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This is something Timothy Lord ran across a few months ago at a Maker Faire near Atlanta: The DuinoKit. Think of it as a fancier (and pricier) version of the venerable Radio Shack Electronic Learning Labs and you won't be far off. Plus, as the name DuinoKit implies, it's based on an Arduino, which means that right off the bat it packs a lot more learning punch than the Radio Shack kit. DuinoKit was financed by a KickStarter campaign that asked for $19,500 and raised $57,478 from 250 backers. And for those of you who worry about being called nerds because you're carrying a DuinoKit around, you can relax. It comes in a 'Secret Agent Carrying Case.' Really. Read their What is the DuinoKit? Web page carefully and you'll see. (Alternate Video Link)

wjcofkc writes "The decline of RadioShack has been painful to watch, and now CNN Money reports that they will be closing 1,100 of their stores, totaling 20% of their brick and mortar presence. RadioShack has also publicly admitted its current stores are out of date and in need of a massive overhaul. But the number-one culprit has been a continuous slide in sales down a steep slope in the area of mobile device sales. A few years ago, in a bid to expand its customer base, RadioShack made a bid to return to its roots as a hobbyist electronic components retailer. Apparently the extra traffic hasn't been enough to make up for their failings. The article mentions that some of their stiffest competition is coming from online retailers. The big question is, in order to ensure their survival, would RadioShack be better off continuing to phase out their brick and mortar presence while making substantial efforts to expand as an exclusively online retailer?"

ptorrone writes "If you have an old digital camera laying around and pick up a $1.50 Timer Chip from RadioShack or DigiKey you can turn it in to a great aerial photography camera, this how-to from Engadget shows how they did it along with some other projects with the modded camera." We also linked to part 1.

David Cantrell writes "The Radio Shack Corporation (formerly the Tandy Corporation) headquarters in Fort Worth, TX was one of the only companies in the world to have its own private subway system. Its main purpose in life was to move employees from their parked cars to the office building. About a year or so ago, Radio Shack decided the subway system was no longer needed and they shut it down permanently. Well, they are now selling the subway cars on eBay. For $5000US, you can get your very own Radio Shack Subway Car. Rails sold separately. Click for the eBay auction page."

Slashback with more on GNU Radio; BeUnited's ongoing bid for Gobe Productive's source code; AOL, IM and the USPTO; the consequences one observer faced for watching spammer Alan Ralsky and more. Read on for the details.

Don't Post While Sleepy: Hi, Chrisd here apologizing about that false post on Sony/Nintendo Playstation Trademark Settlement. Oops. Doh. No excuse. Mea Culpa. I'll be more careful next time.

Is "Rubber stamping everything" a patentable business practice? Brian Dear writes "With all the news these days about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issuing a patent to AOL/ICQ/Mirabilis for Instant Messaging, I thought the Slashdot community would be interested in reading about TERM-talk on PLATO, which was announced on the PLATO network on this day in 1973. Here is the URL with a screen shot of the actual announcement."

Turing, Marconi and Rosen: pick any two. squiggleslash writes "Salon is running an informative and sympathetic story about GNU radio. The article discusses how the project could end up pre-empting the Hollywood producers and other content cartel's attempts to destroy modifiable consumer hardware by creating a blatently legitimate space where programmable hardware is a requirement, as well as opening up radio to groups outside of the current cabals. Good stuff."

We've mentioned quite a bit about GNU Radio before (see also Eric Blossom's interview questions and answers; this article delves into the fight that the GNU Radio folks are gearing up for over broadcast flags.

Suiteness and light. To follow up on our mention of the effort to buy from Gobe (and release as Free software) the sourcecode of Gobe Productive, Simon Gauvin of beunited.org writes "beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS. Linux users have also pledged, and we encourage more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version. Call all your friends and send them over to beunited.org to help raise awareness!"

Here's the relevant discussion thread if you'd like to learn more about this effort; I wish the site had a bar chart of some sort showing how much money was currently raised, and an obvious PayPal link or similar. Note that for now, beunited's first goal is to open the source for the BeOS version of Productive.

