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Robbo writes, "Lloyd Kaufman is best known as the uber super epic producer/director who runs Troma Films, creators of such cinema icons as 'The Toxic Avenger' and 'Surf Nazis Must Die.' Lloyd is also a die-hard advocate for Net Neutrality and he has posted an article to the Huffington Post entitled: Innovation And Our Better Future Depend On Preserving Net Neutrality - and it's a good read by a passionate and intelligent individual - who also happens to make movies like 'Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead.'" (more…)

These strange wooden boxes by Paolo del Toro have whimsical designs that open at the mouths to reveal a secret compartment. Just loosen the drawstring and add whatever you'd like. (more…)

Let's take the path less traveled for some holiday gift giving. Two brothers well known in the world of magic and cardistry , Dan and Dave Buck, have a number of enterprises going, including a website called Art of Play . While its nucleus is the sale of unique decks of playing cards, the site has expanded greatly under the guidance of Adam Rubin, the "Director of Puzzles and Games."We travel the world in search of objects designed to dazzle the eyes and fascinate the mind. From luxurious playing cards to ingenious puzzles and stimulating amusements—each beautiful item in our collection holds a whisper of mystery, brimming with potential for surprise and delight.25 Days of Christmas Extravaganza! Whatever you celebrate this December, we're honoring you and the ones you love with our 25 Days of Christmas extravaganza. Every day through December 25th we will offer either a free gift or an exclusive item, such as a rare deck of playing cards. Offers are limited to one day only. To take part, just be sure you're subscribed to our newsletter.I'm personally not much interested in fancy decks of cards—I do my card tricks the old-fashioned way, using Bicycle Rider back cards from the U.S. Playing Card Company. But if, for example, you're a fan of Neil Patrick Harris (who also does magic in addition to being able to sing, dance, act, emcee, etc. and so on) then you might find this special deck interesting.NPH Playing Cards ($10.00)Neil Patrick Harris Playing Cards are elegant, intricate, and visually stunning. Every aspect was handcrafted with relentless, unrivaled attention to detail. With a combination of artistic influences, NPH Playing Cards are a tribute to Neil's love of mystery, magic, games, and theater. The cards feature a custom Ace of Spades, Joker, box design, and modified court card typography. Even the inside of the box has a custom, elegant gold foil pattern. Printed by the U.S. Playing Card Co.My favorite part of the site, and where I've spent my money, is the section on "curiosities." Here you will find items from the modest to the lavish, and several of these have a chance of ending up on my shelves. These folks really know how to make their products sound interesting:3D Card Star $8.00Behold the magnificent twelve card star, a stellar explosion of geometry in three dimensions. Created by Professor George W. Hart, co-founder of the Museum of Mathematics in New York City. Once assembled, the dozen pre-cut playing cards included will lock together to create a 5.5" tall starburst. A thought provoking sculpture to display on your coffee table or hang from your ceiling.Dymaxion Folding Globe $15.00Explore the geometry of earth with this handheld magnetic folding globe. Inspired by the work of famed architect, Buckminster Fuller, the Dymaxion globe is accurate even when unfolded and laid flat on the table. Designed by Brendan Ravenhill for Areaware.Paper Zoetrope $12.00Create your own moving pictures with this simple animation kit. The zoetrope first gained popularity in the 1860s yet this optical illusion is no less fascinating today. Illustrated strips magically come to life when viewed inside the spinning drum. Six sets of images are included but you can also follow the patterns to design some animations of your own.Handmade Praxinoscope $195.00Rediscover the magic of animation with this vintage optical toy. Invented by Charles Reynaud in 1877, the praxinoscope utilizes a rotating drum and a series of mirrors to create brilliant moving pictures. This mesmerizing instrument is constructed from copper and wood. 8 illustrated paper strips are included to create a variety different animations. Measures 8" wide by 11" tall. Curiosity Box $65.00This box is full of potential epiphanies—puzzles, illusions, and amusements designed to reward the curious mind. Some may not reveal their true beauty easily but that's the nature of any satisfying mystery. If you delight in the surprise of these rare novelties, remember—the best thing to do with curiosity is to share it. Limited Edition of 200.They make a good pitch for their products, don't they? Even if you don't want to purchase anything, the site has a blogof entertaining entries with articles on optical illusions, puzzles, and magic tricks. So that's where I'm doing some of my holiday shopping. I really really want that Praxinoscope! Hint, hint … I hope my wife is reading this. Helloooooooo?

