firehose

Make a super cute plush owl toy that chirps using Gemma

Chirp chirp! Make this delightful sound-making plush toy with the Sew-Your-Own Owl Kit and GEMMA plush toy guts kit. This simple circuit uses a tilt ball switch to trigger GEMMA to play a sound on the small speaker. You can program your own circuit to make other sounds too, so you can even mod a plush toy you already have!

This is a beginner level sewing and soldering project. This tutorial has detailed photos for each step of circuit assembly and installing the circuit into the toy, and the owl kit comes with detailed printed instructions recommended for slightly experienced stitchers as young as eight.

Full tutorial

There was some chatter online a while back over the new animated series, Star Wars Rebels only selling toys featuring male characters of the show and marketing said toys only to boys. Well guess what, Hera is coming.

These are the figures you’ve been looking for! pic.twitter.com/5bXUWB8ixd — Dave Filoni (@dave_filoni) December 4, 2014

That’s a tweet from Dave Filoni, executive producer of Rebels. The character Hero is voiced by the awesome Vanessa Marshall, who just so happened to sit on our “Strong Female Characters” panel at this year’s New York Comic Con. Some reply tweets from the official Star Wars account give a bit more info on merchandise for Sabine as well.

@therealobimoo A Sabine costume has been in stores since before Halloween. More products will be coming. — Star Wars (@starwars) December 4, 2014

@Mich_al_Ghul You can pre-order Sabine online now, she’ll be more widely available early next year. — Star Wars (@starwars) December 4, 2014

Found this set on Amazon and uh, I might have to pick it up. For my nieces and myself.

We’ve learned in the past how companies view toy sales when it comes to the continuation of an animated series and it’s not great. However, while there was a lack of Gamora merchandise for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, parent company Disney responded well to concerns over there being no Princess Leia merchandise in their stores.

It’s great to see these toys but are you seeing them on the shelves too? I’m sure there are plenty of little girls and boys who would like them for the holidays.

(via JediNews)

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"Not long ago, a friend told me he’d been fired from a West Coast marketing internship for not having a 'hunger for marketing.'"

Many years ago, during the the 1980s, I witnessed a killing: a New York City cop shooting an unarmed homeless man near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was later called as a grand jury witness in the case. The grand jury did not indict the officer.

Organized crime rings are making millions peddling the most innocuous white powder there is, and the street value is surging

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Set to a backdrop of ongoing protests, New York City's police union and mayor are publicly at odds over the grand jury's decision not to charge officer Daniel Pantaleo in the video-taped homicide of Eric Garner. Elected on a progressive platform, Mayor Bill de Blasio heads not only the country's largest city but its policing laboratory. New York City is where policies like COMPSTAT and "broken windows" got their start. De Blasio also has a bi-racial son with his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray. And it's partly from that personal lens that de Blasio framed his 20-minute response to the grand jury's decision at a press conference this Wednesday. The result is a speech that whatever its limits, strikes an unprecedented note of empathy for the fear felt by black and brown families:

Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face. He's a good young man, law abiding young man who never would think to do anything wrong. And yet because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we've had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers--who are there to protect him. ... For so many of our young people there's a fear and for so many of our families there's a fear. So I've had to worry over the years. Chirlane's had to worry, "Is Dante safe?" each night. There're so many families in the city who feel that each and every night: "Is my child safe?" And not just from the painful realities of crime and violence in some of our neighborhoods but, are they safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors. That's reality. ...

You've heard in so many places, people of all backgrounds utter the same basic phrase. They've said, black lives matter. And they said it because it had to be said. It's a phrase...that should be self-evident. But our history sadly requires us to say, black lives matter.

Notwithstanding that it's the present that necessitates the phrase, #BlackLivesMatter, "the people" was another powerful theme of de Blasio's speech. His insistence that change comes not from city hall or police leadership but "people who've demanded it," make it worth the listen (see clip above).

While de Blasio re-emphasized his faith in commissioner William Bratton (known for implementing COMPSTAT and "broken windows"), he displeased at least another key sector of police leadership. Cops, according to their union, felt, "thrown under the bus." Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association:

"[Mayor de Blasio] spoke about, 'we have to teach our children that their interaction with the police and that they should be afraid of New York City police officers.' That's not true," Lynch said. "We have to teach our children, our sons and our daughters, no matter what they look like, to respect New York City police officers, teach them to comply with New York City police officers even if they think it's unjust."

The war of words in New York City is the latest pushback from police unions feeling under siege--and it's serving to draw attention to their roles in advancing accountability and keeping abusive cops on the street. Asked about race and policing, Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police says, "it's not an issue of race":

The FOP's been on record over the last 15 years denouncing racial profiling. It's not a legitimate police practice; it's not taught in any police academy in the country. That doesn't mean there aren't officers who have racial bias. But any cop who demonstrates any form of racial bias should be put off the job, and we support that.

