwest will be destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami and scaring the crap out of Americans nationwide. Now, emergency kits are “flying off the shelves.”

Read more...

ARLINGTON, VA—Noting that they are reproducing at an alarming and unprecedented rate, researchers from the National Science Foundation warned Friday that the planet cannot continue supporting the rapidly growing population of Gronkowskis. “We are quickly approaching the point at which any more Gronkowskis will be utterly disastrous for all life on earth,” said leading researcher Rebecca Davies, adding that large groups of the enormous, powerful, and overly aggressive Gronkowskis have already overrun much of Massachusetts and are now spreading across the United States. “The planet simply doesn’t contain the resources necessary to sustain all these Gronkowskis, especially given the incredible amount of food they consume in a single day. This situation will soon be irreversible, and we as a society have to do something about it before it’s too late.” Davies added that she fully supports new measures to hunt Gronkowskis in rural parts of the country ...

Tyrese Gibson of The Fast and the Furious fame has been on a mission to lock down a role in the Green Lantern reboot slated for 2020. Inspired by the fan-art of himself in the role, Tyrese had a meeting with Warner Brothers about the picture last June, and confirmed today that he’s now had “a couple of meetings” with the studio.

In an interview with Collider, Tyrese reiterated his emotional investment in the project:

I am going to commit myself to this process, of seeing what’s possible … I do believe that there needs to be more black superheroes out there, but that’s not even my motivation. I think I would be the best Green Lantern, and based on my fans and supporters that spent around $6 billion in box office receipts, I feel like there’s a fanbase of fans out there waiting to see me put on this green suit and do my thing. So I would love to confirm something today but I can’t. We’ll just keep following up.

Sounds like Tyrese’s fans may want to start sending their fan-art to Warner Brothers directly, since they’re the ones who still need convincing!

(via Collider, image via Instagram)

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boredpanda:

Cats In Kimonos Are A Thing In Japan

“Just as the sun’s rays enliven us, PANTONE Minion Yellow is a color that heightens awareness and creates clarity, lighting the way to the intelligence, originality and the resourcefulness of an open mind – this is the color of hope, joy and optimism” - Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director, Pantone Color Institute.