We’ve seen Darth Vader as an evil Imperial enforcer and we have also seen him redeemed as a force ghost. As far as I’m concerned the prequels didn’t happen, so we DID NOT see him as a…
via MightyMega
Darth Vader in Everyday Life

To celebrate the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Google has put together a set of skins for its apps which let you demonstrate your allegiance to either the light or dark side.

The tweaks to Google apps include new Gmail backgrounds, a YouTube progress that looks like a light saver, a Maps positions marker that resembles a TIE fighter or X-Wing, and a bunch more subtle tweaks in Chrome, Translate, Chromecast and the like. We prefer the dark side, though we’re not sure what it says about us.

Guaranteed fun, for at least a few minutes. In fact, it’s kind of reminiscent of the custom options you used to get on Windows, where your swapped alert sounds for train whistles and that kind of thing.

Anyway, you can go choose your side now.

[Google]

via Gizmodo
Google Lets You Re-Skin Its Apps Using Light or Dark Side Star Wars Themes

MySQL Server 5.7 was released around a month ago, and download numbers show huge interest in upgrading from older MySQL releases. As with any product that is frequently used as core infrastructure in complex systems with numerous interdependencies, major version upgrades of MySQL should be approached with some care. In this post, I will cover […]
via Planet MySQL
Upgrading to MySQL 5.7 Using the MySQL Repos for Linux

Build one (or all) of these ten lightsabers to make sure that you’re armed and ready when The Force Awakens.

Read more on MAKE

The post 10 DIY Lightsabers from Padawan to Jedi Master appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

via Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers
10 DIY Lightsabers from Padawan to Jedi Master

Shooting a gun – while standing still without facing incoming fire – isn’t complicated. There are four basic components: sight picture, stance (which includes grip), breathing and trigger control. That’s a bit like saying playing the blues isn’t complicated. While … Read More

The post Guns for Beginners: Stance appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Guns for Beginners: Stance

If you share a computer, you might not want everyone who uses your computer to see your username in the login window or fast user switch menu. To hide your name, MacIssues points out you’ll just need a little bit of Terminal skills.

The idea here is to hide you administrative user account so nobody even knows it’s there to be messed with. Provided you’re on OS X Yosemite or higher, you can hide your username pretty easily. Just run this command, substituting your username in for USERNAME:

sudo dscl . create /Users/USERNAME IsHidden 1

This will hide the administrative account from the login window, Users & Groups preferences, and the user switching menu, though you’ll still be able to manually login. It’s not super necessary for most of us, but if you have a lot of different users on a shared computer, it’s a nice way to make it a little tougher for people to tinker with your settings.

How to create hidden administrative accounts in OS X | MacIssues

via Lifehacker
Create Hidden Administrative Accounts in OS X from the Terminal

Dating all the way back to Neolithic times, the mortise and tenon is the oldest wood joint known to mankind. While the specific provenance of the joint is unknown, I’m willing to bet the inventor wasn’t a virgin.

In the thousands of years since, craftspeople have developed an almost absurd variety of joints, some of which you learned in the ID shop at school, some of which you’ve never heard of, and that one that you can always see in your head but have forgotten the name of. To help you remember for the next time you’re building something out of wood, or to give you some alternatives for any current designs you’re working on, here are some visual guides:

Joints by Application:

Joints for Chairs, Frames and Tables

Joints for Tabletops and Cabinets

Joints for Boxes and Drawers

Joints by Machine:

Typical Router Joints

CNC Mill Joints, Corner

CNC Mill Joints, Tee and Cross

CNC Mill Joints, Splice

CNC Mill Joints, Box

CNC Mill Joints, Miscellaneous/WTF

Books

Here are some books that those of you researching or making joints may want to peruse:

The Joint Book: The Complete Guide to Wood Joinery

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                

  

The Complete Guide to Joint-Making

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joining Wood: Techniques for Better Woodworking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classic Joints with Power Tools

