Poor Mojo's Newswire

Programmer Matt Burns has written a search engine that lets people find their stolen camera gear by searching EXIF data for their serial number. Users can enter their camera’s serial number or simply drop any photo taken with their stolen camera on stolencamerafinder.com to get a list of web pages that contain images taken with the same camera. The service is free.

Michael posted a series of images describing the process used to arrive at the final prototype of the Engrain on his portfolio here. The idea is to create a keyboard where every key has a distinct texture as well as position. Touch typists now rely on finding the home row with nubbins on the F and J keys. This will allow for typists to have an intuitive knowledge of their finger position regardless of where their fingers happen to be. It’ll also just feel really great under the fingers don’t you think?

It's easy to simulate most of our senses in a tabletop RPG campaign. Sight? The dungeon-master draws a map, and characters are represented with figurines. Sound? With digital media, you could score your game with a soundtrack, or just make the sounds with your voice like you did when you were a kid. Touch? Hit each other with bopper swords. Taste and Smell are a bit trickier, but we may have that last one covered. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has released its new line of RPG-inspired perfumes and cologne based on standard fantasy races, classes, and even alignments. You might opt to pick up the Dwarf scent, which is made with "iron filings and chips of stone, Styrian Golding hops, and soot-covered leather," in comparison to the Half-Elf's "white sandalwood, beeswax, white tea leaf, oud, and a hint of sophisticated urban musk." According to Black Phoenix, a Paladin smells like "immaculate white musk, sweet frankincense, bourbon vanilla, white leather, and shining armor," while a Fighter is just "leather, musk, blood, and steel." Frankly, this all makes sense. A Dwarf smells like iron and stone and beer, a Paladin smells holy - but how on earth do you make a fragrance for character alignments? Black Phoenix tried its damnedest, assigning "rigid oak, blue chamomile, rhubarb, and fig leaf" to those of the Lawful persuasion, whereas those sinister Evil folks get "smouldering opium tar, tobacco absolute, green tea, black plum, kush, ambergris accord, ambrette seed, and costus root."

Vegans and vegetarians are known to be clever about food substitutions: baking with applesauce in place of eggs, turning tempeh into sausages. But it seems that VegNews, a San Francisco-based vegetarian lifestyle magazine, has been doing things the other way around: using photographs of meat and dairy to stand in for the stand-ins. “The pictures we’ve been drooling over for years are actually of MEAT!” thundered the author of the vegan blog Quarrygirl.com, who broke the story in a post last night. Tipped off by a reader, the blog’s author, who would not give her name, discovered that the 11-year-old magazine has been getting many of its photographs from the royalty-free service iStockphoto. And, according to the original captions, those photos are anything but vegan. That picture of a “burger”? It’s really a burger. Running with a recipe for “veganized Brunswick stew” is a shot of a decidedly un-veganized “chicken breast soup.” A creamy-looking macaroni and cheese photo depicts, the blog noted with horror, a dish made from actual cow’s milk cheese, “infused with antibiotics, pain and anguish.” . . .