Besides being an editor at Boing Boing, I'm also an editor at Cool Tools. Cool Tools has an annual gift guide, and it's worth sharing. It's got felt guitar picks, stainless steel can insulators, mushroom coffee, hand-crank coffee grinders, cast aluminum kitty litter scoops, and much, much more. (I'm also sharing Boing Boing's gift guide with Cool Tools readers.)Check out Cool Tools' gift guide here.

Apple -- which is one of the multinational poster children for tax dodging, along with Google, Amazon, Ikea and others -- has billions of dollars "offshore" and in theory they can't bring that money into the USA without paying tax on it; but thanks to some fancy accounting, much of that money is sunk into US Treasury Bills (floated by the government Apple is starving through tax evasion), and the US taxpayers pay Apple, about $600M so far. (more…)

The Mirai worm made its way into information security lore in September, when it was identified as the source of the punishing flood of junk traffic launched against Brian Krebs in retaliation for his investigative reporting about a couple of petty Israeli criminals; subsequent analysis showed Mirai to be amateurish and clumsy, and despite this, it went on to infect devices all over the world, gaining virulence as it hybridized with other Internet of Things worms, endangering entire countries, growing by leaps and bounds, helped along by negligent engineering practices at major companies like Sony. (more…)

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. For less than the price of one of these apps, you get all nine. Included in the bundle are:PDF Expert 2.0 for Mac - This 2015 App of the Year will boost your productivity by removing the pain of working with PDFs. It lets you edit PDF text, images, links, and outlines quickly and easily—right in the PDF document itself.CrossOver 15 - If you game on a PC, but use a Mac for everything else, this app will be a game-changer. It lets you run PC games and apps, while still operating on your Mac desktop.MainMenu Pro - With MainMenu, you’ll be able to keep your Mac in good shape even as it gets older. Free up disk space, run maintenance scripts, clean up your system, fix common disk problems, and much more. With these and six additional apps, The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is definitely a solid investment for your Mac. Just don’t wait too long to snap it up: this is the last day for this extended Black Friday pricing.Also check out the Boing Boing Store's 2016 Holiday Gift Guide to treat yourself or someone close to you.

