At SXSW (where my two of the games my wife commissioned just won Best Game and Best Edugame!), the trade-floor booth for hosting company The Planet is holding competitions to speed-assemble rack-mounted servers. It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons.

How Fast Can You Build A Server? (via Hack the Planet)

CMU's Chloe Fan hacked an Arduino controlled 8x8 pixelboard to play a wicked side-scrolling game of Super Mario. What a fun and creative use of the board! Someone needs to start an Arduino summer-camp; I went to Logo camp when I was 11 or 12 and it was life-changing. I expect there's a kid or two out there waiting to have their minds blown with Arduino. (If you know of such a summer camp, post to the comments; if you're looking for such a summer camp, check the comments!).

Mario Goes Open-Source with Arduino (via /.)

A lovely pie for Pi Day (3/14), by Boing Boing reader Genise Schnitman. I wish I could taste a bite.

Has it been two weeks already? This has been fantastic.

Those of you who read and comment on this website may suspect that the people who run it are the coolest people on the planet; turns out your suspicions are absolutely correct. This has been a wonderful place to blab on about all sorts of issues and I hope I get the opportunity to contribute again. Thanks in particular to Mark for helping me not get Boing Boing sued, and Xeni for turning me into a YouTube-embedding ninja.

In the unlikely event that you're still interested in anything I have to say after these two weeks, you can find me on twitter, my blog, and my website. You can also find me at my new job, which I'll be able to reveal in a week or so.

"Tulane" wasn't Chuck Berry's last great song -- that would be "Oh What a Thrill," from Rockit -- but it's awfully close. Recorded for Back Home, the 1970 album he recorded for his return to the Chess label after a few years at Mercury that we fans are still trying to forget, "Tulane" both sounds like classic Chuck (you have heard this guitar intro before) and completely up-to-date (it's about a head shop raid). On the album, Berry follows it with "Have Mercy Judge," one of his sharpest blues performances, the tale of what happened when Tulane got away from the cops but the singer didn't.

Here's a good reason to stay in Austin on Monday night.

In 2001, Jon Lebkowsky and Cory threw the first annual Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) party during SXSW Interactive, hosted by EFF-Austin. This party became annual tradition, and morphed over the last four years into Plutopia, a multifaceted extravaganza of music, performances, art, and talks, this year based on "The Science of Music." The event is Monday night, March 15, at the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin.

Plutopia 2010 is an amazing convergence of technology, DIY, music, art, and academics. In addition to standard party fare, performance and the arts will play a major role alongside exhibits and talks in presenting the ideas in a way that will make this yet another memorable, stimulating, and fun SXSW after event.

Way beyond the run-of-the-mill "booze and schmooze" after-party mixer, Plutopia is an ever-evolving multimedia experiment of Austin-tatious proportions dedicated to a playful, yet masterful cross-pollination across verticals to bring you an immersive interactive experience event.

This year's Plutopian theme explores the role of technology, sound and digital media in changing the landscape and narrative of music in the information age.

The science refers to everything from immersive listening and the expanding of audio boundaries and experimentation, to new forms of instrumentation, sampling and remixing and emerging creative processes; and from integrated multisensory systems and interfaces with intelligent networks, to the transformations of aesthetics and the changing rhythm of nature.

Monday, March 15, 2010
7pm - midnight
Mexican American Cultural Center
600 River St. Austin, TX
FREE to SXSW Interactive and Platinum Badge Holders; $15 General Public

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Bruce Sterling
Xiao He
DJ Spooky
Black Pig Liberation Front
White
Dr. Strangevibe
and also featuring the Edible Austin Foodie Fest and Tipsy Texan Cocktail Bar!

Unique to this and only this event, Edible Austin magazine is bringing the heart and soul of Austin's local foodie scene and cutting edge mixology to Plutopia and will be hosting out-of-town guests from Eat Well Guide. Full list of food and drink participants here.

Plutopia

Marc de Vinck says: "I was watching SpongeBob with the kids. During the snail races I noticed the announcer's mug. OK, so it most likely stands for Bikini Bottom (where SpongeBob lives), but maybe, just maybe, it stands for something else?!"

Home movie hero Robbins Barstow writes,

I am the 90-year-old producer of the 1956 family home movie, Disneyland Dream, which you first BoingBoinged nearly two years ago, on April 11, 2008.

I thought you might be interested in knowing that a 1956 "Disneyland Dream" DVD is now available for purchase for $15 plus shipping from Amazon.com, with an added Special Feature on "The Making of Disneyland Dream." It has taken me a long time to get this set up, but the attachment to this email is a flyer I have worked out to let people know about this new DVD availability. "Disneyland Dream" can still be downloaded anytime free from the internet at Archive.org, but from now on the 2009 "Making of D.D." will only be available as part of this for-sale DVD.

This is my first venture into commercial marketing (after 75 years of amateur film making), so I don't know how it will go. But I appreciate your earlier interest.

This is the most delightful historical Disneyland movie I've seen -- including the old TV shows where Walt tours the park. Young Master Barstow was a great film-maker (there's a reason that the Library of Congress added this to the National Film Registry), and the subject is wonderful, My mom and her family had a trip to Disneyland in '56, and my grandfather talked about it to his dying day -- the stuff of legend.

Disneyland Dream

It's Caturday. Watch: Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat REINCARNATED! (via Sean Bonner)

Update VICTORY! Motion passed with near unanimity!

I'm delighted to report that the UK Liberal Democrats' Spring Convention have accepted the emergency motion on internet freedom, and will be debating it tomorrow morning.