The one topic that's not being discussed and is never discussed is [that] we don't believe it's an issue of race. We believe it's an issue of poverty. Communities that have distrust of law enforcement -- it's because law enforcement is the only part of government they ever see. They're poor; infant mortality rates are higher; single-family homes are higher; unemployment is higher; people don't live as long as the average American. And that is the issue in every community in America that we police.

Read more in The Washington Post. 

 

“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.”

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It Is Expensive to Be Poor | The Atlantic  (via america-wakiewakie)

Reblog this forever. I’ll never forget how many of my students in the school I worked in with a 100% free and reduced lunch rate lived in residential motels and how many of them relied on the school to get breakfast and lunch and how often those were their only meals for the day.

Or how my friends who have older cars have to spend so much money repairing them but an older car was all they could afford in the first place.

And how you literally have no safety net because if you already fixed one thing on your car and something else goes a week later, you’ve already spent the little bit of buffer you saved up.

(via raindropprincess)

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

(via moniquill)

Filed under: Etc., Crossover, Subaru, Weird Car News

$90 Million Powerball winner plans to buy a #Subaru Forester. Go ahead, treat yourself to the power windows. http://t.co/G0RjRlgSob

- Car Talk (@cartalk) December 5, 2014

Lisa Quam recently hit the Powerball jackpot to win $90 million. Like many folks lucky enough to win, Quam says one of her first stops will be a car dealer for a new set of wheels. Her first thought isn't to choose high luxury with a Bentley Mulsanne or Mercedes-Benz S-Class, though. Nope, she plans to buy herself a Subaru Forester, which is an eminently practical (if predictable) choice for someone residing in Washington state. Hopefully, Quam will decide to spend a few extra bucks for the turbocharged XT trim; she can definitely afford it.

For our money, Quam's Subaru isn't nearly as cool of a choice as the guy who decided to buy himself an used Acura NSX from Craigslist with his $448 million Powerball jackpot last year. They're both keeping things modest with their newfound fortunes, though, and that strikes us as a smart move.

WA woman wins $90M Powerball, plans to buy Subaru Forester originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 05 Dec 2014 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Redfin data shows a median list price in Brooklyn of $340,000 and a median sale price of $432,000, or about $280 a square foot. That compares favorably, from a buyer's point of view, with nearby Sellwood, where the median list price is $409,000 and median sale price of $375,000 amounts to about $299 a square foot.

In the ad, a tall black father sits on a couch next to his young daughter. He pulls out his phone with unlimited Internet from Wal-Mart Family Mobile. Then he gives her a phone and she is overjoyed. Squealing with delight, she wraps her arm around the back of his neck and tugs him down. "I can't breathe," he says jokingly as he struggles. Cut to product information and pricing. "Based on feedback from customers we're going to be re-editing the ad," said Deisha Barnett, Wal-Mart's senior director of corporate communications. "It struck a nerve in myself," said Shana Sanders, a marketing professional from Atlanta, Georgia, who saw it while watching the morning news and said she told several friends about it right away. "It immediately made me think of the Eric Garner case where he was choked by the arms of a New York police officer."

The Washington Post reported on Friday that officials close to the accused fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, or “Phi Psi,” can prove that several details of Jackie’s story are false. For instance, Jackie told Rolling Stone and The Washington Post in separate interviews that one of the alleged perpetrators was employed at a certain fitness center on campus when the rape happened in 2012, but no Phi Psi brother was employed at that facility at the time. Toward the end of its article, the Post reported that "Jackie contradicted an earlier interview" by saying she no longer knew if her "attacker actually was a member of Phi Kappa Psi." Reached by The Huffington Post, friends of Jackie said she was under “extreme duress” and could not speak publicly at the moment.

Most of all, Ms. Williams had to surmount the hype and overselling of NBC, a helicopter network that smothered this production with fulsome ads and in-house synergy boosts, including a promo for the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who is the actress’s father. Mr. Williams skipped anchoring the evening news on Thursday to watch his daughter’s premiere, which is understandable. The newscast’s sizable segment about Ms. Williams and her lifelong fascination with Peter Pan was less so. ... The producers, worried about offending Native Americans, took one obvious liberty by rewriting the lyrics of Tiger Lily’s song, “Ugg-a-Wugg,” calling it “True Blood Brothers.” They cast an unknown actress of Cherokee descent, Alanna Saunders, 22, as Tiger Lily and surrounded her with a tribe of dancers dressed, or undressed really, in less stereotypical storybook costumes — though these near-naked men gyrating like Chippendales dancers weren’t necessarily any more culturally sensitive. The Lost Boys, meanwhile, looked like Etonian football hooligans. ... “Peter Pan Live!” was a loving, lavish tribute to a beloved musical that offered a new generation of children a chance to use their smartphones to keep Tinkerbell alive. (Peter asked children to clap, but an NBC crawl urged them to also tweet.)

