My 12-year-old daughter recently picked up my long-neglected ukulele and has gotten pretty good at it in a short amount of time. I lost my ukulele pitch pipe, so she's been using an online tone generator to tune it, which is not convenient. So I got her a Snark SN-5 Tuner for $8 on Amazon. There's no microphone - it clips to the headstock to pick up vibrations. This is a good thing because you can tune the instrument in a noisy environment. When you pluck a string, it registers the note without a noticeable delay. I'm sorry I didn't get this thing sooner!

For his latest piece at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford spoke to filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz about the Horn & Hardart chain of cafeterias and automats. Despite being limited to Philadelphia and New York (a Boston branch was short-lived), Horn & Hardart was the largest food-service business in America from the 1930s through the 1950s. As it turns out, though, its famous automats were not especially automated, relying on hundreds scurrying cooks and kitchen staffers to fill entire walls of glassed-in compartments with plates of scrapple, deviled crab on toast, and nickel slices of apple pie.

The latest installment of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast (MP3) interviews science fiction author William Shunn, author of the The Accidental Terrorist, a memoir that explains the bizarre circumstances in which Shunn, as a teenaged Mormon missionary stationed in Calgary, Alberta, was arrested and deported for terrorism. (more…)

The creator offers a lot of sound advice on owning and caring for geckos, too. Images and build-log [Overlordofllama]

The Gallaher How to Do Its were a set of British 100 cigarette cards, each depicting and describing a 19th (?) century life-hack (the collection is undated). (more…)

The Anne Frank Foundation -- a Swiss nonprofit that supports children's charities and provides a stipend to gentiles who hid Jews during WWII -- has claimed that Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, is the legal co-author of her diaries, a move that will have the effect of extending copyright on the diaries to at least 2030. (more…)

As many as 153 people were killed in a series of terror attacks across Paris Friday night, with Middle-East terror group ISIS claiming responsibility in the aftermath. Authorities described the carnage as the worst acts of violence to hit France since World War II.The seemingly-coordinated shootings and explosions took place at at least six locations, including a café and a stadium where a soccer game was interrupted by an apparent suicide bombing, sending the crowd pouring onto the pitch. Eyewitnesses claim that the assailants carried Kalashnikov rifles.Some 118 people were reported killed at the Bataclan theater, where hostages were taken and systematically executed before police stormed the building and killed at least three gunmen.Californian rock band Eagles of Death Metal were performing a concert at the venue.Reports of gunfire, explosions, and ongoing killings within the theater forced a police assault on the building at about 6:30 p.m. EST, according to Agence France-Presse.https://twitter.com/AFP/status/665321462442528768Local news channel BFMTV reported that the police operation was concluded at about 7 p.m.Julian Pearce, speaking to CNN, says he escaped the building earlier in the evening and described it as a "bloodbath."There were further reports of gunfire at a food market near the center of town. 42 were reportedly killed there, at the Petit Cambodge restaurant in the 11th district, and in the stadium bombing.A state of emergency was declared across the nation and 1,500 extra soldiers deployed to the capital in the aftermath of the attacks. Residents were told to stay indoors.French President Francois Hollande said that his thoughts were with the victims and their families. He also closed the French borders, an unprecedented measure in modern Europe. On twitter, he said that France would defeat the terrorists: "Faced with dread, our nation knows to defend itself, knows to mobilize its forces and, once again, will defeat the terrorists."https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/665308718335070212U.S. President Obama said that the attacks were an outrageous act of terrorism and that the U.S. would do all it could to help France."This is not just an attack on Paris or the people of France, but on the values that we all share," Obama said. "France is our oldest ally. The French have stood at our shoulder time and time again in the struggle against extremism, and Paris itself stands for the values of human progress. … the values of liberté, egalité, fraternité."Members of the band performing at the theater is reportedly safe, but they later indicated otherwise:ABC News quotes Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman as saying it is too early to draw conclusions about who is responsible. The BBC reports that attacks took place at the Petit Cambodge restaurant in the 11th district, near the Bataclan arts centre, and near the Stade de France.

