Make ’s Sean Michael Ragan reviews an old-school Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter he found cheap on eBay and finds it to be an eminently satisfying piece of kit. There are modern versions but they’ll cost you lots more, and this thing is pretty much indestructible so there’s no reason not to buy a cheapo one on eBay. But in terms of construction quality and durability, the Tapewriter is as far removed from those cheap plastic embossers as a Mercedes is from a Kia. Its 10? long, weighs almost two pounds, and is made almost entirely from cast aluminum, with steel fittings here and there, and all held together with machine screws. The only polymer in the thing, as far as I can tell, is a rubber friction coating on the internal tape drive wheels… Embossed aluminum is pretty much the ultimate labeling material. Without wanting to be morbid, there is a reason why military services around the world choose it for personnel identification tags. Secured with mechanical fasteners, instead of adhesives, an embossed aluminum label will stand up for years against water, extremes of heat and cold, prolonged direct sunlight, and any organic solvent you care to throw at it. This is a true industrial-grade labeling tool, and if you can snag a used one for a reasonable price, you can expect a lifetime of use from it. Tool Review: Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter

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Vintage aluminum label-embosser kicks your labelwriter’s ass

Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as The Big Con (the sociological study of con artists that was the basis for the movie The Sting ). The first edition of “Yellow Kid” Weil , the as-told-by autobiography of the cheerful crook, was published in 1948. It was long out of print, but it was reprinted in 2010 by AK Press, and it’s one of the most entertaining memoirs of the era. Students of con games will know the basic mechanics — many of which Weil claims to have invented — and will know that some legitimate contemporary business practices, such as giving away high-priced premiums to sell commodity goods and stocking department stores with flashy, cheap goods that are priced as though they were being sold at a great discount, came to prominence as part of elaborate con-games and only later were institutionalized as normal business. But the real, serious, high-octane cons were practiced with a cast from two to 200, using elaborate sets, timing and staging, and usually involved a faked-up plan to cheat on horse races, real estate or the stock market. This plan always went awry somehow, and ended with all the participants losing their shirts (as far as the mark knew, anyway — in reality, his “pal” the con-man lost nothing and would split the take with the inside man). Weil’s autobiography is really more of a memoir — it doesn’t provide much of a coherent narrative of the man and his life. Rather, it is a series of unconnected — but hugely entertaining — anaecdotes about the various scams he ran and the venal fools he took for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Weil is a virtuoso exploiter of human foibles, and each story serves as a miniature morality play in which someone who thinks he’s getting something for nothing (usually at some innocent’s expense) instead loses everything as payback for his venality. One glaring blindspot in Weil’s narrative is Weil himself. He has practically no self-awareness, and there’s virtually no sense of what’s going on in his own head as he bilks and cons his way around the world. This omission is as striking as anything else in the book, and speaks volumes about how disassociated Weil was from his own ethics and morality. The final two chapters are the most poignant, as they are where Weil, now gone straight, accounts for himself and his deeds. He repeats the con-artist’s shibboleth that he only cheated crooks who thought they were cheating others (though the book has plenty of contradictory examples he neglects to mention), but there is a glimmer of self-knowledge there that is all the more remarkable due to its absence elsewhere in the narrative. This is one of the most entertaining memoirs I’ve ever read. Its episodic nature makes it a natural for quick reads — a more perfect toilet-tank book there never was — and the detailed descriptions of Depression-era cons are priceless, especially for anyone interested in gadgets and improvisation. The scam fortuneteller whose turban disguised a telephone clamped to his head, which was wired down his collar and trouser-leg to an electrical contact on the bottom of his shoe, which would be mated to a telephone circuit when the “swami” reclined on an “oriental lounger” to “commune with the spirit world” is one of the best things I’ve ever read. “Yellow Kid” Weil

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Yellow Kid Weil: Autobiography of the greatest con man in American history

