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"Ript" is so technologically advanced, it comes with a HOWTO, bitches:
Ript, via Book of Joe.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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And suddenly there was Flixel, a free and open-source gameengine. Very well designed, fast to step into, made for ActionScript 3 and very versatile. The engine was released only some weeks ago, but the community is currently submitting first games. Time to talk to Adam Atomic: The guy who wrote this genious piece of software. Let’s jump right in!
Flixel and a little code-example.
Is there any deeper open-source related philosophy behind Flixel, or was is a more practical decision to do this thing?Flixel is probably my most selfish project ever! The whole idea behind it was just to make it easier for me to make and distribute the kinds of games that I like to make. After my third game I had most of the bits and pieces that I needed, and figured with maybe a long weekend I could clean it up enough that maybe other people could use it too.
How much time / effort does it cost you to maintain the project?Nothing deep I don’t think. I’ve used and played a lot of free or open source apps and games, and always like giving back. I won’t go so far as to say I believe in karma exactly… but it seems like it can’t hurt.
We are very curious if there are any plans to monetize Flixel now or in the future? (Don’t be shy, we are ready for everything).I’ve spent approximately one hour on maintenance since release, for the v1.1 update. This is where the karma comes in; if you give it away for free, then you can trade that karma for a little help from the self-starters who are willing to share their knowledge with everybody else. Within a day or two of releasing the framework, people had already posted tutorials for settings the package up in FlashDevelop and running MXMLC from the command line and and and…it’s pretty rad. Basically, if I had to do that stuff myself, I could never have released it. So I think it was really release it for free, or just don’t release it.
What about Gamemaker, Clickteam or Torque? Do you care about the developments of the “other guys” doing tools in that field?Yes and no, sort of, I guess? I have some ideas, I’m gonna build some stuff with the help of some friends later this year that will involve Flixel, but I don’t think it will be anything you can buy, or subscriptions or anything like that. The trick is finding a way to monetize it that isn’t so annoying to actually set up that it just takes all the fun out of the thing… which I haven’t completely worked out yet.
Are you willing to tell us more about features to come at Flixel? How about community driven developments?
Unity3D is the only system that really impresses me; they mix the GUI and scripting and asset tracking and all that stuff really nicely. I think after actually making a bunch of smaller games my ideas about the fastest way to do this stuff differs some from some of the popular conceptions of how to make game-making more accessible, particularly the whole GUI aspect I think level editors, GUIs, and all that stuff is a real drag. It’s probably a little egalitarian but I think it’s actually good for people who want to develop games to kind of… meet me halfway, I guess. Plus most simple game-making GUIs encourage static art and static level design, which leads directly to really costly, slow content creation. Scripting I think encourages users to experiment with procedural design more if only to make their lives easier! For 2D games, if you can learn just a smidge of scripting and basic programming logic, and you have the right libraries, you can do REALLY amazing stuff really quickly (see the entire Processing community for example). Plus, hey, now you know how to program!
I also read, that you were involved in the Wii-port of Cave Story. How did you came into this project and what does this project meant to you personally (i.e. for your developing skills or things learned)?Sure! The big stuff I’m working on soon is making it easier to insert sponsor SWFs, support for displaying traditional tilemaps, and just some general improvements and streamlining (especially for controlling render order and special effects). The community is working on a bunch of different level editors that they’re enthusiastically sharing, and they’ve already developed and released some nice stopgaps for both tilemap display and better depth control, which is pretty rad.
How do you think the indie-game-community and the market will develop in the next few years?I got involved with Cave Story Wii as a direct result of developing and releasing Gravity Hook. Tyrone Rodriguez, the head guy over at Nicalis, thought it was cool, noticed I was a bit of a Cave Story fan, and asked if I wanted to work on scaling up the boss graphics. I was a little nervous about getting involved with what would undoubtedly be yet another unreleased and subpar attempt to put Cave Story on some console or other. After doubtlessly insulting Tyrone to his face multiple times, we somehow agreed that for like $5/hour I would redo all the level graphics, with Amaya-san having the final say on everything. It turns out Tyrone had been working with Amaya-san for over a year already to figure out the right console and the right feature set for this project, and Amaya-san himself had complete veto rights. The job paid poorly, and it was really, really boring. I went through a couple years worth of This American Life episodes while tracing those tiles. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked on anything I’m so proud of! Cave Story (for PC) is the game that opened my eyes to what one person could make, and sparked a permanent shift in my life. To get to be involved with the official commercial release, and to get to have a say in how the thing looked to people who were playing it for the first time… it was just awesome.