The festival of lights, indeed. (Thanks, Jordan Kurland!)

It started as a maker project, became a viral shoop, then a successful kickstarter, and now there's a product: the $75 keyboard waffle-iron.

In a characteristically thought-provoking longread on Ribbonfarm (previously) Haley Thurston concludes her Better Art Vocabulary series by arguing that art is a technology, that it moves through technical innovation, and that innovation can be systematized and studied and improved. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRDzl3oqeUThe company continues its amazing tradition of surprising and delightful holiday subscriptions with a $15, eight-part Hannukah mystery gift offering. I just ordered mine (I'm not missing out this year!) and answered many of the nosy questions at the end.

The mother a 13-year-old girl has been unable to get Facebook to remove a photo that her daughter and a 12-year-old friend were tricked into having taken, which is being used to promote the violent neo-fascist group Britain First. (more…)

Danish artist Steffen Dam creates exquisite, minimalist "cabinets of curiosity" fashioned from glass and containing specimens of his own creation."My aim is to describe the world as I see it," Dam says. "One could also say to describe what’s not tangible and understandable with our everyday senses. My cylinders contain nothing that exists in the ocean, my specimens are plausible but not from this world, my plants are only to be found in my compost heap, and my flowers are still unnamed."See more at his site: Steffen Dam (via Instagram/saatchi_gallery)

https://youtu.be/YkJS0IzZREkAfter many TV networks blurred out parts of Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 painting of a nude woman (Nu Couché) that sold for $170.4 million at Christie's New York on Monday, Stephen Colbert told viewers what you can and can't look at on network TV.[caption id="attachment_434311" align="alignnone" width="950"] CNBC blurred parts of Modigliani's masterpiece, "Nu Couche."[/caption]

Some people have jobs at places where reading Reddit on the clock is frowned upon. This Reddit skin, which looks like Microsoft Outlook, is for them.

Why did the Star Wars movies come out in the sequence 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3?Because in charge of sequence, Yoda was.(via r/jokes)

https://youtu.be/TdrAF3xk4pIIn South Korea, where the rate of suicide is on the rise, a former funeral director has established a "death experience" therapy center to help people understand the benefits of not killing yourself.From Oddity Central:

As I have often noted, medical devices have terrifyingly poor security models, even when compared to the rest of the nascent Internet of Things, where security is, at best, an afterthought (at worst, it's the enemy!). (more…)

Remember the glory days of playing Super Nintendo on that classic gray controller with its signature purple push buttons? Yeah, we do too.8Bitdo is bringing the 8-bit gaming vibe back with the SNES30, a 1:1 original design that supports both Bluetooth and USB connections. Connect with your favorite console or computer to play any modern or old-school game with arguably the greatest controller of all time.

Kathryn Cramer writes, "Jesse Friedman, age 14, has developed some code for getting Wolfram Language to tell a few jokes.Although most of WL's jokes are not funny, the generative language tools are an interesting toy." (more…)

Rumanian Punishment Gifts by Etelka Penquelik is not a real book, but don't you wish it were? It's from designer Sean Tejaratchi's fantastic LiarTownUSA site.

When I was a mechanical engineer in the late 1980s I used Microsoft QuickBASIC to write and create simple programs for work. I loved it. It was a compiled BASIC, too, so it was speedy. I used it to recreate a lot of the programs from Rudy Rucker's Chaos software from Autodesk. I got pretty good at writing programs in BASIC, just as I got pretty good at nodding my head when my smarter programmer friends would tell me that BASIC was not a real programming language.I never learned any other languages, but recently I've started using Python and it is easy and fun. One thing I did with Python was write a nontransitive dice simulator to prove to myself that these confounding dice really worked as described.I just got my hands on a new book called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by Al Sweigart, and it looks like it is exactly what I need: a book for beginners and with lots of ideas for programs that are actually useful. Examples:

See sample pages from this book at Wink.The Mindfulness Coloring Book came out last January by London-based illustrator Emma Farrarons, and it immediately sold out and became a national bestseller. I think any book with the word “anti-stress” in the subtitle has an excellent shot at success, but Farrarons’ coloring book for adults is also appealing for its pleasing, just-simple-enough modern designs as well as its smaller size, which makes it less daunting than a lot of the other popular adult coloring books out there. Last month Ferrarons came out with a second volume to her book – same size, seem feel, different designs. I’ve spent a couple of family nights coloring while my daughter crafted and my husband read, and I have to say, Farraron is right about the anti-stress angle. Plus it’s been a lot of fun.The Mindfulness Coloring Book: Anti-Stress Art Therapy for Busy People Volume 2The Mindfulness Coloring Book: Anti-Stress Art Therapy for Busy People

Tantalum is a 2D ray tracer that runs in the browser. Just click anywhere in the scene and watch those rays go a-scatterin' through the simulated optics.You can reconfigure the contents of the scene, the light emission spectrum, and much else besides. The Secret Life of Photons, by creator Benedikt Bitterli, explains everything.r/internetisbeautiful has some neat examples.

When you think about it, the design of playing cards is ridiculously complicated and to create a truly unique deck could take many months. It’s one thing to take an existing template and alter it a bit and it’s another thing all together to rework each element from scratch.Tyler Deeb of MISC. GOODS CO. has designed a deck of cards from the ground up and it has a whole lot to say. Every court card, every symbol and boarder has gotten as much attention as any deck I’ve ever seen. It’s clear that this was a labor of love and will act as his calling card for years to come.To me, this deck is just chock full of story and I wonder if anyone else is seeing what I’m seeing.There's so much to figure out when laying out a deck of cards and it all starts with the box that contains it. In this case, if you look closely, you’ll find some very thoughtful touches.Firstly, besides the beautiful silver foil printing, there is an embossing of the message “Do nothing out of selfish ambition”. It’s a bible verse from Philippians 2:3-8 and the thing is, while this deck is one of the most ambitious ones I’ve ever seen, it certainly isn’t selfish. It’s a gift to us.While I’m not going to go into every little detail of what I’m reading into here, I will share a playful contradiction that pops up when you look closely.This contradiction sets the stage for what’s to come. On the side of the box, there’s a message that reads, “Here to stay” while the messaging on the front reads, “Here today / Gone today”.That contrary concept mirrors our lives doesn’t it? We're born into this world and as children we feel invincible. We are “here to stay". But over time, that changes as we constantly look over our shoulders because death’s a comin’ and though we might be “here today“- we could very well be – well, you get the concept. While this and the rest of the messaging may seem grim, it’s actually a celebration of life.You don’t know what you have until it’s gone – unless someone is there to remind you that you have it.Each set of court cards subtly and beautifully pushes an ongoing message of the harsh reality of life. The Suicide suit, Diamonds, pushes the “Here today, gone today” concept nicely with the queen bearing flowers to her husband’s funeral and the jack sporting a black bird that represents death. Very tidy.Things get a bit more complicated with the other suits.The Hearts tell a supporting story. “Love is watching someone & watching someone die is hard”. Pretty miserable but true and we can all relate to it. The funny thing is that the queen of hearts is sporting what seems to be a voodoo doll and a wicked scowl.I’d say she’s the reason the King of Diamonds committed suicide in the first place.The clubs family, I think, delivers a message that’s more of a preparation for the inevitable. “You’re going to die & all that you own will one day vanish. Hard facts. Deal with it.”But let us analyze how the clubs family deals with that message:The Jack comfortably hangs out by kegs of lager. He's 3 sheets to the wind and drinks his sorrows away while sporting a royal 5 o’clock shadow.The queen, clearly smoking a pipe full of a mind altering drugs (just look at her eyes), will surely stab anyone who comes near her to take it away or discuss what’s on her mind. From the look of her tattoo, she's spent far too much time with sailors and probably has a potty mouth.The King, unaffected, literally turns a blind eye to his family and the truth.It seems that this family doesn’t deal with their message at all and I find that pretty interesting.And that leaves us with the lesson from the Spades family. They are literally battling to stay alive and though they are - they are just barely. They’ve had a good run but there’s no happiness in their eyes because the walls have been breached and their defenses have expired.The ace reads, “Free for now”, but for how long?The Jack has been pierced by an arrow and can no longer hold back what life has brought to him. He weeps and waits with disheveled collar for his last breath.The queen looks up to heaven as if to ask for more time not noticing what is clearly a vial of poison coming from her right. Her minutes are numbered.The King, hardened and scarred, bravely awaits his last stand.They are truly all free but the answer to how long is brutally clear.It’s just a deck of cards right?Every part of the design beautifully tells part of the story including the number cards. But let's ignore the interesting font selection for the numbers and the fact that the placement of the pips are laid out in a pleasing way. I think there's more here than first meets the eye.You'll notice that there are notches printed on each numbered card that redundantly represents them. To me, these notches are like ones that a prisoner would make in a cell to counts the days he’s survived. Each notch on these cards represents our days scratched onto the wall of life. I just love the coincidence that when you add up the numeric values of a deck of cards you get 365 - one notch for each day in a year.If that is difficult to imagine, think of it this way:Consider the Ace as a 1, Jack as 11, Queen as 12, and King as 13. If you add up all fifty-two cards in the deck you’ll get 364. Add one for the Joker and you have 365 (decks of cards had only one Joker until the 1940's).Look, I know that I’m reaching a bit but I still like the idea.In the end, even if I’m wrong about everything, I don't really care. This is one beautiful deck of cards. For me, design is a personal thing and story, no matter what it is, lives everywhere.My hat's off to you Tyler Deeb and I look forward to whatever you design next.For now, take a moment and check out his current catalogue of well designed products at the MISC. GOODS CO.