Boing BoingHere's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. Please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!Planned ParenthoodBecause we deserve health care, including reproductive, gender, and sexual health care. Because access to birth control and safe abortion is a human right. Because Trump's regime wants to destroy all of this. —XJElectronic Frontier FoundationEver since its landmark 1992 lawsuit over civilian access to strong cryptography, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting governments around the world in the fight over whether the internet is a tool for dialog and innovation around the world, or a nightmarish system for control and censorship. Trump just inherited the surveillance infrastructure that GW Bush built and Obama operationalized it -- a surveillance apparatus that EFF is already suing to end. There has never been more EFF moment than this one. —CDCreative CommonsCreative Commons is best known as a tool for sharing-friendly artists, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginngin, and all over the world, CC has provided governments, agencies, research and scholarly institutions and NGOs with the tools to easily share across borders and the bewildering array of copyright laws. We can't beat trumpism without collaboration tools, and that includes legal tools. —CDWikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)If "post-truth" is the 2016's word of the year, then Wikipedia's moment has arrived. For 15 years, Wikipedia has been figuring out how to negotiate truth among diverse and even warring points of view. It's not always pretty and it's not always nice, but no one's yet found a better way to let ideas bash against each other until something everyone agrees upon emerges. —CDHuman Rights Data Analysis GroupFor more than twenty-five years, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has held heads of state accountable for human rights violations, and they'll continue in the United States under our new President. They analyze data collected by human rights workers using cutting-edge methods from computer science and statistics. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice. We have challenging times ahead of us to hold our president-elect accountable-- recall that during the campaign, President-elect Trump promised to order US forces to commit torture, and to bomb the families of suspected insurgents. Both actions would be war crimes. We will continue to stand for justice for the victims of human rights violations. Facts do matter. And all leaders, around the world, must to be held to account for their actions.Institute for the FutureThere are no facts about the future, only fictions. As we've learned in this election, nothing is certain about tomorrow. But even as our attention is captured by the present, we can begin to write the story to come. A place to start is the Institute for the Future's Future for Good fellowship. Institute for the Future, where Mark and David are researchers, is a 50-year-old nonprofit that helps the public think about the future to make better decisions in the present. The Fellowship directly supports inspiring social innovators who are working to make tomorrow a better place. You can help too. Make a donation of $100 and you’ll receive our new limited edition Future Now ‘zine and a custom enamel pin that Mark designed!The National Wildlife FederationNational Wildlife Federation is a voice for wildlife, dedicated to protecting wildlife and habitat and inspiring the future generation of conservationists. Now's the time: the shortlist for our new Secretary of the Interior is reportedly Sarah Palin and Forrest Lucas, an "advocate of trophy hunting and puppy mills ... who never met a case of animal exploitation he wouldn’t defend." — RBThe Marine Mammal CenterWhen seals, sea lion, or many other sea going pals need help, if they get lucky, they may be taken to The Marine Mammal Center, a veterinary hospital just for them. Thousands of heartbreakingly cute, but very wild, animals are rescued, rehabilitated and released on an annual basis. I'm a volunteer. In addition to the hundreds of highly trained volunteers that make the hospital run, the center always needs cash for fish and medicine. —JWThe Southern Poverty Law Center & the Anti-Defamation LeagueThe Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defemation League fight hate, teach tolerance, and help secure justice, and fair treatment for all. "There is no 'them' and 'us.' There is only us." --Greg Boyle —JWFacing History and OurselvesFacing History and Ourselves is an international educational group that helps young people study issues around racism, antisemitism, and prejudice in history, from the Holocaust to today's immigrant experiences to the killing fields of Cambodia. Their aim is to teach young people "to think critically, to empathize, to recognize moral choices, to make their voices heard, we put in their hands the possibility--and the responsibility--to do the serious work demanded of us all as citizens." —DPFree Software Foundation/Defective By DesignThe Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free. —CDFree Software Foundation EuropeSoftware has eaten the world, and software freedom is increasingly synonymous with human freedom. In Europe, far-right parties and authoritarians are inheriting a constellation of gadgets and devices that are "defective by design," built to allow corporations spy on and control their owners -- and those thugs are contemplating how they can use those companies' extraordinary powers to put whole populations under their thumbs. Free softwar in Europe, free software everywhere! —CDThe Internet Archive: In an era where the control of information has been weaponized, the Internet Archive's mission -- universal access to all human knowledge -- is a revolutionary manifesto. The Archive isn't screwing around: they're siting a copy of their data in Canada to resist trumpian grabs and spying. —CDOpen Rights GroupFor Britons, 2016 was the year of Brexit, and while we were all fighting about Brexit, Theresa May's Tory government passed the most intrusive surveillance bill in the history of modern democracies. It's a longstanding joke that the gnomes of Westminster Village think that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a manual for statecraft, but the joke is getting less funny by the second. ORG is a decade old: spunky, going though a timely growth spurt, and badly needed. —CDAmnesty InternationalI just looked up Amnesty's founding principles and found tears rolling down my cheeks: "Only when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world’s people, will our work be done." 2016 is a year when these values need our support more than ever. —CDACLUOn November 9, ACLU changed its homepage to a picture of Trump superimposed with the words SEE YOU IN COURT. ACLU's deep bench of kick-ass lawyers has been lately augmented by a much-needed group of freedom-fighting technologists, welded into the fighting force we'll need for the next four years and beyond: from voter suppression to free speech, the ACLU is key to the fight. —CDLibertyWith the UK plunging into surveillance dystopia where human rights are an afterthought and racial profiling is becoming official doctrine, it needs Liberty, an organisation with 80+ years' track record fighting for human rights in many incarnations of the British project. The Tories ran on a platform of repealing the Human Rights Act: when the government is officially anti "human rights," you need someone like Liberty to take the "pro" side. —CD 826 NationalBorn in San Francisco’s Mission District in the back room of a piratesupply store, 826 National teaches young people the art and magic ofcreative writing through classes, DIY publishing projects, in-schoolprograms, and drop-in tutoring at seven centers around the US. And it’sall free for the kids. Help open more 826 locations around the country! —DPFight for the FutureSome of the Internet's savviest, hard-working-est activists. Fight forthe Future is in all the Internet fights, kicking ass on Net Neutrality -- a fight that's back on in 2017, thanks Trump -- mass surveillance and justice for Chelsea Manning.DemandProgressAaron Swartz co-founded Demand Progress, and as you'd expect from thathistory, they're relentless in reinventing the activist playbook for the21st century. MySocietySoftware in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers. —CD