Now we are still curious to learn a little more about you. Where you live, what did do, how old, etc.The “indie” part will continue to mean less and less, and the opportunities for small teams with great ideas will get better and better. I hope.
So this is not the first time, that you are doing games and things. What role do they play in your life?Sure! I’m 27, and I live in Austin, Texas, USA with my amazing wife Bekah and my two idiot pug dogs. Right now I’m living off our windfall from an iPhone game (Wurdle) that I worked on last year with my rock climbing buddy Eric, and I spend most of my time either working on supporting that game, or (especially lately) prototyping and developing our next iPhone game, which should be announced in a few weeks. As for important career steps… I think getting a four-year degree was a good start, and opened some doors. After college I worked for a couple years as a software developer, at a place where I had some creative control over my projects and only had to put in 40 hours a week. That was a pretty big deal, as it left me some free time and didn’t crush my soul. Quitting that job to go solo was pretty exciting, but I was really bad at it for a few years. I would say the single most important step was when I finally learned enough from my failures as a freelancer to start doing it right. That was last summer, I think. That’s when the cool stuff started to happen! I made Gravity Hook, Paper Moon, and wurdle all in the same month, and a month later had picked up enough steady clients so that my wife could quit her job, too.
Well, yes. In that context. Do you have any games, book, movies or other peoples work, that you would recommend to people or that you really love? (We even accept famous quotes!)Good question! I’ve been an art geek for most of my life, but I’ve always been intoxicated by the mixed mediums, especially comic books, movies, and video games. When you start mixing art and writing and sequential imagery and then pile in interactivity…it’s just too much! How can you not be obsessed with this stuff?
Many thanks Adam. I guess I am not the only one, that is looking forward new inspiring stuff made by you and the Flixel-community.Oh boy, haha where do I start? Here’s some stuff that people might not have heard of, I guess. Seems silly for me to list stuff like “Pixar movies” when everybody already knows they’re completely awesome? Anyways, some good stuff I’ve digested recently that has been nice brain-fuel:
- The Scar, by China Mieville
- The Taking of Pelham 123 Soundtrack, by David Shore (1970)
- Tekkon Kinkreet, by Michael Arias
- The French Connection, by William Friedkin
Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, 2. Juli 2009
Weblinks
I’ve been blogging effectively every day for nearly five years, so it’s hard to avoid novelty - that’s kind of what we publish. The question is, is it the novelty that’s important, or do you see these as little steps toward something greater that hasn’t happened yet? I tend to favor the latter.
Here’s the question: can augmented reality - using computer vision tools to mix computer graphics with stuff in the real world - become a real medium and not just a gimmick?
If it works in a game, you begin to think there’s really something to an interactive design. I’m not certain yet about the upcoming PSP game from giant Sony. Georgia Tech researchers, on the other hand, are coming up with stuff I really want to play.
Oh, yeah - and it makes me crave some Skittles. (Product integration, anyone?)
About the game:
ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones, created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta). The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.
Skittles could be the computer interface of the future. See also a music sequencer made with Skittles. (The only problem, as your inner Cookie Monster might quickly point out, is when you eat the interface.)
It’s still just an experiment, but the interaction itself starts to really require the technique - and, in turn, it becomes something that actually gets you closer to the game.
For visualist artists and performers, there’s something really powerful and expressive here, too, which is the opportunity to remix “reality” itself (or at least what you can see through a live video feed) with computer-imagined graphics, all live.
It’s even more impressive to see this running on mobile devices. And we’re not far from this kind of performance on current mobiles, either.
