Not to make all of you feel horrible about the gifts you gave your wife, but you see this telescope? Some guy made this by hand for his wife. And no, his name wasn't Copernicus.

He's never attempted woodworking before, but tackled this project with absolute determination. I'm a huge space geek, and have been fascinated with the night sky almost all of my life. I've talked of wanting a good telescope, and it would have been very easy for him to just make a stop by the store to pick one up. That he spent weeks working on this for me makes it the most special gift I've ever received.

Sure, you couldn't make a Kindle or a 47-inch Plasma TV by hand—at least nothing comparable in quality to the real thing—but did you even try? Huh?

So Rachel, you've got a really nice husband, but he's probably cheated on you in the past year. That's the only logical explanation. [Make]

HD Guru is reporting that DirecTV is going to launch the first 3D HDTV channel in the US next year. Great! Now all we need are 3D displays, content, and a goofy pair of glasses.

The 3D HD channel will apparently be officially announced next week at CES, and will come compliments of a DirecTV satellite that's scheduled to launch today. The report says that the channel will offer a line-up of movies, sports and other programs all in 3D, but at this point it's hard to see where that much content will be coming from. Some sports events are getting the 3D treatment next year, and there are certainly more and more big-name movies taking advantage of the technology, but there's not nearly enough out there to fill a whole schedule.

Existing DirecTV HDTV users will get a firmware upgarde that will allow them to receive the special programming, provided they have an appropriate display. That should be less of a concern than content availability, with both LG and Sony, among others, making a big push for 3D LCD televisions over the next few years.

A dedicated 3D HD channel will be a big step forward, but a lot more pieces need to fall into place before I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with Joy Behar during my daily dose of "The View." [HD Guru]

The environmental movement has gone too far. One of the main draws of the traditional Slinky was its metallic, yet smelly, rings, expanding and contracting like a steel accordion that only played one note. And now, cardboard.

Not only is this "environmentally friendly" slinky worse than a real Slinky, it costs $18! A Slinky is three fraking dollars at Walgreens, or free if you dig through your uncle's old crap. I won't stand for this, hippies. [Uncommon Goods via Nerd Approved]

A spinning excavator, a giant pit of mud, rednecks, reckless disregard for personal safety, speed, waterskis and moonshine, added to taste: some recipes are simply perfect.

There are a lot of questions posed by this video. Is the excavator stranded? Is this just a group of people making the best of a messy, annoying situation? Or was it placed there intentionally, as a part of some kind of perennial South Carolinian tradition; a sacred coming of age ritual known in the local dialect as gittin'r done? Lastly, when can I try this?

Search as I may, I can find no answers. Just more questions. [Break]

Today, DHS's Napolitano's response to the crotchbomber: "We're looking to make sure that this sort of incident cannot recur." But the TSA's response to Abdulmutalib's attempt makes one thing clear: We must stop pretending the TSA is making us safer.

Security expert Bruce Schneier nails the core incompetency: "For years I've been saying 'Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.'"

So what has the TSA done in response to the attempted attack? They've told airlines to make passengers stay in their seats during the last hour of flight. They've made it verboten for passengers to hold anything in their laps, again only during the last hour of flight. Perhaps most hilariously telling, they've forbidden pilots from announcing when a plane is flying over certain cities and landmarks.

There is no other way to interpret it: The TSA is saying clearly that they can't prevent terrorists from getting explosives on airplanes, but by god, they'll make sure those planes explode only when the TSA says it's okay.

I want our government to prevent terrorism and to make flights safer. But we are spending billions of dollars and man-hours to fight a threat that is less likely to kill a traveler than being struck by lightning. In the last decade, according to statistician Nate Silver, there has been "one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown [the] equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune." (Sadly, this does mean that in the future we can expect one out of every two round-trip flights to Neptune to be hijacked.)

The TSA isn't saving lives. We, the passengers, are saving our own. Since its inception, the TSA has been structured in such a way as to prevent specific terror scenarios, attempting to disrupt a handful of insanely specific tactics, while continuing to disenfranchise and demoralize the citizens who are actually doing the work that a billion-dollar government agency—an agency that received an additional $128 million just this year for new checkpoint explosive screening technology—has failed to do.

We just had the first legitimate attempted attack in years, and the TSA changes the threat level from orange...to orange.