About a dozen members of the staff of The New Republic, and an even greater number of contributing editors, resigned on Friday morning, angered by an abrupt change of editors and what they saw as a series of management missteps. The resignations include the senior editors Alec MacGillis, Julia Ioffe and Isaac Chotiner, and the contributing editors Sean Wilentz and William Deresiewicz, according to several staff members who are leaving. The departures, which represent a significant chunk of the small magazine’s staff, followed the resignations on Thursday of the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer, and its longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. Some staff members have asked that their work be pulled from the coming issue of the magazine, which will have to be completed without an editor, and a greatly diminished staff. Mr. Foer was replaced by Gabriel Snyder, the former editor of The Atlantic Wire, who will start on Dec. 22.

Marci Kratter said Friday that a request for an injunction to defer the autopsy for 34-year-old Rumain Brisbon by one day was denied by Maricopa County Superior Court. Kratter is requesting the state Court of Appeals examine the issue. Kratter says the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office refused to postpone the autopsy until Saturday, when an independent expert could be present.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving the image of a Confederate flag on a license plate and decide how much control state governments can exert over slogans and messages on vehicle tags. The court will hear an appeal from the state of Texas, which refused five years ago to approve a specialty plate for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, including a logo of a Confederate battle flag surrounded by group's name and the year 1896. After hearing public comments, the state motor vehicle authority rejected the request, explaining that "many members of the general public find the design offensive," and associate the flag "with organizations advocating expressions of hate." The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued and won in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It ruled that license plate messages — other than official mottos such as "Lone Star State" — are free speech and can't be restricted by the state even if some consider the words offensive.

The irony of the Berkeley situation is I thought campuses were places where free speech was championed. And one of my problems with Islam is that they are not that big on free speech—which so offended the Muslims at Berkeley, they wanted to ban my speech.

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.

I have never felt more alone than when I was working there. I worked in isolation and lived under constant surveillance. Amazon could mandate overtime and I would have to comply with any schedule change they deemed necessary, and if there was not any work, they would send us home early without pay. I started to fall behind on my bills. At some point, I lost all fear. I had already been through hell. I protested Amazon. The gag order was lifted and I was free to speak. I spent my last days in a lovely apartment constructing arguments on discussion boards, writing articles and talking to reporters. That was 2012 and Amazon’s labor and business practices were only beginning to fall under scrutiny. I walked away from Amazon’s warehouse and didn’t have any other source of income lined up. I cashed in on my excellent credit, took out cards, and used them to pay rent and buy food because it would be six months before I could receive my first unemployment compensation check. ... Anyone who bemoans the weakening of Americans should look at the hardy homeless. It takes tremendous strength to get through a day. I’m stronger, healthier and happier than ever. There’s more respect for a homeless woman out on the streets than there is in a warehouse for Amazon workers.

“We Talked about this subject, and yeah -- she just said, you gotta understand that there are a lot of black folks that are incredibly, more and more, distrusting of law enforcement,” Bush said. “Which is a shame, because law enforcement’s job is to protect everybody.

The parents of Akai Gurley said Friday that their son was murdered by NYPD Officer Peter Liang, and that they feel Liang should be charged with homicide. Their statement came hours after a damning report from The New York Daily News stating that Liang texted his police union representative while Gurley lay dying. It also came just hours before Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson confirmed that he will impanel a grand jury to consider charges against Liang.

Esaw Garner became visibly angry when asked if she accepted the remorse Pantaleo expressed earlier that day. In a statement, Pantaleo offered his condolences to the family and said he never intended to harm Garner. "Hell no!" Garner replied. "The time for remorse would have been when my husband was yelling to breathe." "No, I don't accept his apology. No, I could care less about his condolences," she continued. "He's still working. He's still getting a paycheck. He's still feeding his kids, when my husband is six feet under and I'm looking for a way to feed my kids now."

Now that over 20 women have come forward accusing Bill Cosby of rape, someone decided to make it official and vandalize the comedian’s star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, writing the word “rapist” on it in marker multiple times.

Whereas Crick remained a relatively private person until his death in 2004, Watson is a notorious rabble-rouser who is not shy about voicing his views on race and gender. In 2007, he was suspended from his post as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York, after controversy erupted over his suggestion to The Sunday Times that black people are not as intelligent as white. "Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so," he said. Watson retired from the laboratory shortly after. Watson told Nature that his motivation for selling the medal is a chance for redemption. He plans to donate some of the proceeds to Cold Spring, where he still draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus, and also to University College Cork in Ireland to help establish an institute dedicated to the mathematician George Boole. "I'm 52% Irish," Watson said by way of explanation.

“I will have to buy some more Bitcoin on the open market to fulfill my commitment to the new batch of Boost companies,” Mr. Draper said in an email. Draper Associates had teamed up with Boost VC, the Bitcoin start-up accelerator founded by his son, Adam Draper, to invest 300 Bitcoins in every company that works with Boost.

America's oldest gun manufacturer, Remington, has agreed to replace millions of triggers in its most popular product — the Model 700 rifle. The company has been riddled for years with claims the gun can fire without the trigger being pulled, often with deadly results.