Julia Suits’s The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines - from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels is a history of those long-gone, much lamented days when Americans joined fraternal lodges in great numbers, and when those lodges attracted and retained members by subjecting new initiates to horrible, dangerous, violent pranks that often involved some combination of 35 cal blanks and high-voltage electricity. You know, the good old days. The Demoulin Brothers were the top of the fraternal order prank-gadget food-chain, publishing a secretive (but wildly popular) catalog that was distributed to lodge presidents and other mucky-mucks. The catalog featured inventions that could be used to terrorize (and delight) the members by simulating their executions, making them think they were to be horribly burned, and other delights of the simpler era when TV wasn’t yet invented and radio was newfangled and untrustworthy. Suits is a real scholar of those days, and she livens up the many reproductions from the various catalogs with great context-giving notes about the nature of these lodges, reprints from newspapers and magazine articles of the day that give a sense of their prominence and significance, and biographies of the mad geniuses who sold these gadgets for so many years. From the demented copywriting in the catalogs to the fan-letters written to the company by excited lodge leaders who were delighted with the performance of the prank items, The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions is a time machine that transports readers to that gilded age and its highly specialized notions of fun and fraternity. The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines - from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels [amazon.com]

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Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges

Gweek is Boing Boing’s podcast about comics books, science fiction, games, gadgets, and other neat stuff. In this episode, Mark reviews the psychological thriller Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber, a health book called Why We Get Fat , by Gary Taubes, a comic book called All Nighter , and the Canon S95 digital camera . Download Gweek 011 as an MP3 | Subscribe to Gweek via iTunes | Subscribe via RSS | Download single episodes of Gweek as MP3s

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Gweek 011: Why we get fat

My family has a new favorite bedtime book; my three year old has fallen in love with Polo , a little doggy featured in a series of wordless picture books by French illustrator Rgis Faller . Every night for a week, my three-year-old daughter has demanded The Adventures of Polo at bedtime. She’s at the stage where she wants a “talking story” (a story I make up, with her adding in details as we go) and a book every night, and Polo combines the best of both worlds. Told through simple comic panels, Adventures opens with Polo leaving his house (carved into a giant tree that sits on its own island) with his backpack and umbrella, balancing on a tightrope attached to a peg on the island’s edge. He walks the tightrope until it turns into a set of stairs, and then a slide, which deposits him on a cloud, that flies to another cloud on which sits a bear with a fishing rod and line. They greet each other, and then Polo slides down the line and into a little boat, and then, as the moon rises, puts on a diving helmet and goes to the bottom of the sea where he finds a star in a treasure chest. The nearby fish gather round, and guide him to the fish-king, whose wand has lost its star. Polo fits the star on the king’s wand, who conjures up a bubble that lofts Polo to the water’s surface. Back in the boat, he sails into a fog bank and is beached on the back of an enormous whale. His momentary fright is settled by the whale’s grin, and he fits wings to his boat, transforming it into a glider that the whale tosses forward with a flick of his tail, delivering Polo to a tropical island with its own volcano (Polo roasts some wieners on a string over the lava-flow). And then Polo is off again, on more adventures that include islands, musical monkeys, soaring balloons, mischievous mosquitoes, a diving bell, an igloo with an angry polar bear, an ice-boat, a friendly snowman, and then a trip back home to the island where it all started. For us, Polo’s magic is in the combination of the whimsy and charm of the illustration and the just-right degree of narrative coherence between the panels and pages, which are perfect for Poesy to follow along — she delights in trading narrator duties with me, and the lack of words puts us on something like equal footing. Reading to my daughter is one of my greatest pleasures, and Adventures has taken our reading to a new level. The Adventures of Polo

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Adventures of Polo: wordless picture book is a bedtime delight

The Looxcie is one of the silliest products we’ve seen that isn’t a mere concept. It’s a wearable Bluetooth camera that records everything — it’s meant to document your daily life and create movie clips that can be shared to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. To find out if the Looxcie provides the ultimate hands-free video recording experience, we embarrassed ourselves to the best of our abilities to test the hell out of this thing — in public. Click on for the full review.

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Looxcie: the Bluetooth camera that’s always on and always recording

Struck by the Chimaera’s pro-gramer looks, we took the $130 stereo headset to our Xbox 360 to see whether or not Razer , makers of some of the best gaming gear on the planet, could create an unmatched personal audio gaming experience. Read on to discover if the Chimaera roar is loud and mighty or low and weak.