This goes far beyond simple customer satisfaction issues like "Take Back Takeoff." (Although they are of a kind.) It has to do with wildly irrationally response of a government agency in the face of failure. An agency whose leader, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, said at first blush that the attempted attack showed that—here comes the Katrina-class foot-in-mouth—"the system worked." (She shoveled shit in her mouth this morning, while still talking up the asinine new measures that the TSA will be taking to respond to this isolated threat.)

I don't want to die on an airplane. I don't want to die in my home while eating an organic bagel infested with parasites that lay eggs on my liver. I don't want to die from starvation or bad water or a thousand other things that I pay our government to monitor and regulate.

But I also don't expect the government to protect from the literally endless possibilities and threats that could occur at any point to end my life or the life of the few I love. It's been nearly a decade since terrorists used airplanes to attack our country, and last week's attempt makes it clear that the lack of terrorist attacks have nothing to do with the increasing gauntlet of whirring machines, friskings, and arbitrary bureaucratic provisions, but simply that for the most part, there just aren't that many terrorists trying to blow up planes. Because god knows if there were, the TSA isn't capable of stopping them. We're just one bad burrito away from the TSA forcing passengers to choke back an Imodium and a Xanax before being hogtied to our seats.

President Obama, don't let this attack—this one attack that was thankfully stopped by smart, fearless passengers and airline staff—take us further in the wrong direction. I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. Americans of all stripes and affiliation standing up to say, "This isn't working. We gave you our money. You're not making us safer." We appreciate the attempt to make us safer and acknowledge that it came from an honest attempt to protect American (and the rest of the world's) lives.

But it's a failure. It's wrongheaded. It's a farce. Tear it down. Put the money towards the sort of actions at which our government excels, like intelligence. The failure of the TSA leaves us no choice, but it's okay. The American people are ready to take back the responsibility for our own safety. Really, we already have.

Everybody knew the iPhone was coming—just like everybody knows the tablet coming. Funny thing is, (nearly) everybody got everything else about it wrong. If we'd all been right, the iPhone would've sucked.

From Technologizer's round-up of pre-iPhone iPhone coverage, here's some of the most of tragicomically wrong specurumorbobulation:

• An Apple phone's functions could be accessed hassle-free with the iPod's scroll wheel, and the numbers could work with a slide-out keyboard or a simple touchpad system on the screen.

• The click-wheel is closer to the bottom of the device with the screen taking a vertical orientation. The click-wheel portion of the device reportedly slides down to reveal a traditional numeric dial-pad underneath. The front is black, while the back is chrome like the current iPod.

• Two battery design (with single charger) - one for playing music, the other for phone functions.

• The first will be little more than an iPod Nano with basic phone capabilities while the latter will boast more advanced smartphone functions including real-time IM using Apple's iChat platform (and by proxy, AOL and Jabber).

• AppleBerry–a combination iPod/BlackBerry: Apple Computer and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion might be working on a product together based on the advice of their common partner, Intel. The pairing combines Apple's design expertise with RIM's relationships with carriers and handset makers.

Okay, altogether now: Ahahahaha.

But wait. Check out these bits from a piece by NYT's John Markoff from 2002:

And now come signs that Mr. Jobs means to take Apple back to the land of the handhelds, but this time with a device that would combine elements of a cellphone and a Palm-like personal digital assistant.

But industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an "iPhone."

But analysts and people close to the company say that the plan is under way and that the evidence is manifest in the features and elements of the new version of the Macintosh operating system.

He didn't just report the iPhone would be called the iPhone and be a real smartphone, he even got that it would use part of OS X. (Update: I misread, and gave him just a little bit too much credit.) Five years before it was announced. Whoa, right?

The broader point of all is this one I made rounding up all of the current Apple Tablet rumors. We all might've "known" the iPhone was coming, but nobody had any idea what it was really like, which turned out to be a good thing—an iPodphone doesn't sound all that great. Maybe it'll be the same story with the tablet. I hope so, I like surprises. [Technologizer, Image: © 2004 eye//candy]

Vespa South Africa calls this four-seater a "family car." Apparently South African families don't pack much for road trips?

Not to mention how silly it sounds for an angry father to threaten to "turn this Vespa around this instant!" No, the stretch Vespa should clearly be marketed to its rightful clientele: roving gangs of urbanites who don't mind making wide right turns. [Likecool]

The A5/1 privacy algorithm, a code which is used to protect the privacy of about 80 percent of all mobile calls worldwide, has been deciphered and made public. It remains to be seen whether it's time to panic just yet.

