The network is Freenode (chat.freenode.net), while our room is #boingboing.

To connect you'll need an "IRC Client," dozens of which are available for almost every computing platform, including mIRC, Trillian, and X-Chat 2 for Windows; X-Chat Aqua and Colloquy on OS X; and IRSSI and other favorites on Linux and other UNIXish environments. You can also use the Chatzilla plug-in for Firefox or simply use the Freenode java applet to connect.

To register your nickname, which gives you the ability to send private messages and reserve your name from use by others, type "/msg NickServ register [choose a password]" when connected to the Freenode server. Don't share your password with anyone!

To wonder if IRC is an antiquated old protocol far past its prime, consider that Douglas Rushkoff was lamenting its death in '96. Boing Boing Gadgets loves to serve you Yesterday's Future Today!

RockPaperShotgun, as our most respected gaming blog by far, deserves more than the occasional misappropriation of its work, sandwiched between a link and a quip. Accordingly, we're formalizing the creative incest and will regularly swap headlines on a wholesale basis.

Seriously, these guys rule. Even if you're not interested in games (who are you kidding?), they're smart, insouciant and dedicated to the craft. Read on for the links.

In honor of Osaka's refurbed Brynnerbot.

I am Costa Rica bound. I'll be gone for a week-and-a-day. I was originally going to try to do some work down there but I've been too busy to line up anything to really cover, so I'm just going to play it by ear. If you know of any good tech or environment-oriented projects happening down there that I should look into let me know. I'll be flying into San Jose but plan on being fairly mobile.

Couple of questions: What's the internet cafe/access scene like down there? Should I bother taking my laptop or will it just be dead weight? (Obviously, I know there's internet, but I don't know how common it is to find it outside of San Jose. I can rely on internet cafes if I have to.)

If you need anything BBG related, feel free to contact Rob or John at rob@ or brownlee@ and they'll take care of you.

We have a name for the 21st century where I come from: the suppurating asshole of space time. For reference, imagine flipping through an American History textbook, just lazily skimming around, then... WHAM! Goatse.cx. You now have a good idea of what the history books of the 31st century look like: an engorged, inside-out historical sphincter stretching between the knuckles of 1983's break-dancing revolution and the emergence of robo-break-dancing in 2176.

Now imagine being sucked into that pulsating Goatse vortex and you've got a pretty good idea of what it felt like when I woke up naked in an Oklahoma field surrounded only by belching cows and clouds of dissipating purple chronatons. Yes, it's an ugly analogy, and I'm sorry to labor it, but short of cramming the monolith from 2001 down your throats, it's the only way I can make you monkeys understand what it's like to be trapped here.

The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.

When Boing Boing invited me into their tree house a few months ago I had every hope that I, a notoriously fickle employee, would find a home. Somewhere to kick up my feet for the long haul; a place to do exactly the sort of work — or attempt at work — that I wanted to do. It's been that and more. The Boingers are — unsurprisingly — the most like-minded and supportive group of folks I've ever worked with and I owe them a lot.

So it is with my closest analog of real human joy that I ask you to welcome two new editors here at Boing Boing Gadgets: Rob Beschizza and John Brownlee. I'll save the pedantic (and probably boring) retelling of their recent careers. Suffice it to say that of the dozens of writers I've worked with over the years, Rob and John consistently make the kind of content I find captivating, intelligent, and hilarious. It doesn't hurt that they've both become dear friends.

Our mission remains the same meandering trajectory: share with you the things we find interesting — and lambast the things we find tedious, wasteful, or poorly crafted. We're going to be experimenting with lots of ideas, some of which may actually turn out to be good. We also will continue to find ways to engage the community that has grown up around Boing Boing, not as some bullet point on a "Things to do on a website" list, but because collectively — often individually! — you guys are smarter and more knowledgeable than we are.

I'm not exactly sure what Boing Boing Gadgets will grow up to be, but I can't wait to watch it erupt into the scaly travesty against life itself we all know it can become.

Previously • Welcome. If I Didn't Hate the Connotations of "Manifesto..." [BBG]

I enjoy a good spoof or prank as much as the next guy, but in general I find April 1st on the web to be tedious, so I will be abstaining from participating on this site. This year.

If you'd like to join other Happy Mutants on an ancient, non-web-based protocol, we have registered a new channel on Freenode in which to discuss, you know, stuff. Standard rules apply: If you're unruly or rude, don't stop by! Otherwise, I look forward to wasting far too much time chatting to you all in one big yappy forum.

