goldengod

Leftfield by Lord of the Jungle

Sara sent me this interesting article from New Scientist Tech. Scroll down past the summary paragraphs on multilayered body armour and contextual Blackberries. A UK inventor by the name of Colin Davies has devised a method to force PVR’s to display ads even while fast-forwarding through commercials. It goes without saying that advertisers will be delighted at this discovery and probably shower him with dollars.

As scarily invasive this is, it is kind of ingenious. Taking the standard video concept of keyframes, combined with the fact that PVR’s tend to only show keyframes while in fast-forward mode, he suggests embedding simple ads in these keyframes.

This article is one that reminds me exactly how much of a war between the advertisers and the customers that advertising really is. Most times it seems like a tolerable annoyance, and the fact that advertisers have gulled us into thinking this displays at least a modicum of success. Long story short, we need to egg this dude’s house.

Equipment Porn
Photo by Gregory Carafelli

The British Royal Society has opened the doors on their brand new free online archive of scientific papers, dating back as far as the late 1600’s. El Reg picked up the story last week when it launched and there’s more information available in the Royal Society’s newspost. Like the BBC’s digital archive, this is a huge step forward in terms developing a ’sum of total human knowledge’ type repository.

I’ve explored the archive a little bit and it is quite fun if you’re into geeky science things. I’m totally worried about it becoming a giant timesink though, since I get lost in things like this easily. My RPG collection speaks embarrassingly large volumes on that subject.

Two clippings of articles that were of particular interest to me were William Henry Fox Talbot’s first accounts of the process of photography. You can read them yourself here and here. Dig around through the annals of scientific history a bit and see what you can find. Send me interesting articles so I have more fodder for my Blog-O-Matic cannon!

MOO, an innovative British web printing company, has just launched a new product called Flickr Minicards. Basically a new, custom-printed, thinner version of business cards. The best part is that they’re offering free 10-packs to the first 10,000 Flickr Pro users to sign up for ‘em. Shipping’s free too and they ship internationally, so us crazy Canadians can possess the proverbial ‘hook-ups’.

I’ve ordered my ten little slices of digital glory, can’t wait to see what they look like when they show up. It was a bit tricky finding ten different photos that I could crop that narrow and still have them look good, but I think I did alright. If you’ve got a Flickr Pro account, try this for sure. And if you want more reading, check out the MOO news section for more details.

Less than an hour after posting my Zenit KGB Photosniper entry, fellow Vancouver blogger Greg of dingoRUE got back to me about my request for other wacky cameras. Made by a company I’ve never even heard of called Minox, the DC-1011 Carat is a 10 megapixel digital camera. The wackiness? It’s gold plated, of course! We’ve got gold plated everything-fucking-else, so why not a digital camera?

The Minox DC 1011 special edition has a gold plated outer skin of 24 carat gold with ten 2mm diamonds at 0.03 carat each adorning the lens.

Furhter investigation into this company show at least a couple other strange digital cameras, including models designed to look like an ancient Rolleiflex twin lens reflex, an older model gold-plated camera, a camera that looks like a bad 70’s futuristic frisbee studded with diamonds, and a miniaturized digital version of an old film Leica. Personally, the digital Rolleiflex is the strange camera that really stands out to me.

It seems I must cut this entry short, as I’m expected at the Talk Like A Pirate Day Flashmob shortly. Yarr!

Little People is one of the most interesting, simple, and somehow engaging street art projects that I have ever seen. An artist who goes by Slinkachu hand paints these tiny figurines of people, and leaves them all over London. Either to be discovered by passersby or never seen again. The figurines are incredibly detailed, considering exactly how small they are.

To get an idea of exactly how tiny the figures are, take a look at the ‘homeless man‘ figure with pennies beside him.

This one’s been sitting in my queue for a little while now, but Photojojo just did a post on it, reminding me that it existed. This happens far too often. Either way, it’s brilliant street art. The kind of thing I’d love to see around town.

