toshism

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straight stolen from reddit.com: what's new online

This black belt takes his time preparing to break ten bricks, but the payoff is worth it.

(via b3ta)

straight stolen from YesButNoButYes

Looking for new ways to impress girls? The good-old-fashioned tattoo on the arm just doesn’t do it anymore? Well, you should try the new hottest thing: tattoo your eyeballs! They absolutely love it. I’m just kidding. Who wants to see a guy with tattoed eyeballs…?

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done. It is the case of Pauly Unstoppable, Josh, and Shannon Larratt, who offered to be volunteers and get their eyeballs tattoed as an experiment. The procedure involves injecting the eye with ink.

Read more about it on Modblog.bmezine.com: part 1, part 2 and part 3

straight stolen from Blame It On The Voices

More tattoo stuff

The BBC's Darren Waters had a sit down with Andy Rubin (formerly of Apple, General Magic, WebTV, and Danger) who's the main man on Android, Google's mobile OS. Rubin showed the current state of the Android platform and it's looking swell—for the most part. (What's up with having to use a slider to zoom in the web browser? Can't you just rip off the double-tap intelligent zoom from Mobile Safari?)

Perhaps most impressive is the Street View mode of Google Maps, pulled down to the 3G prototype reference phone running at a relatively mild 300MHz. That reference design, which may or may not reflect hardware that will run Android in the future, had another interesting feature: a trackball, currently seen on Danger Hiptops and Blackberries.

Under the bonnet of Android [BBC]

straight stolen from Boing Boing Gadgets

From Ironic Sans, a new typography term: “Keming” — improper kerning.

Link

(Thanks, Alex!)

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Worried about your mortgage? How about just not paying it? Some banks were so enthusiastic in playing subprime derivatives shell-games that they’ve literally lost the notes on the mortgages they “own,” and can’t prove that deadbeat homeowners owe them any money. An estimated $2.1 trillion worth of these mortgages are “orphaned” with no apparent owner.

Joe Lents hasn’t made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That’s when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents’ mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

“If you’re going to take my house away from me, you better own the note,” said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Link

(via Karmabanque)

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Everyone loves guitar hero, but what about those who just
plain suck at it. What are they supposed to do at parties,
family gatherings, and LAN Parties? Well, they could always
bring their own hacked guitar which plays every single note
automatically

straight stolen from HacknMod.com – You name it. We hack it.

Fred sez, “Those who rent videos from iTunes to play back on their Apple TV units may discover that they can’t watch them unless their displays support HDCP — the DRM technology that infects most Hollywood digital video these days.”

When I attempted to watch the movie, however, the Apple TV displayed an error message: “This content requires HDCP for playback.” HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is a form of digital rights management (DRM) that prevents you from playing video over
DVI and HDMI connections (in my case) if you don’t own compatible hardware that can decode the signal properly. (In other words, HDCP is more crap DRM that does nothing but irritate legitimate
customers.)

Of course, people who use the Pirate Bay to get the same videos for free have no such problems. Hollywood only punishes paying customers. Smooth.

Link

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Mother Jones has an audio feature up this week — a compilation of songs believed to be used in US military prisons and on bases…

to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams.

Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Desiree Palmen, a 44-year-old Dutch artist creates crazy clothing to hide in plain sight with…. wow.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

straight stolen from NOTCOT.ORG

The Star Tribune reports that dozens of bars in the Twin Cities are holding “theater nights” and declaring everyone in the bar to be an actor. By law, performers are allowed to smoke during theatrical performances. (The law in California is similar. I once saw Art Spiegelman give his presentation about the history of comic books and he chained-smoked his way through it.)

Lisa Anderson, owner of Mike’s Uptown bar in Hill City, said that last Saturday she staged a “theater night” and packed in four times the usual crowd that has come in since the smoking ban took effect.

Anderson said she has been helping other bar owners who want to put on their own tobacco productions.

“I’m going to continue to do this,” she said. “It increased my business.”

So will Brian Bauman, owner of The Rock nightclub in Maplewood, which staged a theater night Tuesday and nearly doubled the usual crowd.

At least 10 other bar owners wandered through his bar that night, taking stock of the event’s success.

Link (Via Reason Hit & Run)

straight stolen from Boing Boing

An extensive collection of cheat sheets for programming languages and applications. There are 10 PHP cheat sheets alone and more for related things like Drupal and CakePHP.

(link)

straight stolen from kottke.org

Oxblood Ruffin shares word that Cult of the Dead Cow just launched a large-scale scanner project, Goolag.org:

SECURITY ADVISORY: The following program may screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.

LUBBOCK, TX, February 20th – Today CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc), the world’s most attractive hacker group, announced the release of Goolag Scanner, a Web auditing tool. Goolag Scanner enables everyone to audit his or her own Web site via Google. The scanner technology is based on “Google hacking”, a form of vulnerability research developed by Johnny I Hack Stuff. He’s a lovely fellow. Go buy him a drink.

“It’s no big secret that the Web is the platform”, said cDc spokesmodel, Oxblood Ruffin. “And this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective. Goolag Scanner provides one more tool for Web site owners to patch up their online properties. We’ve seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a big Web site, I’d be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday. The vulnerabilities are that serious.”

Goolag Scanner will be released open source under the GNU Affero General Public license. It is dedicated to the memory of Wau Holland, founder of the Chaos Computer Club, and a true champion of privacy rights and social justice.

GOOLAG SCANNER FUNCTIONS AND FEATURES

GoolagScan is a standalone windows GUI based application.

* Configuration. gS uses one xml-based configuration file for its
settings.

* Data-House-holding. All dorks coming with the distribution of gS
are kept inside one file.

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Matthew says:

Swedish graduate student Emil Ernerfeldt created the program Phun, a 2D physics playground, and has made it free to download for non-commercial use.

He demonstrates it in a zenful YouTube video, where he creates devices like cars and piston engines in seconds using simple shapes.

Download app here.

straight stolen from Boing Boing

Through a clever use of the “selection” CSS attribute, you can make blocks of text that turn into blocky artwork when selected.
Link

Update:
Erik sez, “Thanks for linking to my little demo of css3. After making that one, I made one that allows you to supply an image and text and it generates it for you.”

straight stolen from Boing Boing

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Adam Shepard had $25 and the clothes on his back. As a challenge, he set himself a year to get an apartment, a car, and $2500 in savings.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education. During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

The whole thing is recounted in Shepard’s book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. (via cyn-c)

(link)

straight stolen from kottke.org

(YouTube link)

It’s interesting to see the strategies different species use to operate.

Cat: Back off or I’ll fight! I’m warning you!

Raccoon: I don’t know anything about fighting. I’ll just take the food.

-via Cynical-C

straight stolen from Neatorama

Dave Park says,

Amplive made a remix of Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ and was planning to release it without the band’s permission leading to a cease and desist order on December 18. Today it was announced that both parties had since met and Amplive was now given permission to release the album. Downloadable MP3s are now available.

Link

straight stolen from Boing Boing