If you've never used IRC before, you'll need a client. On Windows I've used mIRC, on OS X or Linux I prefer X-Chat Aqua (although many like Colloquy on OS X). Connect to any of the Freenode servers and join the channel #boingboing for maximum chat.

As the taxi from JFK pulled up in front of my apartment I felt my iPhone vibrating in my pocket, but didn't answer it since I was trying to pay the cabbie. I walked inside, reached in my pocket to see who called, and realized I didn't have it. The damn thing vibrated itself out of my front jeans pocket.

I've reported it to the taxi company, but it's probably gone for good. In the meantime, if you need to reach me email is the best option. I can call you back out on Skype as necessary.

Now the question is: do I buy a refurb 8GB from Apple or do I get a cheapo phone and wait until the probable 3G iPhone release in June?

Update: My phone is apparently waiting for me at JFK. I am a lucky bastard. Not that I got my phone back, per se, but that I found two helpful, honest people: Ophelia at the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, who tracked down my cabbie Mike, who in turn had the foresight to capture both the name and badge number of the Port Authority officer who did not turn in my phone to the Lost & Found until this morning.

The lesson, should you lose your gear in a NYC cab, is to make sure you have the cab number. It's easy when you come from an airport because it's on that little slip of paper they hand you, but otherwise you'd have to write it down when you got inside. But if I hadn't had that, Ophelia couldn't have tracked down Mike. Without him and the receipt he got from the officer who took his sweet time turning my phone in, I might have been out of luck.

I've got to make an appointment to go pick up my phone today. As soon as I get it, I think I need to send Ophelia some flowers. (And find something good for Mike.)

Hey, folks. Posting will be a little back and forth today and tomorrow as I'm still at SXSWi. I haven't been blogging all the panels I've been attending, but I've been taking lots of notes. Perhaps I will be able to synthesize some sort of cohesive perspective or nugget of insight out of them later!

How are things going with you? Did you have a good weekend?

Boing Boing is maternity and children's clothing store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I snapped this rather crappy pic with my iPhone a couple of months ago, went out today to get a better one, and then couldn't find it. Turns out it's a lot further down 6th Avenue that I remembered!

It's got a 9.8 out of 10 review on NYMag.com, though, so we can safely say they're doing the name proud.

Boing Boing [NYMag.com]

Below is a sponsored widget from Microsoft.

I whipped up some easy icons for all three Boing Boing sites just in case anyone wants to save a page to the menu screen of their iPhone or iPod Touch. (You have to be on the latest firmware to do this.)

There were lots of great entries in the "Suckiest Gadget Experience" contest, but none quite made us laugh like BPratt's story of the wooden apotemnophilic dinosaur who ruined Christmas morning.

The Winning Story [BBG]

We are looking for your worst, never-again, broke-your-spirit, storming-the-corporate-offices—flat out suckiest—gadget experience. (Not necessarily the worst gadget, but your worst experience.) You could write a novella or a sentence, but you'll have to leave it in the comments, and you'll have to use a registered account so we can contact you if you win.

How do you win? Joel and I will pick our favorite story in the thread. Easy! (And if you liked someone else's story, feel free to influence us with comments pointing out which story you liked.)

To start it off, here's mine. It's not dramatic (and I'm not in the contest) but you get the idea:

"I loosely subscribe to the Unix principle: do one thing well. Take, for example, my shower clock. It tells me what time it is while I'm in the shower. Awesome.

But nothing bothers me more than when something of mine doesn't work at all.

I hate to sound like a pen snob, but last summer I wanted a new pen in my life. I looked to the Bic Wide Body Ballpoint Pen. I was taking a risk, because I usually prefer fountain pens, but Bics are usually so reliable. Plus this one had a steel body, so I was sold. The pen lasted two days.

I tried drawing circles to get the ink flowing. No go. The let down anticipation made me so mad at that pen that I froze it in a Ziploc bag filled with water for a year. I'm still upset. Presumably, so is the pen."

The contest is open to US citizens residents only and will last until Friday. Sorry, international brethren!

Now that we have "In the Year 2000" and "Electro Selecto", we're taking our Flickr groups a step further with one specifically dedicated to the site. In the "Boing Boing Gadgets" group, you can post any images you think might be useful for the blog. We're looking for pictures to fill out any posts that lack visual content.

Both "In the Year 2000" and "Electro Selecto" are filling out nicely, but we're insatiable. Keep posting anything you can find. "Electro Selecto" currently features a smorgasbord of old advertisements posted by spike55151 and hytam2. Isaac Asimov shows up with his massive mutton chops to pimp Radio Shack. Ray Charles and Melissa Manchester duke it out over recording tape: Memorex or Scotch? Sony just wants people to be a little nicer to their speakers. Included as well is this creepy instruction manual for The Imagination Machine, where the man's stare calls into question who is imagining what. And of course, Joel reminds us that Atari programming requires more bondage than one would expect.

