February 11, 2010 - Posted by Josh - 2 Comments
Ever since it became clear that companies like PayPal won’t let me use their service to collect donations for milkboys (which they call “selling adult pictures”) I was looking for a better way to let people chip in to pay for the server which is hosting all the milkboys-related projects. Dutch service TipIt was fine until they were bought by an American investor who, of course, didn’t want any “obscene” sites using the service. After that there was a whole lot of nothing. But it seems like Peter Sunde will save the world once again ;) After The Pirate Bay, Anonymous Mail, Anonymous Blogs, Anonymous Internet, Uncensored Image Hosting and an open Fuck Copyrights YouTube clone in the work there finally comes something that could beat PayPal :D
So, in short: You pay a small flatrate fee per month and whenever you see content you want to support you can do so by clicking the Flattr button and a part of your monthly fee will be transferred to the owner of the site – without giving the content provider your credit card details or anything like that. This seems just perfect for milkboys :)
August 10, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 5 Comments
I want this really, really bad :3
July 31, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 22 Comments
If you ever talked to me it’s very likely that I told you about how happy I am with Ipredator, the anonymous VPN (a secure, encrypted, private communication tunnel between two or more devices across the internet) I use to pirate Johan Palm Porn hide my IP from the rest of the world (and the wide web too). The only downside about it is that it costs € 5 per month and is still not open to the public.
Enter BlackVPN: They are free and they are having a beta test too, but it’s open for everyone. Just use the invite code “GetUp” to sign up and you’re ready to go. Setting the whole thing up is dead simple and after 5 minutes you’re set to surf the web without having to fear you get in trouble for downloading torrents or visiting sites like 12chan ;)
I don’t know the guys behind BlackVPN so I can’t tell how reliable the service is but like Pirate Bay’s Ipredator they promise that they don’t store any connection data – so even if any authority will ask them to identify a customer they couldn’t because they don’t have any logs to do so.
The cool thing about BlackVPN is that you can chose between different IP’s. One from the USA, one from the UK and one from the Netherlands (which seems to be Swedish actually). This means you can use services which are available in specific countries only, like BBC’s iPlayer in the UK or Hulu in the US.
July 14, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 5 Comments
Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.
RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend…
The general idea behind RepRap sounds amazing. I have just one concern: They use plastic :(
April 23, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 1 Comment
Just read about a new book lovers site on Boing Boing:
Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books and we’re gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth. A month into public beta, the site’s already throwing up some curious connections. Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell? Charles Stross and Fyodor Dostoevsky? Anything goes: Bookarmy recommendations are generated by members themselves, who can mix and match similar reads from a full bibliographic database. The site also give readers space to host online libraries of their favourite books — and compares their tastes to refine its recommendations.
I’m not sure about it yet. I know they’re still in Beta (like Gmail is for 5 years now) but there are many small things making it look a bit… unprofessional: They didn’t bother to give their site a title (the browser just says “Default Page”), they use Blogger for their offical blog (Seriuosly, guys) and the site in general looks like a mess. I guess I can’t blame them for the fact that the abstinence porn crap Twilight occupies the first 3 slots of their top reading list and that there are hardly any German books in their database yet but all this put together… *sigh*
April 13, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 4 Comments
Tweenbots are are simple robots bearing a flag with their destinations. Random humans they encounter in the street have to pick them up and aim them in the right direction. Kacie Kinzer built this small motorized vehicle that looked like a happy little robot, called a tweenbot. It could only move forward. Attached to the robot was a flag that asked humans to help steer it from one corner of Washington Square Park to the opposite corner.
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
(via Levi, Darian, Boing Boing & tweenbots)
April 11, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 2 Comments
The Web Trend Map – Click it to view it Full Size :)
The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by iA Inc. It maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each.
April 10, 2009 - Posted by Josh - 0 Comments
Taskfox, the Mozilla project that aims to bring some of Ubiquity’s action-oriented awesomeness into Firefox without extensions, is moving along, and the team wants everyone to see how it might work without any downloads required.
Full Article + Video
I don’t know if you have to be a nerd to be excited about such things but if you ask me… it looks pretty fucking amazing and I can’t wait to use it :D