The algorithm in question has been used to encrypt GSM calls since 1988, but this past week, at the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day computer hackers' conference, an encryption specialist by the name of Karsten Nohl disclosed how he and about 24 other people cracked the code. He also revealed that the resulting two terabyte "code book" which is "a vast log of binary codes that could theoretically be used to decipher GSM phone calls" is available on various BitTorrent websites.

Whether you should begin to worry about this news depends on whom you listen to. The telephone companies are proclaiming that the A5/1 algorithm, a 64-bit binary code, will soon be phased out for its successor, the 128-bit A5/3 algorithm, and that even just a simple modification to the existing code would be enough to thwart any attempts to intercept calls.

Some security experts on the other hand are saying that the "hardware and software needed for digital surveillance were available free as an open-source product" and that this new development could "reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours."

Either way, it doesn't seem like it's time to shout about yet another breach of privacy just yet, so let's go back to focusing on crotch pat downs once again. [NY Times]

Photo by Taberna de Ingrid

My first iMac arrived with a jaundiced screen, so Apple sent me a replacement. After unpacking, it took only moments for me to diagnose the system as being flawed in the exact same manner. Yes friends, I'm two for two!

Just like my first 27-inch iMac, the screen is inflicted with the yellow screen issue, a color reproduction failure that moves from cool on top to warm on the bottom. Receiving two faulty products in a row is making it hard to believe that this issue isn't every bit as common as the Apple message boards would make it seem.
I'll admit, this iMac's screen isn't nearly as bad as my first's. The warm color gradient is subtler and more localized to the center. But the naked eye can see it, especially on a big, white webpage. And there's absolutely no reason that a consumer should be paying $2000+ ($2200 in my case) on any product that's anything but perfect.

Personally speaking, this setback means I'll have gone a month after dropping a few grand from my bank account without anything to show for it. A normal person might settle with product flaw, worn down by packing, shipping and customer service. The most sane would probably just file for a return.

I have a lot of respect for this "most sane" category.

Me? I basically mail back review products for a living, and the joy of this new toy has long been spoiled. So I'm going to do my damndest to bankrupt Apple with return shipping. I will send back these iMacs as many times as it takes for them to build one correctly. And every single time that they screw it up, I'm going to air their dirty laundry here. Feel free to read it or don't. It's my opinion that Apple's cyclical production issues can't be swept under the rug any longer.

You see, I received a lot of email after my initial problem post. About 80% of it was thanking me for bringing the issue to light. But about 20% suggested that this was somehow MY fault, you know, for not waiting for Apple to work out the kinks in a new line before purchasing it. As an educated consumer, I should have known that the first X% of Apple purchasers always get screwed by manufacturing problems, and my bad fortune was the result of a sort of consumer Darwinism.

I was simply unfit to buy the "ultimate iMac" with "the ultimate display."

Because that makes sense—Apple's lack of QA is my fault. Their inability to supply a functional screen—the centerpiece of this whole freaking product—is something I should have anticipated. Seriously, can you imagine if they built anything more crucial? Airbags? Plane engines? Condoms? The world would never turn a blind eye.

Apple, it's this simple: Get your shit together.

1. Openly acknowledge the issue.
2. Apologize (mock sincerity is fine if the public doesn't notice).
3. Fix the problem, which I'm betting is the LCD itself.
4. If you can't fix the problem, then just test for it at the factory. (It takes about 2 seconds.)
5. If the computer has a yellow screen, don't ship it out.

In fact, I don't even expect steps 1 or 2. If you just did 3-5, nobody would have even cared in the first place.

A couple was stuck in the untamed winter wilderness of eastern Oregon for three days after following their evil SUV's GPS navigator's directions. They were saved by a do-gooder GPS in their phone.

The couple got trapped in the snow for three days in the Winema-Fremont National Forest after their SUV's navigator told them to follow Forest Service Road 28—35 miles down the remote road, they got stuck in a foot-and-a-half of snow. They would've frozen to death, except they had packed a bunch of winter clothes.

On the third day, the "atmospheric conditions" changed enough that their cellphone's GPS was able to put out a tiny signal that led 911 dispatchers to the couple's location.

And that's why you should still learn to navigate using the stars. [Yahoo]