You’ll find lots of other projects on the Augmented Environments Lab site, and plenty of other ideas. There are technical solutions, like building an augmented reality scenegraph for easier development. There are concepts for integration, like bringing augmented reality into the virtual reality world of Second Life. There are virtual reality pets and mixed reality games, too - and even a concept working with the MIT Media Lab’s Scratch that makes augmented reality serve teaching programming in a more tangible way for kids. (Somewhere, game developers are looking at it thinking it could be a great way for grown-ups to prototype games.)
AR Scratch: A Tangible Programming Environment for Children
Developers, there really are some great concepts there in terms of how to develop both programming concepts and mapping of imagery to the AR-tagged objects. Not only does this have educational potential, but it could help develop notions of how interactive programming in general could work, and how our closed digital boxes relate to the world around them. Figuring out just how that works is not a small problem - it’s the kind of problem you could spend a lifetime thinking about and developing, on a timescale we can easily miss in the blogosphere.
But I’ll close with a project called Joe Warpin, from Georgia Tech’s handheld augmented reality class, the inspiration for the zombie game. It reminds me of the days as a young kid when I spent hours roaming the universe inside a room in my house with Matchbox cars and toy planes. That brings up an important question that often gets left out: the question of imagination. On one hand, you could say that getting overly focused on augmented reality takes out the ingredient of imagination, by working too hard to substitute technology for the imagined virtual reality in a child’s mind.
I’d say just the opposite: I think imagination is what gives augmented reality real potential. If you can meet the user halfway - actually stimulate their imagination - and leave just enough to their head, I think AR could be not only successful, but addictive.
The Times of India is calling it "India's Gay Day." A ruling on Thursday overturned a colonial law nearly 150 years old that describes sex acts between two persons of the same gender in India's capital city as an "unnatural offense."
Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. Many people in India regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate. Rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.A clarification from an earlier iteration of this blog post: The ruling only applies to India's capital city of Delhi. Sex acts between two men or two women is, if I'm reading this right, still a crime in the rest of India.
India media hails gay sex ruling (BBC). See also: Mumbai gays' long fight for recognition (BBC). Below: image from WAtoday: "A eunuch kisses another member of the transgender, gay and lesbian communities as they celebrate the Indian court decision." (thanks, Antinous!)
Cross-stitch ninja's photostream (via Craft, thanks, Alice!) Previously:
No word on whether the Obamabot will allow release of the photos of the waterbotting on Pleasure Island, a no-go zone for civilians for several years now.
We're just sorting out our Christmas at Disney World plans -- our first WDW trip with the baby -- and I'm looking forward to this. There is something eerily cool and compelling about all those hyper-detailed robots nodding and twitching at you from out of the uncanny valley while Maya Angelou tells you about the War Between the States.
Barack Obama Joins Hall of Presidents at Disney's Magic Kingdom (Thanks, Patricio!) Previously:A remarkably lifelike Audio-Animatronics figure of President Barack Obama enters the spotlight in a revised and refreshed Hall of Presidents show when it reopens July 4 in Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort. The addition of the countrys 44th chief executive is just part of the most significant update to this classic attraction since its 1971 debut in the parks Liberty Square.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin helped develop the show with Disney Imagineers. In this video they talk about the Hall of Presidents: A Celebration of Libertys Leaders.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Record-Release-Party am Sonntag in Berlin
DJ T. aka Thomas Koch lädt am Sonntag zur Record-Release-Party in die Berliner Panorama-Bar: "The Inner Jukebox" wird ab 12:00 Mittags mit einem besonders cremigen Line-up begrüßt:
Abe Duque feat. Blake Baxter (live)
Thomas Schumacher
Clé & Terrible
und natürlich: DJ T.
Wir freuen uns schon jetzt wie Bolle darauf den Sommerhit "Let´s take it back" mit Baxter am Mikro live zu erleben:
Abe dekliniert das Alphabet des Oldschool-in-den-Arschtretens durch, über dem Acid-Bassline-808-Bassdrum-Getucker schwebt eine Kraftwerk-transparente Synthie-Rieselfläche und Baxter spricht:
Let´s take it back
like way back
like back in the day
i wanna go back
Was dann natürlich herzergreifend ist, aber auch albern und irgendwie gar nicht rückwärtsgewandt.
