The Story of Santa Claus as told by Lore Sjöberg on Wired’s Alt Text #20.

Do you know the real story behind the actual true non-fictional Santa Claus? No, not the cartoon with Burgermeister Meisterburger in it,
although that’s pretty awesome. We reveal the secret origins of Santa.

See Previously: Lore Sjöberg from Brunching Shuttlecocks to ALT TEXT

via Waxy

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Lore Sjöberg Tells The Real Story Behind Santa Claus on Alt Text #20

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Last weekend at Santacon in San Francisco, Santa’s Little Secret Service was hard at work protecting luminaries like Jesus Christ and Frank Chu.

E. D. W. Lynch has some background info on the Santa’s Little Secret Service which was first deployed during Santacon 2006.

More photos can be found in the Santa’s Little Secret Service Flickr group.

photo by Mitchell Aidelbaum, E. D. W. Lynch & gastronomicdiva06

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Santa’s Little Secret Service, Protecting Jesus Christ & Frank Chu

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Violet Blue, my good friend and Laughing Squid guest blogger, has just launched Art Machines, covering the world of kinetic, robotic and machine art, for example her recent post on the amazing Nemo Gould.

Violet has also just launched Violet Blue SF where she’s blogging about things related to life in San Francisco, like the amazing photos of Fleishhacker Pool House by Thomas Hawk.

These two new blogs join Violet’s fast growing empire of blogs which also include her sex blog Tiny Nibbles, tech blog Techyum and her audio and e-books blog Digita Publications.

photos by Scott Beale & Thomas Hawk

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Violet Blue Launches New Blogs On Art Machines & San Francisco

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Today Google adds clip art and line drawings to their image search criteria, in addition to photos and faces.

To restrict your search to either line drawings, clip art, photos, or faces, choose the style criteria from the drop-down on an image results page. (Alternately you can add the right parameter to your search URL to set up a keyword quick search; for line drawings, for example, it's &imgtype=lineart.) Check out a cool example search for Celtic art line drawings. For more Google search fun, check out our top 10 obscure Google search tricks.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, home of The Colossal Squid Exhibition, has a really cool “Build a Squid” interactive page on their website.

Thanks to Davina for the tip!

image via Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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Build A Squid at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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Last night Sarah Lacy had a Holiday Happy Hour at The Beauty Bar in San Francisco. I dropped by and while there shot a few photos with the new Canon 5D Mark II.

Photo Gallery: The Beauty Bar

photos by Scott Beale

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Sarah Lacy’s Holiday Happy Hour at The Beauty Bar in San Francisco

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guest post by RICK!

Unsilent Night, a mobile ambient music public art installation produced by Phil Kline, returns to San Francisco this Saturday, December 20th at 7pm in Dolores Park.

Every year since 1992 I’ve presented UNSILENT NIGHT, an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It’s like a Christmas caroling party except that we don’t sing, but rather carry the music, each of us playing a separate track that is a “voice” in the piece. In effect, we become a city-block-long sound system!

Join us and bring a boombox, or anything that will blast a cassette, CD or Mp3. (Cassettes sound the coolest, but we realize cassette players are getting scarce now.) The more tracks we play, the bigger and more amazing the sound is. In recent years, UNSILENT NIGHTs in New York and San Francisco have attracted crowds of over a thousand people, with hundreds of boomboxes… it’s spectacular. If you’d like to participate, please e-mail the contact listed for your city for instructions. If you’d like to participate but don’t have a boombox or a music player with speakers, you can just show up and join the parade. Everyone is an important part of the procession. Help us make a BIG (and joyful) noise. This is always a free event and all ages are welcome.

Here’s a video Scott Beale made of Unsilent Night 2006 in San Francisco.

photos by Anjuli Ayer

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Unsilent Night 2008 in San Francisco

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On December 13th The White Holly, a former Navy ship loaded up with amazing fire art, pyrotechnics and a Tesla Coil hanging off the side, entered and won the annual “Lighted Boat Parade” hosted by the Sausalito Yacht Club. Ed Hunsinger has a great write-up on the event and here’s an awesome video from Megavolt2 showing The While Holy in all it’s glory, the YouTube video description sums it up quite well:

On Saturday December 13, 2008 the former navy ship White Holly, now a privately operated scientific research vessel run by Captain Vince Backen, was entered into The Sausalito Yacht Club “Parade of Lights” held in Sausalito, California in the San Francisco Bay. Boat parades will never be the same… the event was organized by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito in collaboration with Jack Schroll and Black Rock FX (El Diablo - jet engine fire effect, Chrysler air raid siren, smoke generator and methanol mines,) John Behrens and Omega Recoil, (upside down Tesla Coil,) Epiphany by Dan Das Mann, Karen Cusolito and Pyrokinetics (Danya Parkinson and Jo Bard,) Headless Point Studio, American Steel Studios, Flaming Lotus Girls (Mini Mega Junior - fire poofer,) Camron “Teiwaz” Asadi and The Crucible of Oakland California (flame cannons on the upper poop- deck,) Bonefire Bob and over 150 others! All of this so they could have a good time for approximately two minutes…

PEST169 has another video of The White Holly in the parade.