Ralsky, Ralsky, Ralsky ... IsoRashi writes "Over at the Register they have this short article about a guy who took some photos of spammer Alan Ralsky's home. After taking the photographs, the man was chased by someone in a black jaguar and he began receiving threatening phone calls the next day. Here is a direct link to the site the photographer set up."

Read your TOS carefully before you start downloading ... Sergeant Beavis writes "Nate Carlson was kind enough to create a HOWTO for connecting your Linux box to Sprint's Vision network via a Sanyo SCP-4900 phone. However Sanyo's store shows the cable to be out of stock. Now comes FutureDial to the rescue with both the USB cable and SnapDialer software for connecting to the Vision network with Windows instead of Linux. Oh, the cable only cost $19.99 at your local Radio Shack. Enjoy!"

And let this be a lesson (of sorts) to you! gh0ul writes "Looks like Uzi Nissan (for those of you who don't recall owns nissan.com) has lost his fight with Nissan Motors to keep his nissan.com (last name by birthright/company) domain. The site now reads "In compliance with a ruling issued by the United States District Court in Los Angeles on November 14, 2002, in the lawsuit of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. v. Nissan Computer Corporation, this web site has been converted to non-commercial use." Are we ever going to have any protection against these kind of things?"

The Eye was never there. You never saw it. It was not creepy. Finally, Rob writes "The creepy all-seeing eye logo from John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness project is suddenly missing from the TIA web site. Old site ; Current site Perhaps TIA is seeking suggestions for a new logo?"

Today, more on setting up XFree86 4.0 with Debian; getting broadband in Whitefish, Montana and other metropolae; coming changes for players of EverQuest (but at least with a bit of explanation), and more words from the hellhole -- err, Hellmouth. Just read on.

Getcher Woody in prime operation! You may have noticed the report Saturday that Xfree86 debs are now available, and many readers pointed out problems with setting the newest XFree up. A mysteriously unnamed correspondent writes: "i've written an article to answer some of the questions raised and give an intro into how to set [XFree86 in Debian's unstable tree] up (3dx specifically)."

"Sir, I can't sell this to you without your GPS coordinates. No -- really, store policy." einstein writes "MSN and Radio Shack have gotten together to provide high speed internet access that will cover most of the continental US, looks to be great for rural areas, but the downfalls include: $59.95 a month upfront, for a year, $299 bucks in equipment, only works with Windows 98, and you have to buy a computer from Radio Shack. ugh."

D'ja ever stop to think of it this way ... Mr. Buckaroo writes: "Verant Interactive is again trying to change the license agreement of Everquest to make it legal for them to gather whatever information/files from your machine they deem necessary. They are also changing the agreement to prevent sale of characters, items, etc. I remember when games were just games."

Mr. Buckaroo included the full text of a letter to players from John Smedley Verant Interactive's president and CEO. It's long, but worth reading.Makes you think about the voluntary nature of this and the other software you use, and what you're willing to tolerate on your own system.

Dear EverQuest Players,
An exciting time is now at hand. Within the next 2 days the Login Servers will be coming down and we will be doing a patch that will add the EverQuest Store into the front end of the game. At that time, the first product we will be offering will be the EverQuest: Ruins of Kunark (RoK) upgrade for existing customers. This will allow existing customers of EverQuest to purchase RoK for $16.95 (Plus S&H). In addition, we will offer various shipping options depending on which country you live in. EverQuest: Ruins of Kunark will be launching on April 24th. We want to insure that this product is in everybody's hands on or before that date.

In addition to this change, we will also be modifying our User Agreement and Software License to add in some additional Terms and Conditions that we will require everyone to agree to before playing EverQuest.

The first of these changes concerns the selling of EverQuest Characters and Items outside of the game (i.e. things like Ebay). Here is the text of this change:

"You may not sell or auction any EverQuest characters, items, coin or copyrighted material."

You may ask why we are doing this. There are many reasons, but first and foremost of them is the amount of trouble this is causing our Customer Service group. Simply put there area lot of people out there who defraud others and we are being put in the middle of it, and we don't have the time or the resources to assist people with these disputes when they arise. The next reason is amore philosophical one and that is that we believe people should have to earn their items and characters in the game rather than from buying them outside the game. Obviously the second point can be argued from other perspectives that we do in fact respect, but we wanted you to hear ours.