Amnesty International's No End in Sight: Torture and Forced Confessions in China interviews 37 Chinese lawyers and analyzes 590 court decisions in the process of documenting the routine torture of human rights lawyers in China. (more…)

We won't be colonizing this one first! Exoplanet HD189733b, previously determined to contain water in its atmosphere, is blasted by 2 kilometers-per-second winds, say researchers at the University of Warwick.Twenty times faster than the highest wind speeds recorded on Earth, the 5,400 MPH gales are caused by the distant world's proximity to its star. Though sightly larger than Jupiter, it orbits 180 times closer, whirling around HD189733 at a distance of 2.8 million miles.In our solar system, even baking-hot Mercury has 36 million miles between it and the Sun.Temperatures on HD189733b are thought to exceed 1,800 °C, but the presence of water increases hopes that it will be found on more Earthlike worlds.

Even if it were a bleak ironic joke, the perfect mix of contempt and need in his eyes would make it too grotesque to be funny. But this was an actual ad running for Bloomingdales, and it has apologized for it.https://twitter.com/Laradp/status/664476122118123520/photo/1

Shut up and take my money, Lumio. Just shut right up and take it. Jesus!(more…)

A gorgeous Northern Lights video by Markus Kiili from Ylläs, Lapland, Finland in September, 2015.(more…)

A clever fellow explains.

https://youtu.be/u6zwnmlzZSQHuffington Post posted this video that was filmed on the University of Missouri campus on October 10. It shows a group of peaceful black protestors being hassled and assaulted by white people, while the university president Tim Wolfe watched without saying a word.

