July 12, 1960: Etch-a-Sketch? Let Us Draw You a Picture
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The big companies weren't interested, but when Arthur Granjean finally sold his invention it became one of the most popular children's toys ever.
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THE great-grandfather of modern computers was today being commemorated with a special set of stamps. Bletchley Park Post Office is issuing a first day cover featuring the 1943 Colossus.  (c) 2007 Liverpool Echo. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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Get up close and personal with the curiously '80s-stylings of the Fujitsu UMPC
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A show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presents some odd (but fascinating) examples of serial photography.
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Search technology for images may lead to a way to search handwritten manuscripts.
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A cadre of unknown designers shapes everyday human-machine interactions. By Andrew Blum from Wired magazine.
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Life & style: In pictures: Iconic images feature in a new retrospective photographic exhibition.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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An ambitious new type of pen-based computer system could bridge the gap between paper and the digital world.
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A planned offer from OurPictures hints at the day when camera phones could represent the mainstream way of snapping photos.
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Birthday on Sunday Forgotten Tech The transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, will be 60 years old on Sunday. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who made the first working point-contact transistor on 16 December 1947.â¦
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Gabe: Sorry for the late comic strip today. It was just a little more than I was able to get done in one day. I ended up having to finish it up this morning. I've had some requests for wallpapers of the relief at the top of the Olympus and I'll try and get something like that out.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.    A new picture size routine, which maps specified user coordinates to a given final size, provides a convenient way of forcing the plotted  subregion of a graph to have a fixed size. The correct surface normal is chosen when calculating lighting. The comment character can now be escaped when reading strings from data files (but is disabled when reading raw characters with getc). The new word file mode is useful for reading  white space-delimited strings. PostScript output files are now explicitly designated as EPSF in the header line. The minimum width and height of flowchart blocks may now be controlled separately. Interpolation and knot theory modules were added. The usage of path vs. guide in the base files was  standardized.   https://sourceforge.net/projects/asymptote
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The Art Institute of Chicago has spun a wonderful show around George Seurat's famous oil painting, which includes related sketches and works by contemporaries.
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New company in New York will emboss gadgets with custom artwork, and they're going to give away the business plan. Photos: Laser-etched laptops
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Dozens of Irving Pennâs portraits of artists, writers and musicians are on view in âClose Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writersâ.
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Life & style: In pictures: The best entries in our competition to finish the picture drawn by Rosie Flo illustrator Roz Streeten