“Frozen Grand Central” is a brilliant new mission by Improv Everywhere where 207 agents all froze in place at the exact same time for five minutes in the middle of Grand Central Station. Here’s the full mission report, including photos and video.

Wow, flying out of SFO just became much worse. While traveling this morning I surprised to find out that TSA is now requiring that you remove all electronic devices from your carry-on bags, including cables etc. and place them in a separate bin to be scanned at the security checkpoints. Along with slowing down the line to a crawl, this will undoubtedly lead to people losing expensive equipment, not to mention the possiblity for your stuff to be accidentally taken by someone else or even stolen.

Of course none of this information is mentioned on either the TSA or SFO websites.

Does anyone know if TSA is requiring this at any other airports?

Here’s more coverage of this story:

- Boing Boing
- Wired Gadget Lab

UPDATE 1: How ironic, TSA just launched their new blog today “to provide here a forum for a lively, open discussion of TSA issues”. Maybe they can explain this new SFO policy.

UPDATE 2: There’s a discussion about this issue on the FlyerTalk forums. One person thinks it’s some kind of TSA test, but so far no official word from TSA.

UPDATE 3: Just to clarify a few details, this unique security requirement was requested of everyone (not just me) in all the security lines (both regular and first class) and took place at one of the domestic security checkpoints at SFO on Thursday, January 31st.

UPDATE 4: Mark Frauenfelder posted about my TSA experience at SFO on Boing Boing and there are quite a few comments from travelers over there as well.

UPDATE 5: Ok, so it looks like TSA does not handle the gate security at SFO. It is run by a security company called Covenant Aviation Security (CAS). This might explain the discrepancies. Maybe someone from CAS would be willing to explain why the sudden change in policy.

UPDATE 6: It appears that this blog post played a part in convincing TSA to end this unusual practice of screening individual electronic items.

UPDATE 7: The Examiner published an interview with me regarding this blog post about the TSA experiement.

photo by Scott Beale

DP Review is reporting that Sigma has just announced that their highly anticipated DP1, a 14 megapixel compact camera with DSLR-sized Foveon X3 direct image sensor, will finally be coming out this spring. The camera features a wide range of manual controls and can shoot in RAW, with full spec and image quality of a DSLR.

I’m really looking forward to this one. Sigma is calling it a “camera that belongs to no known category” and from the specs it looks like it’s going to be one killer compact camera.

photos via DP Review

New from Archie McPhee, it’s Tic Tac Toast!

Finally, a good reason to play with your food! The Tic Tac Toast stamper combines the fun of tic-tac-toe with the tastiness of toast. Just press this 3-3/8″ x 3-3/8” plastic stamper into a piece of bread, then put your bread in the toaster on a dark setting. The resulting toast will be branded with a tic-tac-toe grid! When the toasted gameboard is ready, all that’s left to do is pick some tasty toppings and play a game. Winner gets to eat the toast!

Speaking of fun with toast, check out Toasted Notes from Fred.

This piping hot slice of toast is pretty hard to miss on your desktop, so you’ll always be able to put your fingers on a buttery little self-
stick note when you need one. Old Fred really wanted to call it “toast-it notes” but he just doesn’t want to deal with another lawyer. Whatever happened to America’s sense of humor? Toast Notes comes with 5 handy pads in each peggable clamshell.

photos via Archie McPhee & Fred

Here’s a classic one from the archives, The Joy of Tech on blogging.

Here’s an instructional video by cobbler where he shows you how to make a simple image stabilizer for your camera in less than 5 minutes using a string, a bolt and a washer. It only costs around $1 in materials and can fit in your pocket, eliminating the need to carry around a monopod or tripod in some situations.

via Daring Fireball

Here are two stamps on SASE sent to us for Laughing Squid stickers requests. I must say, USPS stamps are pretty damn awesome these days, especially with the recent Star Wars and Marvel Comics commemorative series.

See Previously: Star Wars Celebration IV & USPS Star Wars Stamps

photo by Scott Beale

To-Do Tattoo is a clever temporary tattoo that you can apply to your body to help you remember what needs to be done. Brought to you by Fred, the same guys who make the 500 XL speakers.

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek tribute to anyone who’s ever scribbled a reminder on their hand or wrist. Err, that would be about everybody, right? Our To-Do Tattoo kit includes 12 graphic “To Do” forms that you can apply to your body wherever it’s most convenient (or creative) and a skin-safe, washable-ink gel pen. You’ll never again have to make lame excuses for missing bowling night or your mom’s birthday. Nifty peggable blistercard packaging.

via OhGizmo!

photo via Fred

Robert Hardman of the Daily Mail has a great write-up about his trip on the Flying Scotsman, a wonderful 156′ tall bagpipe player hot air balloon owned by Muir Moffat, during the International Balloon Festival in Swiss village of Chateau d’Oex.

via Neatorama

photo via Daily Mail

The Fail Blog is a recently launched site for sharing new and classic fail images.

UPDATE: Another great Fail blog is Shipment of Fail.

via MetaFilter

photo by unknown

VR photographer Bradford Bohonus has a fantastic series of panoramic virtual reality (VR) photography of Seattle artists in their studios, including VR photos of our friends Jim Blanchard (Jim designed one of our postcards back in 2004) and art car artist Kelly Lyles, as well as porcelain artist Charles Krafft and many others.

Also make sure to check out Bradford’s amazing virtual tour of Seattle: VR Seattle

via Jim Blanchard

photo by Bradford Bohonus

Quirky products company Fred has created the 500 XL, a really cool set of desktop speakers made in the shape of giant iPod earbuds, 500 times the original size.

Sometimes bigger IS really better, especially when it comes to sound. That’s why we took a puny pair of earbuds, put them in Fred’s highly technical Way Big machine, and created 500XL - it’s 500 times the size of the original! How great will these look on your desktop alongside your mp3 player or PC? 500XL includes a built-in amp and 3-way power - it runs on batteries; you can connect it to your PC’s USB port with the supplied cord; or plug it into the wall with a generic power supply (not included). The stand-up, peggable clamshell packaging really makes a statement.

via FreshArrival

photo via Fred

Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant recently created two really beautiful prints, “Vote!” for a call-to-action to motivate people to take part of the presidential election process and “Obama” in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

illustrations by Shepard Fairey (Obey Giant)

The current issue of Wired has a great Infographic by Build showing what goes on behind the scenes when you publish a blog post.

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

via Boing Boing

infographic by Build

Tweetmeme is a new service created by the team behind fav.or.it that tracks popular Twitter links, breaking them down by blogs, images, videos and audio.

Tweetmeme will also notify you through a Twitter reply if you are the first person to post a link to Twitter that leads a popular thread on Tweetmeme.