General

This article tells how to build your own self-balancing scooter like a Segway™.

Although the Segway has several exotic components, this one is built from common low-tech parts like wheelchair motors and RC car batteries. The parts, even at small quantity retail prices, cost less than half of a genuine Segway. It also doesn’t need complex or high-performance software. The first version was written in Python and used serial ports to talk to the gyroscope and motor controller. The current software, now in C running in an onboard 8-bit microcontroller, is only 500 lines of code.

At least 186 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded today when a wave of blasts ripped through Madrid’s railway network at the height of the morning rush hour. There has been no claim of responsibility in the attacks, but Spanish officials are blaming terrorists from the Basque separatist group ETA.

Full story at CNN

The server which hosts this site, as well as worldbeatplanet & shareyourmusic.com crashed and was down most of today. The problem has been fixed.

UPDATE: here’s the explanation from PEHosting:

The downtime was caused by a simple CGI script taking up all the system resources and causing the server to crash. We had a company to monitor the new servers that we got about a month ago and this was the first time something like this has happened. We will not be hiring these guys to monitor our servers any more. To prevent such a thing form happening in the future we have decided not to use a 3rd party server monitoring company. From now on we will monitor and manage these new servers.

I was away for a few days due to an emergency. I have the greatest neighbors in the world. They took care of my cats and even cleaned my apartment while I was gone.

I received 6 Nigerian spams today, a new record. One of them was sent via the feedback form on this website.

For the second time in about a week, WorldBeatPlanet has been hacked. I saved a screenshot of the last one.

Some day our country is going to have to take a long hard look at itself and wonder why it tolerates massive amounts of violence on TV, but a single Boob is capable of driving us collectively insane. I just flipped between all the networks and the Boob was the story on every one, including CNN, except NBC. I’m sure they had it earlier. [Eschaton]

via Boing Boing Blog:
Wiley Wiggins sez, “My last movie, Frontier – A surreal quasi-comedy performed entirely in a heretofore unknown eastern european language with English (and Esparanto) subtitles, is now available on DVD from Film Threat. Watch grown men beat each other with whole raw chickens. Watch me copulate with a hole in the ground and lick inhabited spiderwebs. Fun for the whole family. Frontier was directed by David Zellner and is based on the classic Bulbovian drama fragment ‘Froktog’.”

Here’s a map of the states I’ve visited:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

MUDDA (Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists) is a new initiative by Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel to help transform the music business in such a way that artists are on level terms with record companies, receive fair payments and have new opportunities to be their own retailer when they choose.