Some mobile carriers have started selling subsidized netbooks with integrated 3G radios. If you've already got a netbook and enjoy the form factor, but would rather not have to plug in a dongle, here's a quick run-through for integrating a Novatel EU850D 3G radio into a Dell Mini 9 that should give you an idea of what such a project entails.
How-to: 3G to Dell Mini 9. Not so easy way.. [via jkkmobile]
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Scottish sound designer, the Amazing Rolo, traveled to Maker Faire this year especially to see what sorts of cool musical technologies people were cooking up. He made a series of videos of makers demoing their wares. Of the three videos above, he writes:
First up is Elly Jessop, a Masters Student at the uber-cool MIT Media Lab, and her Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis (VAMP). Next is Barry Threw, from Keith McMillan Instruments, showing off the K-Bow (and accompanying software) for extending stringed instrument performance into the digital realm. And finally, the amazing Moldover and his totally bonkers Syncomasher.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
Switched On Synthesizer
Die Veteranen Abe Duque und Blake Baxter bekräftigen auf Duques Album "Don´t be so mean", dass früher alles besser war. Heute kämpft Abe gegen die Landplage einfaltsloser Tracks und mieser DJs mit Disziplin und beispielhaftem Verhalten.
aus Debug 133
The Inner Jukebox: Das zweite Album
aus Debug 134
Stefan Heidenreich über Wertigkeiten
aus Debug 132
Yesterday and Tomorrow
aus Debug 132
The Fire Piston Kit is a neat physics experiment based on the heat created when air is rapidly compressed. Bill Gurstelle, author of Backyard Ballistics and Barrage Garage, created this kit for us. If you were at Maker Faire you might have seen him demonstrating his kit in the Maker Shed. [Thanks Bill!]
More about the Fire Piston Kit
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Last year on July 4, we were walking down the beach in Santa Monica and we saw a pap stop his car in traffic, jump out, run up to the passenger window of a car and start shooting. It turned out Courtney Love and a friend were in the car, enjoying a drive.
We chased the pap back to his car and paced him in the snail-traffic with our cameras, snapping pictures of him as he crawled to the next traffic light.
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(Thanks, Tony!)Arnie Miller, a palentologist at the University of Cincinnati who was chairman of the convention, said he hoped the tour would introduce the scientists to "the lay of the land" and show them firsthand what's being put forth in a place that has elicited vehement criticism from the scientific community...
"And there was a feeling of unhappiness, too, about the extent to which mainstream scientists and evolutionists are demonized -- that if you don't accept the Answers in Genesis vision of the history of Earth and life, you're contributing to the ills of society and of the church."
Daryl Domning, professor of anatomy at Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several points during the tour. "This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," he said.
(Image: (AFP/File/Jeff Haynes) Previously:
Famous prostitute's gravestone deemed too 'slutty' (Thanks, Rosa!)
The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...Ungerer and Niehoff were friends for decades, and even shared a flat for a while in 1984. He published drawings of Niehoff and her colleagues in a book entitled "Guardian Angels of Hell" at the time...
Niehoff, who gained fame for advocating the rights of sex workers in the 70s and 80s, died at age 63 in February 2009.
Silence of the Chips (Flickr)
One of the most important action point is the launch of "a debate on the technical and legal aspects of the 'right to silence of the chips', which has been referred to under different names by different authors and expresses the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time."This is one of the main actions of the plan in order to allow the usage of the RFID while respecting privacy and the protection of personal data, two fundamental rights of the EU.
Silence of the Chips (CafePress)
(via Beyond the Beyond)
Limor has posted another installment of her exceedingly excellent sensor tutorials, this one on that most marvelous of switches, the tilt sensor. When you just have to know which end is up, you need to strap on one of these puppies. Here's how.
Sensor tutorials - Tilt sensors!