Shivan, a computer science student in Montreal, applied for a job at Amazon; the second round interview was conducted remotely by a proctor from an online service called Proctor U who insisted that Shivan install a remote-access trojan on his computer that let the proctor completely control his machine; then he was made to use the camera on his laptop to give the proctor a view of his room and all the things in it (with the proctor barking orders at him to shift his belonging around to give a better view. (more…)

Publio Delgado provides jazz guitar accompaniment to an advertisement for Jones Big ASS Truck Rental & Storage: "In my yard, I don't care!"Here's the original, which now seems naked and bereft of wonder:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0gb9v4LI4oSee also Publio's accompaniment to a lady's unwise attempt to eat a hot pepper raw:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuIiYOgtEuYBest, though, is his accompaniment to The Cat That Says No:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSZlyNGj3dg

Arthur Boycott borrowed a copy of Dr William B Carpenter's The Microscope and its Revelations from Hereford Library in 1886 or thereabouts. His granddaughter, Alice Gillett, just returned it. The £7,446 late fine was waived, reports the BBC. Mrs Gillett discovered the book while she was sorting through a collection of 6,000 books following the death of her husband earlier this year. On discovering the HCS library stamp inside the book, Mrs Gillett, who lives near Taunton, decided to return it."I can't imagine how the school has managed without it," she said.Photo: HEREFORD CATHEDRAL SCHOOL

Rio Tinto is a giant UK/Australian mining corporation that operates many facilities in Australia's remotest reaches, where there is no housing for workers, so the company ends up building "company towns" where their laborers live, closing the loop between home and worklife, and putting them both under control of a corporation; now the company is flirting with the kind of "smart city" technology that has been tried elsewhere, but generally in places where the residents are citizens, not employees, and the governing law is created by a legislature, not a non-negotiable employment contract. (more…)

Distractify has thirty mall santas to be on the lookout for. There's plenty of listicle filler here, but would you just look at those vintage masked bastards. There's even a website dedicated to creepy santas. [via MeFi, which has even more]

KINO demonstrates ways in which Tarantino's The Hateful Eight pays homage to John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing. (more…)

As part of her Ordinary Women series, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency examines the impressive achievement of Ada Lovelace, the “mother” of computer programming. You can also watch the Ordinary Women profiles on Ching Shih and Ida B. Wells:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0U6Ol-38Twhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ip-SEYvRTA

Following the tragic fire in an Oakland warehouse space called Ghost Ship, engineer and designer Gui Cavalcanti put together a guide to help ensure that unconventional homes, studios, and galleries are as safe as possible. Cavalcanti’s article acknowledges that people generally use these types of spaces because they can’t afford more conventional real estate. And his guide centers on small, inexpensive changes that can save lives. Here's an excerpt:Make sure your exit infrastructure is fire-safe. News reports indicate that the Ghost Ship fire was exacerbated by the fact that an improvised stairwell was made of pallets. For the record, people often construct bonfires out of pallets. They are not sound building material, they are not fire-resistant in any way, and they should not have been serving as exit infrastructure between the first and second floor. I’ve seen many pieces of improvised infrastructure in the spaces I’ve visited; second floors that are served by home-built wooden ladders, wooden lofts that serve as mezzanines, catwalks made of old building materials, you name it. All of these examples can be extremely hazardous in a fire or other hazardous situation. They’re cool, they’re edgy, they’re creative, but they can also be fundamentally unsafe. Make sure you have safe exit paths (that are marked and made of fire-safe materials) to all of your spaces, even if you also have decorative walkways and paths. Ladders, poles, ropes and other features are not safe exits.You can read the full piece over on Medium.

