If there are kids in your future, so is one of those mugs with a picture of your children on it. But wouldn’t it be great if that image could be updated as they grow up? That’s exactly what the Muki mug from Paulig promises, thanks to an e-Ink display powered by your piping hot coffee. Read more…
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This Mug’s Customizable e-Ink Display Is Powered By Hot Coffee
schwit1 (797399) writes with this excerpt from the Washington Examiner: “A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military. The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Navy Database Tracks Civilians’ Parking Tickets, Fender-Benders
If you ever want to change the style of all the headings or captions in a document, bold all the italicized text, or otherwise fine-tune the formatting of your document in one swoop, Microsoft Word has a setting for that. Read more…
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Select All Text with the Same Formatting in Word (and Other Word Tips)
krakman writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: “Bitcoin plunged more than 8 percent [Friday] after a Tokyo-based exchange halted withdrawals of the digital currency, citing technical malfunction. Mt. Gox, claimed in a blog post it needed to ‘temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests to obtain a clear technical view of the currency processes.’ It promised an ‘update’ — not a reopening — on Monday, Feb. 10, Japan time. This is day after Russia’s Prosecutor General concluded Bitcoin and other digital currencies are illegal under current law.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bitcoin Plunges After Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Trades
Costco is one of the best places to buy quality ingredients in bulk and save money on food. With just one trip and $150, you can pick up enough to make nearly three weeks’ worth of dinners (4 servings each)—and have lots of leftovers. Read more…
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Make 20 Meals to Feed a Family of Four for $150 and One Trip to Costco
Kembrew writes, “I saw your post in Boing Boing today about Pee-Wee, and coincidentally, I just published a piece on Pee-wee’s Christmas Special . I think it’s the first time Paul Reubens has been interviewed about the upcoming remastered Pee-wee’s Playhouse DVDs that will come out next year.” I previously invoked the term “eye-popping” to describe Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but starting next year, viewers will run the risk of having their eyeballs permanently dislodged from their sockets. “The Christmas Special is going to come out, along with the entire Playhouse series, on Blu-ray,” Reubens tells me. “It’s being remastered now.” “The show was never seen on film,” he says. “The show was shot on film and transferred to tape and edited on tape, and all the effects were done on tape. Then the entire show was put on another tape to broadcast, so there are three or four generations of quality that are lost on every episode. So we went back to the original film elements, and the company I’m working with has recreated every edit in every single show, and recreated all the effects from all the original elements—which we were lucky to have kept.” “It looks unbelievable. It’s so extreme, people are going to freak out when they see it,” Reubens adds. “The detail and clarity and color is amazing.” This means that Gary Panter’s set design, the stop motion animation and other details will come alive in psychedelic high definition. It’s the kids show equivalent of being upgraded from cough syrup to mescaline. Pee-wee’s (remastered) Christmas Adventure: An interview with Paul Reubens [Kembrew McLeod/Little Village]
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Pee-Wee Herman talks about the remastered Christmas Special and Playhouse episodes
An anonymous reader writes “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have announced that measles cases in the U.S. spiked this year, rising to three times their recent average rate. It’s partly due to a greater number of people traveling to the U.S. when they’re infectious, but also because a frustrating number of people are either failing to have their children vaccinated, or are failing to do so in a timely manner. Dr. Thomas Friedman said, ‘Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.’ Phil Plait adds, ‘In all three of these outbreaks, someone who had not been vaccinated traveled overseas and brought the disease back with them, which then spread due to low vaccination rates in their communities. It’s unclear how much religious beliefs themselves were behind the outbreaks in Brooklyn and North Carolina; it may have been due to widespread secular anti-vax beliefs in those tight-knit groups. But either way, a large proportion of the people in those areas were unvaccinated.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Michael sez, “Apparently medieval Russian schoolroooms used birch bark for things like writing practice. Erik Kwakkel, medieval book historian at Leiden University, Netherlands, has some charming photos of stick-figure illustrations on bark by kids who, like kids everywhere, got a bit bored with the lesson and started doodling in the margins. There are links to more images (and an interesting scholarly article) at the bottom of the post .” The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process. Medieval kids’ doodles on birch bark [Erik Kwakkel] ( Thanks, Michael ! )
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Medieval kids’ birch-bark doodles
Off the coast of Japan, an exploding volcano has formed a new island about 650 meters in diameter. You can see it spewing and spouting off black volcanic ash all around as it fills itself out. Pretty cool. Read more…
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Watch a volcano birth an entire new island
Paranoid much, China? Cause it sure as hell looks like it when you have more than sixty security cameras strapped onto a single street light. This photograph, taken at an intersection in Shanghai by NetEase , hilariously captures the personal privacy be damned, big brother monster attitude that everyone imagines China to have. It’s perfect, really. Read more…
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China installed more than 60 security cameras on one street light