More:
Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR) tutorial
Ladyada's temp sensor tutorial
Adafruit's CdS tutorial
Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!
Bill writes in:
Last year I built a Kid Wash and my kids have loved playing in it. We brought it out again yesterday with the great weather we had over the weekend and my son (age 12) came up with the idea of earning money over the summer by building and selling them locally. It's an easy enough project that I figure he can handle it and it is popular enough with the neighborhood children that he could also have some success in selling it.
However, the new CPSIA regulations have me worried that such a project (however small) will never get off the ground or we'll just be setting ourselves up for legal problems down the road. How do makers who build and sell toys deal with such regulations? Obviously if he was trying to make and sell something hazardous I wouldn't allow it, but how do we encourage such entrepreneurship without exposing ourselves to liabilities.
There was a huge outcry over the CPSIA regulations when they were announced because of their lack of consideration of the costs they would impose on small manufacturers, especially handmakers of one-of-a-kind toys and clothes. The CPSC voted to impose a stay of one year for testing and certification requirements, which expires February 10, 2010. These folks clearly realized there needs to be more thought put into the wide-sweeping rules that would devastate many small businesses. So you still aren't allowed to sell toys with lead paint, small choking-sized parts, etc., but you don't have to have your KidWash tested by a third party for lead and phthalates before selling them to your neighbors. Not until next year, at least.
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Now, let's see if I can embed 
Now, let's see if I can embed
Matt Mets made a rotation-based MIDI controller using a motor, disc, webcam, and OpenCV. Source code included.
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As in any office, my co-workers and I experience several WTF-Situations during our working day. So we decided to implement a
simple system to count the WTF’s and use them as a metric for our working climate 
we use an “emergency stop”-Button which is connected to an arduino. This arduino sends the string “WTF” on the serial line
a little python scrip writes them to a file, another processing app count’s the lines in the file and offers the result
via [http,] which is read by a processing app for visualisation …
Arduino Part:
const int buttonPin = 2;
const int ledPin = 13;
int ledState = HIGH;
int buttonState;
int lastButtonState = LOW;
long lastDebounceTime = 0;
long debounceDelay = 200;
void setup() {
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println("Hello");
}
void loop() {
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
if ((buttonState == HIGH) && (lastButtonState == LOW) && (millis() - lastDebounceTime) > debounceDelay) {
Serial.println( "WTF" );
if (ledState == HIGH) {
ledState = LOW;
} else {
ledState = HIGH;
}
lastDebounceTime = millis();
}
digitalWrite(ledPin, ledState);
lastButtonState = buttonState;
}
Python server part1:
import serial
f = open("wtf/current", "aw");
ser = serial.Serial( '/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600, timeout = None )
line = ser.readline()
while line:
if line[0:3] == "WTF" :
f.write( line )
f.flush()
line = ser.readline()
ser.close()
Python server part2:
from Bas [HTTPServer] import [HTTPServer,] Bas [HTTPRequestHandler]
class WtfHandler(Bas [HTTPRequestHandler):] def do_GET(self):
f = open('wtf/current')
count = 0;
l = f.readline()
while l:
count = count + 1
l = f.readline()
self.send_response(200)
self.send_header("Content-type", "text/plain")
self.end_headers()
self.wfile.write("%d" %count)
f.close()
return
if __name__ == "__main__":
try:
server = [HTTPServer(('',8888),] WtfHandler)
server.serve_forever()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
server.socket.close()
Processing Part:
void setup() {
size(500, 100);
smooth();
textFont( loadFont( "Verdana-Bold-48.vlw"));
noLoop();
start( 10 * 1000 );
}
void draw() {
background(0);
fill(255);
String[] lines = loadStrings("http://armleuchter:8888");
text( "WTF's so far: " + lines[0], 30, 70 );
}
void start( final int mil ) { //<- mil has to be final to be accessible in run()
new Thread() {
public void run() {
while( true ) {
delay( mil );
redraw();
}
}
}.start();
}
Alden Hart, who wrote the LED Light Bricks project for MAKE, Volume 18, has put together a lovely little kit to make building the project much easier. And we're now offering them in the Maker Shed! The kit includes a printed circuit board, 20 bright LEDs, in red, green, blue, and yellow, a programmed PIC16F916 (which you can reprogram, if you like), a tilt switch, power supply, and everything else you need to complete the project (except the molding and casting components). The kit sells for $27.