BuzzFeed shared this awesome story about an Oregon artist named Crispin Young Wilson who created a stunning galaxy ceiling for a friend’s four-year-old son, Ben. Ben was anxious about having his own room for the first time so Wilson gave him something special to look at while falling asleep. The ceiling looks completely normal in bright light:https://twitter.com/crisp22/status/800716804213440513But in the dark it looks like this:Ben reportedly loves his new room. And really, who wouldn’t? You can see more of Wilson's work or commission a mural on her website.[Photos via @crisp22 on Twitter]

I recently stumbled across Dutch designer Rommy Kuperus’ work and I can’t get enough of it. Her purses and accessories look good enough to eat (literally), and there’s a really great sense of humor to her work:You can find more photos or make a purchase on her Etsy shop, Rommydebommy.

Annabel Lector of Conjuror's Kitchen makes rather spectacular, macabre chocolates: gilded crow's skulls, kitten's skulls, conjoined fetal skulls, barn owl skulls and even a chocolate life-mask of Vincent Price and doll head lollipops. (via Wil Wheaton) (more…)

In a thoughtful New York Times editorial, science fiction giant William Gibson mediates on the difference between the privacy that individuals have and deserve, the privacy that governments assert ("What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens?"), and what this will mean for the historians of the future. (more…)

Yesterday morning, Matthias Kirschner opted out of the "voluntary" full-body scanners at Berlin's Schönefeld, and discovered that "voluntary" means that "if you don't do it, they will barrack you endlessly about your choice, punitively repeatedly perform the same searches over and over, and attempt to delay you so you almost miss your flight." (more…)

We've posted previously about Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the weird sounds in electronic recordings that some paranormal researchers insist are actually voices of spirits. But I didn't realize that EVP is part of a larger genre of ghostly phenomena called Instrumental Transcommunication "said to occur on devices as varied as television sets, radios, computers, handheld devices such as ipods or iphones, and even fax machines," according to Mysterious Universe. In the 1970s and 1980s, one popular medium for these ghosts in the machine were television sets. (Remember Tobe Hooper's excellent 1982 film Poltergeist?) From Mysterious Universe:Throughout the 1970s and 80s the ITC phenomenon as it relates to TV really got its roots, becoming quite popular with researchers of the weird, and there were numerous supposed video and audio recordings of these TV bound ghosts at the time. The investigators in these cases claimed that this phenomenon had even been documented with TVs that were turned off or completely unplugged.One of the pioneers of using televisions to try and pick up signals from the dead was a German ITC researcher named Klaus Schreiber, who used an apparatus that he called the “Vidicomin,” which used a video camera aimed at a TV set that was switched on but not attached to an aerial, and the signal looped the output from the camera back into the TV. This loop was said to produce dramatic results, with various faces apparently blooming out from the white noise on sets, and on one occasion an actress from Austria named Romy Schneider supposedly clearly appeared on a TV in one such session years after her death. In 1986, another ITC researcher and physicist named Ernst Senkowski claimed to have attained a clear, unmistakable image of a spirit from a TV set. In this case, a brief feed of video was picked up depicting the spirit of a dead EVP researcher named Hanna Buschbeck, who had died in 1978. In the video, she allegedly appeared recognizable yet much younger than she had been when she had died."Ghosts in the Machine: The Strange World of Haunted TVs" (Mysterious Universe)

IDNYC is New York City's ID card program, and it has served as a critical means for undocumented migrants to get identity papers that they can use to establish utilities accounts, bank accounts, and so on. The city has announced a change to the program's data-retention policy, vowing to purge information that might be useful in the mass deportations promised by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. (more…)

Emergency response times in Zalgo county are superlative! [via]