The next change to the User Agreement and Software license concerns our efforts to stop people from hacking EverQuest and from doing malicious acts that we feel can affect EverQuest as an ongoing business concern. We have developed the technology to check for these hacking tools/programs and report that fact back to us. Without getting into the specifics of this technology, I can say that we in no way will search a user's harddrive(aside from the EverQuest directory during the patching process), registry nor will we send back any information other than the fact that a user is in fact running one of these programs (specifically we are NOT sending information about everything the user is running back to our servers).

It's disturbing that the amount of recent developments in the hacking community force us to do this. Many will say "ShowEQ" isn't worth worrying about. To us, it's cheating and it's not something we can allow in a game like EverQuest where it affects other people's enjoyment of the game. In addition, although this is the first time we'll be acknowledging this, ShowEQ isn't the worst offender. Recently we had someone attempting to bring down our servers with another malicious program. We were able to quickly identify what was going on and insure this didn't happen again, but nonetheless the potential is there and we need to be able to quickly identify and stop these types of programs. Again, I want to say it clearly that we will in NO WAY send any information back to the Everquest servers other than information regarding programs that we feel interfere with the intended operation of EverQuest. We have had this technology available for some time, but recently we've found it's going to be necessary to go to greater lengths to stop this kind of thing. To those of you concerned about privacy (and rightly so) I want to say that we feel it's necessary to do this but we want you to be informed that we are going to try these measures to protect both ourselves and the game's players.

Here is the text of this change:

"You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload(i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii)data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion,determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest."

[Updated 4:10GMT by timothy:] Reader Ted Milker set me straight on the above item, writing "That letter you posted about Everquest is months old. And it all came about from Everlore copying EQ Vaults archived news. EQ Vault restored a backup, and one of Everlore's posters decided to "scoop" that story without even reading it very carefully. Ruins of Kunark has been out for months, and April is past." Sheesh -- given game development time, I thought they meant next April! Mea culpa.

Involuntary servitude is another way to spell "truancy laws" Finally, Part Two of our trek through the Hellmouth is online. Read for more reactions on the world of bullies of all ages, and how to pull through it.

Skyhawk128 writes: "I was in my local Radio Shack yesterday, and as I was checking out, the manager offered me a free barcode scanner to use with their new catalog. By hooking up the scanner to your PS2 keyboard port and installing their software (Windows only) you can scan the bar codes found on most pages and be taken a web page with expanded information about that product. They claim to be able to scan the bar code on all sorts of things (i.e.- UPC codes on food, etc.) I have been too busy playing with the scanner in Notepad to install the software, but I thought this gadget might be of interest to other geeks." Several folks have confirmed that you can get a free barcode reader if you're into it. P'raps a SANE module shall soon follow? [Note from timothy:] Not all RS locations are giving them out yet -- the nearest one to me, despite telling me otherwise on the phone, refused to give me one until they had the new (bar-coded) catalogs in stock. That's at Chatham Station shopping center in Howard County, MD.

IntelliTubbie writes: "In an 'unorthodox form of brand sponsorship,' RadioShack is teaming up with LunaCorp, a Virginia-based space exploration startup. The goal: put a robotic rover on the moon featuring the RadioShack logo. Artist's renderings of the monstrosity can be seen at LunaCorp's web site. We're one step closer to the eerie predictions in 'Fight Club': The IBM Stellar Sphere. Planet Starbucks. Yikes." Unfortunately the robot will be powered by a TRS-80 ModelII, requiring 14 extra tons of propellant (grin). More coverage can be found at Yahoo! and discovery.com; CMU is creating the H₂O-seeking robot for the mission. (More.)

And on a related note for anyone interested in going to the moon in the relatively near future, MrScience writes: "I just received a link for this job in my mailbox from Guru.com, a pretty decent headhunter website. They are looking for a Financial Analyst to evaluate the NASA Academy, and "The end result will be a recommendation that the program either *is* or *is not* beneficial, and the specific reasons to justify such a conclusion. This report will then go before the NASA Administrator to justify the existence (or removal) of the program." I grew up dreaming of going to this, who wouldn't after seeing SpaceCamp?" Pound foolish, anyone?