Here's a link to the Digital Edition of the article in MAKE, Volume 18.
Here's a link to the Web Extras page with the full mold-making and casting article.
Here's a link to the Make: Online how-to on different ways you can construct molds.
In the Maker Shed:
LED Light Brick Electronics Kit
Our Price: $27.00
All the components you need to make the LED Light Brick circuit featured in MAKE, Volume 18. When assembled, the circuit board is ready to cast to make your finished glowing nightlight.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
For the past fifteen years, I have been making pilgrimages to the deserts and mountains of China's western borders, focusing on Tibetan and Uyghur communities. These remote frontier regions are laced with contested geographies where religious and cultural legacies confront powerful economic and political transformations.20x200 just released a collection of four 11x14 prints from his "Travels Without Maps" project. You can buy them as a set, or individually. Truly beautiful work. (thanks, Sara Distin)In these far away places, I look for way stations between cultures where one can see the past and future simultaneously. Seeing these changes over such a short time is a perspective that is at once disorienting and tragic. I try to make images that show these things, or at least some of the emotional truths behind them, because I know each time I return everything will be almost unrecognizable.
Previously:
This is a moment that would have made 15 year old me very proud of present-day me: I've just received a DIY fireworks kit in the mail! I love the "Don't Send This Via Airplane" sticker.
My friend Heathervescent hipped me to this introductory Turbo Pyro kit from Skylighter. The kit supplies what you'll need to make your own fireworks, including a 206 page eBook that guides you through making ten different fireworks: from tube sparklers to bottle rockets to aerial shells to something called a "Flying Fish Fuse Mine". I've skimmed through the eBook and it looks thorough and professionally done. It has a number of embedded videos in it, which should be pretty helpful.
I've only had moments to scan the contents of the boxes, but they include a lot of paper tubes, charcoal, potassium chlorate, clay, potassium nitrate, sulfer, and other compounds (this endeavor involves making your own gunpowder), a few different kinds of ignition fuses, a bunch of mysterious custom tools for packing the fireworks, a digital scale, mortar casings, a large mortar tube, and more. You have to supply some sieeves, trays, measuring spoons, an electric coffee mill, tape, glue, safety gear, and a few hand tools.
I'm going to try the simplest projects first, hopefully in time for the 4th of July. Then, if all goes well (and I have the same number of fingers as I'm typing with right now), I'll put together some of the big flying stuff and head out to the desert to fire them off.
You can sign up here to be notified when the next batch of kits is available:TurboPyro
Their blog is pretty cool too, I had no idea people had taken things to this level!
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Now this is a train layout, 1,800 sqaure feet of it. It's the pride and joy of the Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society, Walnut Creek, CA, who've been at it since 1975. I like how the piece on Wired.com opens:
Before SimCity -- even before Dungeons and Dragons -- back when "computer" was a job title, people still found ways to vaporize countless hours of free time designing and maintaining private universes. In the analog world, such parallel realities were built with tweezers, glue and a spouse's permission to cover the basement with papier-mâché massifs and plywood plains.
And this, on the system that runs the layout:
The society's control systems are a steampunk fantasy: a roomful of vintage 1930s magnetic relays once used to route phone calls, clacking like mechanical dominoes with every move the amateur engineers make. A full complement of 30 members can run 10 individual trains simultaneously on the layout, though only a dozen or so are required for basic operation.
Giant Model Railroad Is an Analog SimCity [via Boing Boing]
More:
Rod Stewart in Model Railroader Magazine
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ever the happy prankster, Paul Krassner "met" with Larry King for an interview.
This video was made to promote Paul's new book: Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture & Comedy in America Today.
A mock interview between Paul Krassner and Larry King by Andy Thomas. (Thanks, Doug Rushkoff!)