The LibDems were plunged into controversy last week when two of the LibDem Lords introduced a pro-web-censorship amendment to the Digital Economy Bill (this amendment was later shown to have been written by record industry lobby group BPI). Outraged party members (including dozens of prospective parliamentary candidates) rallied to fight this shift in party direction toward curtailment of freedom on behalf of corporate lobbyists.

The outcome of that outrage is the emergency motion on internet freedom, called the "Save the Net" memo. It calls for net neutrality, proportionality and due process in copyright enforcement, an absolute rejection of web-blocking and disconnection to solve copyright problems, and other good, principled stands that I'm proud to see my party get behind.

Organisers worked around the clock all week to get the emergency motion accepted for debate. Tomorrow morning, party delegates at the Spring Convention will debate the Save the Net motion from 0915 to 0945. If you are attending the Birmingham convention (or know someone who is!), please help support this motion and get it passed -- let's send a signal to corporate schemers that British law isn't for sale.

If you're not attending the convention, you can still help by joining the Facebook fan page for the motion. If thousands -- tens of thousands! -- of people from around the country and the world show their support for this motion, it will help conference delegates understand how important and far-reaching Internet freedom is.

Laws about copyright and the Internet don't just affect how we get and use cultural works: they affect everything we do with the Internet, whether it's earning a living or staying in touch with family or reporting the news or organising your neighbours around important political issues.

UK Lib Dems: Save the Net!

Bueno Aires's Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid used to be a beautiful movie palace. Saved from the wrecker's ball, it is now one of the most majestic bookstores I've ever clapped eyes upon, a veritable temple to books.

Marilyn sez, "El Ateneo Grand Splendid in downtown Buenos Aires is a spectacular bookstore that retains all the glamour of its former life as a 1920s movie palace, with a original balconies, painted ceiling, ornate carvings and crimson stage curtains. Photo by Bob Krist for National Geographic Traveler. The Guardian named El Ateneo as one of the top ten bookshops in the world (along with Secret Headquarters):'Where else can you sit in a theater box and leisurely read a volume of Neruda, or sip a cortado where Carlos Gardel once performed?'"

Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Intermolecular polarity is a fancy way of saying "oil and water don't mix". Here, Science Bob explains why, and shows off a fun trick you can do over and over with oil, water, food coloring and alka-seltzer.

Like many in the insulated west, I've long been fascinated by North Korea, what life is like in there, and what will happen to the peninsula after the walls come down. (Of course, I'm half a world away, so I have the luxury of being fascinated with North Korea. Life inside the country, I suspect, is beyond rough and might get even worse in the first years of inevitable reunification.) I've read extensively on the country, enough so that I almost understand the concept of juche. And I've explored the country a bit in my fiction. My novel-in-progress has a sequence in which an over-the-hill rocker is invited to perform a goodwill concert in Pyongyang, although I'm not sure the subplot it's part of will earn space in the final draft.

My hometown website boston.com (disclosure: I used to consult for 'em) has a terrific feature called The Big Picture that tells news stories in photographs. A year and change ago, the section ran a gripping Recent scenes from North Korea, a collection of 32 photos, all taken in 2008, some from wire services, some from freelancer Eric Lafforgue's then-recent trip, some shot inside the nation, some shot across the border. And now you can see On the Spot with Kim Jong-il, 31 photos from North Korea's state-run "news" agency, showing Dear Leader, usually in a parka, inspecting various industrial facilities. It's an astonishing series of portraits of a man and a culture disconnected from reality, surveying an empire that does not exist.

I could go on all weekend about Son House, one of the top and longest-lasting country bluesman, but I'll be kind to you and get to the music quickly. His original recordings are messages from a foreign land, his sessions and concerts after rediscovery rival Skip James' (hear an interview with John Fahey and the future Dr. Demento from that period), and both his lyrical and guitar styles are slashing and unforgettable. "Death Letter" is as deep as country blues gets. National resonator guitar!

In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.

Mollet's memo, entitled "Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010," appears to be a weekly status report on the DEB's progress. On the CC list are executives from major record labels, staff at IFPI (the international record industry lobby), PR agents from The Open Road, and others I don't recognise (if you can identify others on the CC list, please post to the comments).

In the memo, Mollet identifies Britain's top spies as being a stumbling block to the bill's passage -- worried, apparently, that creating a Great Firewall of Britain will make it harder for spies to spy on naughty sites (someone should tell MI5 about Ipredator, the excellent proxy service from the Pirate Bay; after all, that's the same proxy that everyone else in Britain is likely to use to get at the blocked sites if the BPI gets its way).

Mollet also implies that Britain's spy agencies might have paid for a Talk Talk survey in which 71% of 18-34 year olds said that they would simply evade the DEB and go on infringing.

Mollet claims that Britain's ISPs have already caved into their duties to spy on and censor network connections, claiming that there is a sense of "settled will" in the "ISP community."

On the other hand, he identifies Members of Parliament as being "resigned" to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it "detailed scrutiny" (heck of a job, MPs!). He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it.

BPI Digital Economy Bill weekly minutes (PDF)

Mirror

Sweet busking pitch: Boba Fett costume, accordion, Zelda theme. This is what makes the NYC subway great. Boba Fett shows off his artistic side (via Digg)

Here's the latest trailer for Luc Besson's forthcoming steampunk movie, "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec." That's some heady stuff.

Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec - 2nd teaser (Thanks, Xeni!)

Looking for an automobile decor element that proudly proclaims your devotion to the earliest, persecuted science fiction fans who huddled in catacombs, scratching crude rayguns into the walls?

Look no further.

WHITE vinyl SCI-FI RAY GUN decal jesus fish parody 3x5 (Thanks, Travis!)