The holidays are nigh, and with them, the annual pilgrimages made by millions back to their hometowns. For some, this is an opportunity to bask in the warm glow that radiates from the memories of their youth; for others, it's a reminder of the lives they were happy to leave behind. Homesickened is a game about going back home that transforms the former into the latter, and reveals the rotting wood that often lies beneath the veneer of nostalgia: the realization that things were never actually as good as we remembered.The game (which displays a fictional copyright date of 1986) opens with the sound of an old computer booting up, and the only audio you hear throughout is the distinctive whirr intimately familiar to anyone who used a PC in the 1980s. Maybe it will even conjure a picture of it in your mind: the desk it used to sit on, the chair where you huddled. It's a detail that hints at the strange sensory wormholes that can be opened to different times in our lives by a scent, a sound, an old knickknack unearthed from a drawer.You begin by walking down a path towards a small town—your town—all of it rendered in the blocky purple and cyan of CGA graphics. In case you'd forgotten, those graphics were pretty janky, and often so were the controls that navigated you around their four-color worlds. Moving around in the game is not what I would call "comfortable," and neither are the conversations you have with former friends around town. One actually claims not to recognize you because you've changed so little, which is a strange but effective burn in a game that looks at the past through such skeptical eyes.While there's not a lot to do in the game, Homesickened is still refreshing, if only because it doesn't gloss over the awkwardness of the era it simulates. There's a pretty substantial market for nostalgia in the world of video games these days, as the children of the '80s march into their 30s and gaze back at the virtual pastimes of their youth with a rosy and sometimes distorted idealism. I don't know how many '80s babies have actually gone back as adults to play the computer games that they used to fire up on their old Apple IIs, but it can be jarring and dissonant as it is in Homesickened.Much like returning to your hometown after years away—or breaking open the amber any cherished memory—it's easy to discover that things don't look the same through the lens of the present, and that looking forward is ultimately far more likely to satisfy than looking back.Developed by Snapman, Homesickened is downloadable for free on Linux, Mac and PC.

From Herb Lester Associates, clever hotel notepads from fictional movie and television hotels! For £12.00, you get six pads:

Food delivery startup DoorDash is being sued by one of the restaurants it buys food from, In-N-Out Burger.(more…)

On the Web, reputation is a critical currency. But reputation is tricky. The way it's measured changes from platform to platform, network to network. And the way we evaluate the reputation of people, products, companies, information, and even the reputation systems, is affected by our own biases. Big time. Gloria Origgi literally wrote the book on reputation, titled La Reputation. A researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Origgi is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, novelist, and journalist. Over at my friend John Brockman's essential site EDGE, Origgi tackles the big question of "What is reputation?" From her interview:

Christian ministry Answers In Genesis report that their massive Noah's Ark attraction will open next July in Williamstown, Kentucky. This is the same organization behind the infamous Creation Museum where cavemen frolic with dinosaurs. The 510-foot-long, $90 million wooden Ark will be the centerpiece of a Christian theme park. The state of Kentucky had originally given Answers In Genesis an $18 million tax break on the project but changed their mind "over concerns of 'religious indoctrination,'" according to the Associated Press. Answers In Genesis has filed a federal lawsuit to try to get the tax incentive reinstated. I just hope the ark has room for the dragons and unicorns.(Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Rocky's 1984 defeat of Ivan Drago was a singular moment in professional boxing that had massive cultural and political implications. "If I can change, and you can change, everyone can change!"(College Humor)

https://youtu.be/2p_8gx-XHJo"Rocket" is not one of the 1,000 most common words in the English language, so it's called an "up goer" in the excellent xkcd video that explains space travel in simple terms. It's adapted from xkcd creator Randall Munroe's book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words."

Charlie Bucket, Mike Teavee, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and an Oompa Loompa got together to chat about being in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They haven't aged a day!The notable person missing from the group, is the delightful Gene Wilder. Here's an interview with him from 2013:https://youtu.be/ezfVc5MGmIUI read his Gene Wilder's wonderful autobiography, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, a few years ago and highly recommend it, especially the audiobook, which he reads with his distinctive voice.