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art Of Japanese Joinery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Complete Japanese Joinery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’ve got any more joint resources you’d like to see included, please let us know in the comments and we’ll expand this section.

via Core77
Reference: The Ultimate Wood Joint Visual Reference Guide

A few years ago, we first wrote about the supposed missing black hole of culture due to copyright, based on some excellent research by Paul Heald, looking at the availability of new books on Amazon based on the years they were published. It produced this chart:

As you can see, there are a bunch of recent books, then a huge drop off… until a sudden spike at 1922 — also known as the year before which nearly all books are in the public domain. That giant gaping hole on the right side of the graph should be pretty distressing. It counters the totally false narrative by certain legacy copyright system supporters that copyright is necessary to get books published and also that without copyright, no one would bother to sell the works, because they could just be copied by others. But, more importantly, it shows how much important culture is totally locked up because of copyright law — unable to be published by those who’d like to offer them, and not worth it for the copyright holders to actually publish.

Late last year, EU Parliament Julia Reda published a similar chart concerning the EU:

That one also looked at books, in the same manner as Heald’s original research. On top of that, Heald himself has continued to explore this issue, including comparing new books to used books and also looking at the music space.

Now we’ve got even more evidence of how copyright kills such culture. Europeana has taken a similar look at a large corpus of digitized works in Europe and mapped it out. Guess what? Despite being a totally different data set, the graphic looks astoundingly similar:

Of course, the "black hole" in this case only goes back to the early 1940s, rather than the 1920s, because copyright terms in Europe tend to be life plus 50 rather than life plus 70, but there have been some efforts to change that as well.

Once again, this should raise serious questions about the problems of copyright term length. It seems fairly obvious that at their current length, copyright terms are actively suppressing a ridiculous about of cultural output, much of it likely to be lost forever to history — as by the time it actually goes into the public domain, it may not even exist any more. This is a pretty big problem — especially given all the claims about how necessary copyright supposedly is for protecting culture. It seems fairly clear from these charts that it’s frequently doing the opposite.

And yet… rather than fix this aspect of copyright law, policy makers seem to be focused on making it worse. The final version of the TPP agreement forces all countries who sign on to move to life plus 70 instead of life plus 50. It’s likely that the TTIP agreement will include some similar provisions.

Every time we post these charts, we also post this chart from William Patry’s book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, which showed the copyright renewal rates on various works in 1958 and 1959, back when you had to "renew" your copyright after 28 years.

As the chart makes clear, for most types of works the copyright is clearly worth basically nothing after 28 years. Movies are the main exception, as are some maps and at least some musical compositions (this was in a time before sound recordings could even get a federal copyright, though I imagine those might have a decently high renewal rate, probably at least on par with musical compositions).

All of this should raise serious questions about why we have copyright terms that are so long when the vast majority of content doesn’t value that protection and (more importantly) the clearly visible harm to culture and public knowledge created by such long copyright term lengths. And, again, it raises the question of why we don’t move to a system whereby copyright holders should be required to renew their copyright at specific intervals, to make sure that such monopoly rights are still more valuable than the public interest in those works.

And, in the meantime, anyone pushing for longer copyright terms, given how much of this information is now out there, is outing themselves as someone who is clearly against the public interest and shouldn’t be taken seriously. And that includes the current negotiators from the USTR who pushed strongly for the copyright expansion in the TPP in the face of all of this evidence.

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via Techdirt.
More Evidence Of How Copyright Makes Culture Disappear In A Giant Black Hole

 If you’ve ever been stuck using another email service and want to move over to Gmail, importing all of your mail is a real pain in the ass. Think Apple’s Mail client tied to, say, an exchange account. Today, Google open sourced two projects that’ll help make moving over much easier. Read More

via TechCrunch
Google Open Sources Two Tools To Import Mail Into Gmail

Watch as this skilled Japanese knife sharpener takes a rusty old kitchen knife and makes it good as new, with a little cleaning compound, some water, sharpening stones, and lots of good old elbow grease.
via The Awesomer
Restoring a Rusty Knife