We have our own share of beautiful graffiti and street art here in Vancouver, though. There’s the ‘2010 Riot‘ guy, wheatpastes by The Dark, Basco5’s quirky characters, and the person who used to trace shadows in chalk (with dates and times) last summer. Anyone know any other Vancouver street art I’ve missed?

Other Street Art/Miniatures Links:

• Mark Jenkins’ Storker Project - Tape Babies
• A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels.
• Karin Stack’s ‘Believe You Me’ collection, part of her ‘Model Citizens’ exhibit.
• You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice - Street art stolen without permission.

Have you ever considered being a private detective and gone “nah, the equipment just doesn’t make me look creepy enough or stand out enough”? Well, here comes Zenit Cameras to the rescue with their FS-122 Photosniper. Yes, that is an actual picture of it to the left.

I spotted this one skimming through Issue 34 of Vapors Magazine at work. The Photosniper was apparently used by the Russian KGB in the 50s and 60s to take pictures of American officials in and around their embassies. The look of it, while strange, makes perfect logical sense if you don’t mind looking like a very conspicuous and simpleminded assassin.

Rather than train all your soldiers the proper methods of holding a camera and taking photos, just mount the camera on a rifle stock. Put the target in the center and pull the trigger, you’ve just snapped your first photo of Justin Timberlake exiting a Russian whorehouse.

The lenses used are an MC Tair-3S 300mm f/4.5 and an MC Helios-44M-6 58mm f/2. It has a number of disadvantages to current cameras inasmuch as it has a top shutter speed of 1/500s and only does manual focus. However, if you want a great conversation piece to hang on the walls of your creepy, unwashed studio or film noir detective’s office, the KGB Photosniper can’t be beat.

Interestingly enough, you can still buy them for $205USD at the link above and pimall has also written a short article on it.

See any other strange cameras or camera guns lurking around on the net? Let me know about it, lest I collapse in some kind of paroxysm unexplained by science.

Don’t be the last kid on your block to know about the International Talk Like A Pirate Day Flashmob!

Arrr Sea Battle will be at Grandview Park on Commercial Drive! The time of attack will be 4:30!

Avast ye hearties, ’tis the day of piratanical reckoning this upcoming Tuesday, September 19th! In celebration of the scourge of the bonny ocean, ye scurvy curs are expected to stand proudly as pirates and brandish yer grimy cardboard swords for a battle of grate proportion.

Make yer own ship, parrot or wench to kidnap!

Bring booty and swag!

Remember, you are rogues! Privateers!

Don’t dance the hempen jig, but plunder in the park, hornswaggle the landlubbers and win the day!

*there may be grog and shanties later, possibly at El Cocal. Details still to be seen.

(Organized by Jhayne)

Spam Musubi
Photo by Chotda

Spambox has put together a very simple and interesting free service that caught my attention yesterday. The little about blurb from their website kind of speaks for itself:

With this service you can create a temporary e-mail address that will forward all incoming mail to your usual e-mail address. Simply enter your e-mail address and the life time of your spambox and we will generate you a temporary @spambox.info e-mail.

It’s genius! For sites that demand your email address to ‘confirm your registration’, you can set up one of these boxes for as short as 30 minutes.

The service lasts long enough for you to get the confirmation email, but not so long that you’ll get any spam from Company XXX (That’s right, I know what you’ve been looking at and you’re a naughty boy). The best part about the service is that it’s free, so you can make use of it whenever it’s convenient.

I will definitely be making use of this service anywhere that I can’t get away with using the BugMeNot Firefox extension to keep the sacred idol that is my email out of the hands of rugged, Harrison Ford-esque spammers.

I have finally managed to get my hands on a clean copy of the footage CBC aired regarding the 2006 Vancouver Zombiewalk. It centers on the incident that many of you are familiar with regarding the car driving through the crowd.