One Flew Over the Cuckooo's Nest by Ken Kesey took place in Salem, Oregon. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was based in Chicago. The Shining by Stephen King took place in Estes, Colorado. These novels, and 39 others, are on this Great American Novel Map ($30) published by Hog Island Press.

Three screeners working for Covenant Aviation Security -- the TSA contractor that provides government-funded genital massages at SFO -- have been arrested for alleged participation in a scheme to smuggle "real and simulated cocaine" onto planes. (more…)

https://youtu.be/1S3yMzEee18Above: a longer video that shows Professor Click's attempts to block and eject University of Missouri student Mark Schierbecker after she called for "muscle."Professor Melissa Click says she can't recall pushing University of Missouri student Mark Schierbecker, who recorded her calling for "muscle" to remove him from a campus protest. But Schierbecker says she did push him and he has filed a complaint with the with campus police, reports USA Today.

NZ Prime Minister John Key is a racist blowhard who has smeared the opposition parties of "backing the rapists" for their support of allowing NZ citizens with minor criminal convictions (not sexual assault, incidentally) to return to the country from Australia, where they have been imprisoned. (more…)

Amazon has a good deal on a TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) therapy electronic pulse massager. It's just $16 when you use code C4MMPX22 at checkout.Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation is an unproven way to reduce body pain, though many people swear by it. TENS devices are small battery powered units that have two electrodes that you stick onto your skin. According to WebMD,

Last May, Jackie Burns, the deputy leader of the Labour Council in South Lanarkshire in Scotland, voted to close all public toilets as part of the Scottish government's £22 million cost-cutting programme; early last Saturday morning, police issued him a £40 ticket for pissing in public. (via Reddit)

The Metropolitan opera only just stopped using blackface performers. Yes! White dudes were blacking up to play Othello until 2015 and still things needed to be explained to them.In Shakespeare's time, though—before the Atlantic slave trade, before imperialism, before Jim Crow, before civil rights, before inconsiderate cosplay—blackness was different. Why, then, was Othello black?

Your account has been disabled for pretending to be someone else.Teachers don't go into education to get rich. It's a great job, the rewards are awesome and although they're not financial, they are of value. They are socially valuable. It's why teachers are one of the "professional" people allowed to verify your passport photograph, to qualify that it really is a picture of you. Society recognises that they're more likely to value the long rigorous process of acquiring that trust above jeopardising it to earn a quick kick-back. We even trust them with our children.And then you get open teachers, who make their classes available online for free, for any learner regardless of their ability to pay or personal circumstance. Open teachers naturally earn this trust, this social capital, very publicly and because they're often teaching at scale they potentially earn this social capital at scale too. It means they and people like them are great people to impersonate in order to steal, from the people who trust them (all of us).

See more photos at Wink Fun.Hive Pocket is a strategy and tile-laying game for two players. It's the more portable version of the original game, Hive, with a couple of expansion pieces and a cloth bag for transport. The base game has 11 pieces, with a queen and several other pieces that move differently around the board. The grasshopper jumps over straight lines of pieces, the ant can move anywhere on the outside of the board, the spider can move 3 spaces at a time around the outside and so on. You'll be attempting to surround the opposing queen bee to win the game. There's 2 expansion pieces that are optional to the base game.Hive falls into a category of easy to learn, and difficult to master. The game typically doesn't take the full 20 minutes, as there's an emphasis on turn economy, or getting the most out of your moves so that you're not one move behind the other player, but frequently it turns into not being able to stop someone from winning. I've had games run way longer when someone devises a new strategy that they want to try out. I have the pocket edition because it's easy enough to throw in something to bring along. The tiles are hearty and the bag is showing no signs of wear. Not having a board also makes it so that you can play while waiting for food, in an extremely small area. – James OrrHive Pocket – A strategy tile-laying game that's easy to learn, difficult to masterHive Pocket

U Penn political scientist Marie Gottschalk has a new book out, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, in which she expands on her prodigious work on the root causes of America's astounding rate of incarceration. (more…)