In the (soundless) video above, @thumb_tani demonstrates his masterful coin balancing. (via Laughing Squid)製作開始から二時間弱。時間を犠牲にした新作をご覧下さい。 pic.twitter.com/11TZp0IkBo— た　ぬ (@thumb_tani) December 3, 2016 こんな事に1時間も費やしてしまった。こんな事に。 pic.twitter.com/c5b29pi3tl— た　ぬ (@thumb_tani) November 23, 2016 コインタワー。久し振りにやると緊張しますね。 pic.twitter.com/Ui6kRct1JC— た　ぬ (@thumb_tani) October 22, 2016

I can't wait to finally see Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch's documentary about Iggy Pop and The Stooges!

It's not bad. In fact, this is a triumph: a Christmas song written entirely by an artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto. Yet it has that uncanny neural network je ne sais quoi in spades. I swear it’s Christmas EveI hope that’s what you sayThe best Christmas present in the world is a blessingI’ve always been there for the rest of our lives.

If you aren’t already watching The CW’s stellar musical comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you should definitely check it out. You'll be treated to plenty more slightly demented musical numbers like this one. As the song says, “When my friends and I stick together, there's nothing we can't do/And when I say that, I specifically mean, we're gonna stage a coup.”

Writer and animator Natalie Gray creates a lot of great fan art, but one of her coolest pieces is this Harry Potter-themed “What do wizards have in their pockets” collection. The four GIFs represent the four Marauders: James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew.

These bespoke tree-shaped ornaments by Forge Creative might look great hanging from a tree, but they would also be right at home on a mantlepiece or in a curio cabinet.Quoth Forge:These collectible tree ornaments are hand-turned on a lathe and each tree is unique. We use off-cuts form a wide variety of woods and turn a them into different shaped trees. This way each one ends up with its own unique character. These look great as a small collection on a mantlepiece. We will pick trees at random and If you buy more than one we try to send a mix of different wood types and shapes. If you wish to choose a specific wood or colour, let us know and we will see what we can do.They have 35 shapes to choose from and all kinds of wood.• Trees (Forge Creative via Behance)

Skier Mathieu Bijasson didn't think it was insane enough to ski down the steepest faces of the French Alps during the day, so he rigged up some skis and poles with LED lighting and did it at night. The result is visually beautiful and teeth-clenchingly terrifying all at once. (more…)

The 88kncorbett Instagram account is a treasure trove of amazing photos of the most patient animals in the world.https://www.instagram.com/p/BMkYR5PgjHU/https://www.instagram.com/p/BL4I5DLgvSZ/https://www.instagram.com/p/BKPJ645jZLO/https://www.instagram.com/p/BH6Ja-gjuej/

Azerbaijani artist Tünzale Memmedzade spent three years writing out the Quran in gold ink on transparent black silk, and the effect is just beautiful. (more…)

“While my wife was at work today, I had some fun modding our daughter's Magic SleepSuit,” from imgurian Bruck. (more…)

John Glenn, a war hero and the first American to orbit planet Earth, has been hospitalized in Ohio for over a week. (more…)

Texas passed a new regulation requiring "cremation or burial" of fetal tissue after a miscarriage or medical abortion, and to hear the lawmakers who passed this idiotic rule, this requires grieving women to dress up minute scraps of tissue in little funeral suits and stand contrite over a tiny casket while a clergyman excoriates them for disappointing god with their selfish uteruses. (more…)

A Pittsburgh-area man was charged with disorderly conduct after telling Verizon store staff that he was "definitely part of ISIS" and talking about ISIS on the store's demo handsets. When asked to leave the store, Fleming said “he wouldn't leave the store and that he was definitely part of ISIS,” the complaint said. He also said that “he was calling to get his posse to get them” and other Verizon stores.Fleming eventually left the store, but was later arrested wearing a ski mask at a bar. Police said he made statements about ISIS to officers and had a block, which he said “I want people to believe it’s C-4 explosive,” the complaint said.They have all the handsets right there to play with, but make an international call on one and everyone loses their mind!