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Razer’s Chimaera: wireless ‘n’ stylish, but how do they sound?

The beautiful HP Z800 workstation knocked our socks off last year , but now it’s packing even more serious heat. This new $10,483 workstation, designed by BMW DesignworksUSA, looks the same as last year’s model, but inside lurks a pair of Intel’s fastest six-core Xeon Westmere EP X5680 3.33GHz processors. We knew the machine would be faster, but putting the pedal to the metal, the results were even better than we expected.

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HP 12-core workstation is 34% faster, consumes same power

Want to know about Google’s Nexus One smartphone, but don’t feel like reading a 10,000-word review? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve taken the shiny, smooth smartphone on the road, putting it through its paces and testing it every which way. Now we’ll give you our impressions of the phone in the most succinct manner. First of all, just look at it. Although it’s that weird color of grayish dog doo, its design reeks of derring-do. Every picture we’ve seen of it makes it look too big, but in the real world it’s a lot smaller and thinner than those pics depict.

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Google Nexus One: Almost the best smartphone

After the first minute I hated it. After a day I loved it. After a week, I’m on ibuprofen. I like the Magic Mouse, especially the touch-sensitive surface and flick scrolling, but am just not sure how long my metacarpals can take it. It’s not Apple’s fault: my hand is passing three decades old and I can’t get away with poor mousing habits anymore. But the iffy ergonomics don’t help. And though this is Cupertino’s best mouse by a country mile, it has some other drawbacks, too. So an unqualified recommendation isn’t quite possible. But I do like it. Surfing the web was a flick-scroll delight from the get-go, even if something about the twitchy touch-sensitive surface dissuades me subtly from doing any real work with it. It’s just weird enough to present the brain with a new learning curve that turns swiftly into a dangerous acquired taste: like the iPhone keyboard, it makes casual use easier and serious use harder. As far as the multitouch touchpad goes, the iPhone–not a laptop’s trackpad–is the right comparison. Clicking is still done the old-fashioned way, which is a good thing, but there’s no middle-click. No pinching gesture, either! The embedded multitouch tracking pad covers almost all of it and mostly serves to replace the scrollwheel found in standard mice–and the Mighty Mouse’s scrollball. Visually, Magic Mouse is an archetypally beautiful Apple product. There are just two curving surfaces, which meet to trace the geometrical form otherwise represented in nature by shoe horns. On top is the expansive white button/trackpad. Underneath is the metal base, broken up by two long teflon pads, a hole for tracking optics, a power switch and a battery light. Two AA batteries are required and are included. It’s well-made, wireless (BlueTooth) and attractive; the minimalist design will be a boon for those who like neat desktops. Drivers are available for Windows. Momentum scrolling feels natural and establishes an organic correspondence between force used and on-screen results. It’s the best thing about it. Other tricks the touchpad facilitates, like holding one finger down to click and then using another finger to scroll-select—feel elegant, a taste of even better implementations to come. This stuff is the magic in the Magic. Also good is that it doesn’t have the wake lag that typifies the BlueTooth mice I’ve used before. In its tracking, responsiveness and precision, it feels much like a decent RF wireless mouse from Logitech or Microsoft. The lack of middle click remains my most pressing real problem. Snow Leopard users can set up a triple-tap gesture with this trick , but people on 10.5 seem out of luck. Command-clicking is a poor substitute. The relatively low-profile shape means it lacks the domed, palm-nestled ergonomics of standard mice. For me, this encourages a punishing anti-grip in which the mouse is pushed around by the inside edges of my little finger and thumb. My pointer, index and ring finger arch over the surface like taut fleshy claws. Old muscle-memory habits occasionally send my hand wandering up it like a spider, sending documents scrolling out of place. Any who prefer a sense of mechanical control will not like this inadvertant fluttering around. Lack of middle click, odd ergonomics, and an occasional inclination to do whatever it pleases. If you don’t like the sound of those drawbacks, don’t let yourself get addicted to momentum scrolling. Magic Mouse - $69 at the Apple Store.

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Magic Mouse