It also features an interview with me, where I say ‘uh’ a lot and get misclassified as a witness, as well as video footage of Zombiewalk 2006 by my friend Jon Stainton. Enjoy!

For all the YouTube haters in the house, it’s also available in quicktime. And I will be posting my photos of the event in the Gallery section over the coming few days.

Kevin Rose signs some breasts
Photo by Thomas Hawk.

A seemingly large number of Digg users are currently very interested in the possibility that the site is actually being controlled by a small number of elite users, rather than by the ‘democratic majority’ of all Digg users that the site promotes.

I’ve been tripping over stories about this all morning, and each one carries anywhere from four hundred to two thousand Diggs. There is some very significant user interest in this once again. Previously, back in April there was another increase of interest in Digg stories that insinuated or outright said that Digg was fixed. There was so much interest that Digg founder Kevin Rose addressed the concerns directly in an entry on the digg blog.

Initial Accusations

Jesusphreak kicked things off again yesterday with his article entitled “Digg the rigged? A closer look at Digg’s democratic model“. In it, he explores how the majority of articles that make the front page are submitted and initially dugg by a core group of about 30 users, who seem to be using their influence to ensure only their friend’s stories get bumped to the front page.

The first thing that I’d like to mention is that I find it interesting that the sites being promoted don’t seem to be commercially affiliated with these users in any way. So despite the fact that Digg is among the top 1,000 sites on the web and has an enormous reach, the system does not appear to be taking advantage for financial means, just geek street cred.

Digg founder Kevin Rose
Photo by Stewart Butterfield.

Later the same day, Jesusphreak returned with a follow up post. It explains how his previous story was actually removed from the Digg upcoming queue. It also was restricted from hitting the front page, despite garnering far more attention and diggs in a shorter time period than most of the entries that do make it there. He states that it appears that a Digg moderator removed the story from the front page.

User Responses & Additional Information

One of the Digg users mentioned as part of the Elite 30, hemphill81, who supposedly control most of the front page discovered this story and wrote a response to it in his personal blog. He explains that the probably reason for this is the top users tend to pay more attention to each others stories because they are top users as well, and thus digg each other far more often. Seems reasonable, if a little unfair to the wailing technological masses.

At the same that this is taking place, another user has made the same discovery separately and written his point of view on it. Again, a large number of the same Digg users are fingered in this group, but not a whole lot of additional evidence is uncovered. The same information from a different point of view is what this article offers.

A Numbers Game

Digg v3 Lauch Party
Photo by Laughing Squid.

Taylor Howard, on the other hand, cuts right to the core of the issue. He presents us with some data on recent top stories showing a very clear pattern of articles being submitted en masse and all being dugg by the same core of a dozen or so users. Links are included so you can verify the veracity of all of it yourself.

A selection of ForeverGeek (a site now banned from Digg) articles on the subject from April 2006 make for interesting additional reading on what happened back then. One of them shows side-by-side comparisons of the same sixteen elite Digg users digging two separate stories, but exactly in the same order and within bare minutes of it being posted.

In Closing

Whether there is any truth to all this is still the subject of much speculation, but there is a lot of information that seems to be pointing at a rather unsavory conclusion. There has not yet been any response to any of these new allegations on the official Digg Blog or DiggNation. However, for the moment at least one of the stories regarding this has made it to the front page without being removed.

Update #1: Kevin Rose has finally addressed the situation directly, on the Digg Blog. He asserts that at the end of the day, Digg is in control of the users and mentions multiple software updates over the next little while that help combat this by concentrating more on the diversity of users who digg the story, rather than just their overall rank. Whether already planned or a very hastily drawn up PR Plan B, this definitely seems to be a step in the right direction towards controlling this kind of manipulation.

Update #2: Alex Peake of TheEmpowerment.com has found a video of the young lady having her bosoms signed by Kevin, pictured at the top of this article. Also, here’s some pictures of her mostly naked in the mountains from her own Flickr account. Enjoy this relevant information!