I bought this foldable step stool in January and we use it a few times a week to get out of reach stuff in the kitchen. It's 11 inches high, and is only 1.5 inches thick when folded up. It has replaced a non-folding plastic step stool that we'd kept in on the floor in the closet. It's on sale at Amazon for $11.

On Common Dreams, Paul Buchheit rounds up a ton of scholarly/economic papers on the ways that automation is coming to employment niches occupied by well-educated middle-class professionals, who face the same dilemma their "low-skilled" industrial colleagues have been living through for three decades and counting. (more…)

James Cawley is a 50 year old Elvis impersonator from Ticonderoga, NY; his friend William Ware Theiss was costume-designer for the original Star Trek series, and left Cawley the blueprints for the original Star Trek Enterprise sets in his will -- so Cawley rented out a 13,000 sqft shuttered supermarket and built an exquisite replica of the original there to use in elaborate fan-films, and now he gives one-hour tours. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAOj0H5c6YcLast year's Hello Barbie chatbot toy sent all your kid's speech to cloud servers operated by Mattel and its tech partner, but only when your kid held down Barbie's listen button -- new chatbot toys like My Friend Cayla and the i-Que Intelligent Robot are in constant listening mode -- as is your "OK Google" enabled phone, your Alexa-enabled home mic, and your Siri-enabled Ios device -- and everything that is uttered in mic range is transmitted to Nuance, a company that makes text-to-speech tech (you probably know them through their Dragon-branded tools), and contracts to the US military. (more…)

When you sign up for a Wells Fargo account, you're required to sign an arbitration "agreement" giving up your right to sue the company, and requiring you to have your case heard by an arbitrator paid for by -- and dependent on -- Wells Fargo instead. (more…)

Fun remix of Gerry and Silvia Anderson's supermarionation classic Thunderbirds.Thunderbird 4 would have been mine. MINE.

Environmental lawyer-turned-Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick has a cool use for the new SEC rules requiring companies to disclose executive pay starting in 2017: he's going to impose special taxes on businesses where the ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay exceeds 100:1 -- an increase of 10% for 100:1 companies, and 25% for 250:1 companies. (more…)

For the past week, Naked Capitalism has run a series of articles by transportation industry expert Hubert Horan on the economic shenanigans of Uber, which cooks the numbers it shows investors, drivers and the press to make it seem like something other than a black box that uses arrogance and lawlessness to make a bet on establishing a monopoly on transport in the world's major cities. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q85iELbijAk&feature=youtu.beDiguo's Luxury Royal Family Balance Syphon Coffee Maker is an amazingly elaborate coffee siphon, a brewing method dating to the 1830s which is said to produce "a delicate, tea-like cup of coffee," albeit with the caveat that it is "quite persnickety." (more…)

If you're one of the 60% of Pebble employees who didn't get a job offer from Fitbit, the company's new owner, you're probably not having a great Christmas season -- but that trepedation is shared by 100% of Pebble customers, who've just learned (via the fine print on an update on the Pebble Kickstarter page) that the company may soon "reduce functionality" on their watches. (more…)

Several years back, we posted about the wonderful site youarelistening.to, a strangely soothing mix of ambient music and police radio chatter (!) from various cities. Youarelistening.to isn't the only source of lovely and relaxing field recordings and ambient noise though. Here are a few of DIGG's favorites:CoffitivityIf your cup of coffee isn't giving you the kick you need, flipping on Coffitivity might be a good next step. Coffivity provides the cozy and comforting sounds of a cafe (which can help you focus according to scientific research) in six flavors, including Paris Paradise, Texas Teahouse, and Brazil Bistro. Virtual ShowerMimicking the sounds of the room in the house where everyone does their best thinking, Virtual Shower also boasts a temperature setting that changes the color of the page. You can't hear it, but you'll know it's there.Blazing LogsAnother simple one. Flip this year-round-yule log on to hear the crackle of a fire and not much else."The Most Relaxing Ambient Sound Sites On The Internet" (DIGG)

Mary (AKA @sapphicgeek) works in an Indiana comic shop, and Saturday, she met a customer, a distraught teen girl, looking for Supergirl. (more…)