Avi_Abrams wins the "In the Year 2000" gold star with 34 images, including one of some badass Soviet hydroplane, a rather phallic rocket ship, and a pyramid city. scrubbles posted a series of images from Sentinel by Syd Mead, all of which are quite gorgeous. There's the perplexing Unipod Gyroscopically Balanced Personal Vehicle, learning capsules, and 3D TV (complete with pod chairs). whoever, whomever reaches even further back to 1910's vision of 2000. Gaze in wonder at curiosities like hand-delivered phonograph cylinders, creepy learning caps, and lots and lots of anachronistic airplanes. Also, in the future, radiation doesn't kill everybody.

Tiny cars are apparently all the rage in the future. This man laughs it up in his Funmobile, while this dour man plots mayhem between a set of giant wheels. Future technology meets dated gender roles: the men use their video phones for work and the women use them for shopping.

That's all a great haul, but there must be more out there. So seek it out and join the fun! This man would approve.

Add your meat flavor to our Flickr pools, humans! In the Year 2000 (Retro-future imagery); Electro Selectro (Old advertisements and catalogs); Boing Boing Gadgets (Otherwise interesting imagery!)

* Yes, two Brians! Hence, "Copeland" and "Dunn." They will later form an '80s folk duo.

Next week I'm going to Berlin. I'm not really going with an agenda, but is there anything I should see while I'm there? I like: art, food, music, things powered by electricity, forlorn ruins, and things that vibrate.

I am pleased to introduce our first Boing Boing Gadgets intern/research thrall, Mr. Brian Copeland, hereafter to be known only as "Copeland." His first task is to start getting some of these prizes in place for our C@H team. There are more to come. Time to take back first place!

For those of you interested in a little computational charity, Boing Boing Gadgets has started a team over at Cosmology@Home. (One we sort have neglected for a month or so. Sorry about that!) Professor Ben Wandelt has some science smut to describe what the team is computing for now:

The goal of Cosmology@Home is to search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical and particle physics data. In order to achieve this goal, participants in Cosmology@Home (i.e. you!) will compute the observable predictions of millions of theoretical models with different parameter combinations. We will use the results of your computations to compare all the available data with these models.

As an incentive for donating your CPU's time, we're offering 25 randomly selected members of the team a GelaSkin for your iPod/iPhone, along with one to accessorize that laptop (color coordinating is extremely important, after all). To sign up, follow the instructions on Cosmology@Home's main site, then search for team "boing boing." Winners will be picked Friday.

Project Page (Get crunching!) [Cosmology@Home]
Product Page [Gelaskin.com]

Sorry about that. We had some tech bloops this morning that delayed the posting of some stories and added a login prompt once they did go live. Should be groovy gravy now, but I apologize for the hassle.

Sorry about the poor posting the last couple days, especially today. I was on a business trip that ended up being very slim on internet. But I'll be back in action very soon!

Even though it's half BS—or maybe because—this comment by reader "Semiotix," in response to the "Crisp vs. Crunch" discussion, is fantastic:

Crispy things are compressible and striated. Air or some other interstitial medium is essential for crispiness.

Crunchy things are solid and may cleave in any number of planes. In a rigid food, crunchiness is the absence of crispiness.

These elements give rise to the epiphenomena other food-ontologists have already noted (higher pitch from the sound of something crispy being chewed, as a function of its lower mass per unit volume; greater resistance in crunchy foods, as a consequence of the covalent bonds that characterize them, versus the van der Waals forces at work between layers of crisped foods).

Sweet Spot post [BBG]

Congratulations to Andrew Pam, selected at random (by Random.org) to receive the Neuros OSD and NAS. Hats off as well to clay whose massive crunching qualified him for first place and thus the bonus prize, a Nokia N95.

One week ago Team bOING bOING was formed. Last night was the end of the contest. In a beautiful bit of serendipity, it was also the point at which Team bOING bOING took the number one spot on Cosmology@Home, allowing me to say for the first time ever in a distributing computing project: Suck it, Ars Technica!*

I've got some more prizes I'll be announced soon for members of the team, so keep crunching those units if you'd like to remain eligible. Great job everyone!

* Just kidding. Please don't come stomp us.

What started as a fun way to extend our Neuros x Boing Boing Gadgets contest is turning into a full-fledged rout, as Team bOING bOING is on track to take first place across the entire project. We've reached second place in less than a week. First place in within our grasp.