More Coverage:

- Ed Hunsinger

- Wally Glenn

- Online Adventures (video)

- Eddie Codel

- Art Machines (Violet Blue)

- Leslie428 (photos)

- NetDiva

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The White Holly Fires Up Sausalito Yacht Club’s Lighted Boat Parade

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“Leary on Drugs” is the latest book from RE/SEARCH Publications, featuring writings and lectures from the Timothy Leary Archives.

Psychedelic guru, Timothy Leary was a psychologist who experimented, wrote and lectured about his investigations of mind-expanding drugs. Here is a collection of just some of his effusive output, much of it written as it happened.

Follow Leary as he drops acid at a prison with inmates, raises his children while the adults are “swimming on a sea of jewels,” becomes incarcerated, escapes prison, and generally expounds upon the politics of mind-altering substances before and after they become “controlled substances” in the U.S.A.

10 Zen Monkey has posted an interview with “Leary on Drugs” editor Hassan I Sirius.

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Leary on Drugs, The Writings and Lectures of Timothy Leary

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Free money management webapp Mint rolls out an iPhone app that puts most of its basic data-mining, alerts, and money-watching tools in a few simple screens.

From the Mint app's home screen, you can see your total balances and click through to check out transactions on balances on everything you've registered over at Mint's web site. The Cash Flow indicator gives you a glance at the current month's spending and earning, and then breaks it down by category or merchant on clicking through. If you've set up budgets or investment accounts, they'll show up as well. Perhaps the most helpful on-the-go feature, especially while traveling, is the alerts window, which updates live and tells you about spending abnormalities and low balances.

One thing you'll definitely want to do if you install this app—and it's recommended on a pop-up screen after installation—is passcode-lock your iPhone or iPod. The app doesn't ask for a password on each login, so anyone who grabbed your device would get way more financial information than they should have. (UPDATE: A Mint.com rep noted that the site offers every user a "Deactivate" link on users' profile pages to disconnect iPhone app access, if it went missing or snoopy folks were lurking).

Here's screens from the app's cash flow and budget tools:

The Mint.com app is a free download for iPhones and iPod touch models running at least the 2.0 firmware, and requires a free sign-up at Mint.com.

Tech columnist David Pogue pulls out "The Best Photography Tricks of All Time" for anyone shooting digital, including the crafty use of a lampshade:

It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp—the place where the lampshade screws on—are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod.

His other tips—always half-pressing the shutter button to reduce camera lag, getting a limited depth of field, forcing the flash on outdoors, and exploiting the "magic hour"—are all good reading for anyone new to shooting, especially to memory cards instead of film. We thought we'd add a few of our own collected tips from over the years to round things out a bit:

• Exhale and pull elbows in for steady shots: Especially if you're not rocking a vibration-control lens on a DSLR rig, this body-steadying practice can make all the difference for no-flash shots.
• Use the Unsharp Mask/Smart Sharpen for crisper shots: Photojojo explains how to use Photoshop (and similar photo editing tools) to get finer contrast on digital camera pics. Our commenters wisely point out, however, that the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop CS1 and later is the way to go.
• Deal with shooting in direct light: Because you, and your subjects, can't always get up at the hour just after dawn, Digital Photography School explains how to work with, and around, a hard sun.
• Get behind something to shoot more candidly: As Rick pointed out (taken from Digital Photography School's tips, it's hard to walk around with a lens pointed and not be noticed. For more candid shots, try shooting over someone's shoulder, or shooting through or around something that you don't mind being in the actual photograph for a voyeuristic effect—tree branches, window frames, and the like.
• Get a cheap, DIY lens hood or flash filter: A lens hood—like the kind you can print yourself—prevents glare, flare, and other light tricks beaming in from just around your lens edges. Similarly, a piece of white coffee filter can work wonders for diffusing your flash, giving bar shots and other low-light situations a much mellower light.

If you had only one tip to give a newcomer to digital photography, what would it be? Step up the chalkboard in the comments. Photo by ssh.