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Boing Boing
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2nd Century AD bust looks like Elvis
Neatorama found this photo of a 2nd Century AD bust that bears a resemblance to The Hillbilly Cat. Roman Elvis (Neatorama)...
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Band features two keyboard-playing chickens
In the late 1990s, Jeff Simmermon formed a band with two chickens as members. This is his story. The keyboard players in my band were spacier than Sun Ra, more abstract than John Coltrane and brought more sheer, squalid anarchy to the stage than GG Allin and the Sex Pistols combined. When they weren?t playing music they were either feeding, fighting, or shitting on the floor ? and they managed to do a lot of that onstage, too. But they didn?t just act like barnyard animals, they were barnyard animals: the keyboard players in my band were two chickens named Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline. I played percussion on a modified vintage typewriter miked up loud enough to sound like the thunder of an angry God. At that volume, the space bar and shift keys rumbled like a kick drum, and the letter keys snapped like a tight snare. My friend Tim, the band?s other human being played the guitar and bass semi-simultaneously, wearing the guitar up by his collarbone and the bass slung low at his hips ? he?d loop the bass notes through a pedal and play rhythm guitar against himself while I thumped and cracked the typewriter. Once we hit a stride of sorts, we?d pull a blanket off the top of the cage where Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline sat with two little Casio Keyboards. We?d glue chicken feed to the keys we wanted them to hit the most, the ones in tune with Tim. But really, whatever the chickens played was up to them ? we just tried to follow along as best we could. We told ourselves that we were influenced by classic country, John Cage, dub reggae and Gonzo the Great. But really, we just tried to create listenable backing rhythms while two birds with brains the size of your pinkie nail took center stage. Brainless Barnyard Keyboards: The Short Saga of Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band. (If you just want to hear what the music sounds like, listen to "Royal Quiet Deluxe" here.)...
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iPhone Forensics book
iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data & Corporate Assets is a new book from O'Reilly Media that "gives IT professionals, security personnel, and law enforcement the knowledge needed to conduct forensic analysis of an iPhone." Looks useful if you plan to sell your old iPhone. This book shows the reader how to recover sensitive information from the device and perform disaster recovery, and walks the reader through various scenarios for recovering different types of information. With this guide, the reader will be able to effectively recover live, lost, or deleted email, photos, voicemail, Google Maps searches, typing cache, and other sensitive data retained by the iPhone. The reader will learn advanced techniques including data recovery, properly preserving and preparing evidence, and technical techniques such as bypassing basic passcode security or recovering data even after a full restore (by say, a disgruntled employee). Finally, the reader will learn how to properly wipe an iPhone clean of all data for resale or reissue - something Apple's own restore process fails to do. (Disclosure: I'm editor-in-chief of MAKE, which is published by O'Reilly.) iPhone Forensics: Rough Cuts Version...
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Garden Yeti
Last night, the Imaginary Foundation presented me with this beautiful gift, "Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti Sculpture." Available from Design Toscano, it stands almost two and a half feet tall and is made from hand-painted resin. My 2.5 year-old-son was slightly scared of the creature at first, but then he cautiously walked up, examined him closely, and finally patted him on the head and said "Nice Bigfoot! Bigfoot is nice!" Bigfoot statue (Thanks, Nick Philip!)...
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Keith Barry's "brain magic" on TED Talks
I enjoyed this video of Keith Barry performing feats of "brain magic" at TED. First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic. Link (Thanks, Wellington!)...
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