Tonight at midnight (EST) I'll be selecting a winner at random to be awarded the Neuros OSD plus NAS. (The bonus prize, a Nokia N95 awarded to the top producer, looks like it's probably Clay's to lose, since he's currently in the top spot by a country mile, unless someone has been saving up units for a last second surprise.)

I've been having so much fun with this that I'd like to keep the project going for now. I've been talking to some companies about getting in more products to give away, although they probably won't be quite as nice as the Neuros in the immediate future.

If you'd like to take a crack at winning the Neuros, you can still sign up for team today. You just need to have to have reported one work unit by midnight to be eligible.

So I'm going to extend the contest out one more week, change the way to enter, and up the ante. It will take a minimum of work, but you can do it without leaving your desk, so this one might be worth giving a go.

Cosmology@Home is a new distributed project that aims to discover the cosmological model that "that best describes our Universe." It does this by running simulations of astronomical and particle physics data on your home machine—a "simulated universe."

I've started a "Team bOING bOING." To enter into a random selection to win the Neuros OSD, simply do the following:

• Go to the Cosmology@Home project page and download the client.
• Join Team bOING bOING.
• Crunch some units!

Crunch until next Wednesday night. I'll select one team member at random to win a free Neuros OSD settop box plus NAS. (I'll contact you via the Cosmology@Home system, so be sure you use a real email address.

In addition, the member who crunches the most units by midnight EST Wednesday will win an unlocked Nokia N95 smartphone.

If you have any questions, I'll respond to them in the comments, but it doesn't get much easier than this. It takes like 60 seconds to get up and running. Good luck! For science!

Don't forget that the Neuros OSD contest is ending tomorrow night, so send in those submissions.

According to the engineering level, comment accounts on both Boing Boing and Boing Boing Gadgets should work in the unified manner which you may rightfully have expected in the first place: One account, one login, posting access on both sites.

A little personal troubleshooting is going on here at the apartment here today; I thought I might share it with you guys to try to figure out what's going on.

I bought two Dell 2001FP flat-panel monitors a couple of years ago. I recently moved one over to my girlfriend Susie's gaming rig and, as per usual when I try to do something nice, it immediately broke, making me look like a cheap heel. See that mild yellow bar on the right? It would do that from time to time on my PC. But now it's throwing that multi-colored bar in the middle, flip-flapping an inch-and-a-half bar of insanity every couple of seconds.

At first I thought it was the cable. It is not. Then I thought it might be her video card. It is not. It happens with both DVI and VGA connections. Now I'm looking at this as a learning experience, since fixing monitors is basically impossible without a tiny spaceship and an elemental shrink ray.

Here's my guess: The video processing hardware inside is dying, but in such a way that each "strip" is dying independantly. The yellow bar seems to be the same width as the inverted one, about 1.5 inches, and the monitor is about 16 inches wide, so that gives us a nice base 2 number of... 10.666. Okay, so much for that. Any ideas?

Good morning! Sorry for the late start today. I went out to dinner with a friend of mine last night and ended up leaving my camera in the restaurant, which I only discovered by the time I was nearly home, necessitating a return trip.

I've got a couple of updates about the site.

First, comments: At the moment, you have to make two different logins for Boing Boing and Gadgets, which is hurky, but there it is. However, we're expecting to have that cleaned up by the 20th or so. I wish we could do it sooner, but there it is. I appreciate everybody who is already commenting despite having to have two logins!

Second, RSS formatting: For some reason the paragraph tags don't seem to be squirting out correctly in Gadgets' RSS feed, causing the content to be all bunched up in some RSS readers, like Google's. We've had a couple of readers offer some advice about why that may be, but we haven't been able to squash it yet. If I knew some bit of HTML to add to my posts that would make it easier, I would. (Someone suggested ordered lists, but those don't add enough padding in between bullets for my taste.)

Lastly! Our "In the Year 2000" Flickr group has been going great, so it's time to give birth to its sister group, "Electro Selectro." NY2K is about a retro-future that never happened; ElSl is about then-futuristic products that were actually manufactured. Catalog scans, old advertisements, instruction manuals: all the sort of stuff I'd love to see in Electro Selectro.

I imagine the second group won't take off as quickly (although I've added thsoe Oster brochure scans to get us started), but for the subset of we gadget nerds who are entranced by the ephemera that surrounded the gadgets themselves, it could be a good time.

And of course, thanks for reading! Tell your friends and co-workers to stop by! Unless they suck!

Twittered Jesse Thorn, from The Sound of Young America.