Chris Nicholls of the Camera StoreTV demonstrates what to do if you are lost in the woods with only your camera gear.Tying flies is boring.(h/t PetaPixel)

Halloween is here and it was time for some new face paint. These crayons are very easy to use.A bit less exact than a brush, these crayons are a fast and simple way to put paint on whomever is your canvas. The 12 colors are bright, and vibrant; showing well against the various skin colors in our household. Soap and warm water washes it right off. I suggest wearing latex gloves as you apply it, the paint doesn't dry and gets a bit slippery on my fingers. Great for use on your budding juggalo!Dress Up America 12 Color Face Paint Safe & Non-Toxic Face and Body Crayons

In 1971 a mysterious man hijacked an airliner in Portland, Oregon, demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. He bailed out somewhere over southwestern Washington and has never been seen again. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of D.B. Cooper, the only unsolved hijacking in American history.We'll also hear some musical disk drives and puzzle over a bicyclist's narrow escape.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Sam says, "Jack has discovered that by playing dead he can scare the shit out of Archie."

A Reddit user says, "My English teacher has this posted outside her office."

Sometime over the last few weeks, the FBI made a secret arrest of a Maryland man who worked as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor for the National Security Agency. (more…)

If you've felt intimidated by Raspberry Pi and Arduino - we get that. That's why we're excited to share the SAM Inventor Kit, an incredibly simple DIY kit that was made a reality by over 800 Kickstarter backers.The SAM Inventor Kit is a smart construction kit that's simple enough for kids to use. It doesn't incorporate any wires - all the parts are wirelessly activated so you can build without needing advanced electronic knowledge. The kit comes with 4 specially selected wireless blocks, which connect to your computer and can be linked to each other to create different combinations of inventions.You can link a button block to an LED light to create a flashlights, combine blocks to master Morse code, and even design alarm systems. Best of all, you can use SAM to prank your family and friends. Check this out:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPp68MExnkw&w=560&h=315]This kit was created to help kids and adults of all ages discover their own inner inventors. Plus, you can even connect your SAM blocks to external services like Twitter and Facebook to add a social component to your creations.If you've shied away from DIY kits in the past, we highly suggest trying out this easy-to-use option. The SAM Inventor Kit is just $129 in the Boing Boing Store today.

In this entrancing video Olga Podluzhnaya Uutai from the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic of Russia howls like a wold, warbles like a bird, whinnies like a horse, chirps like a monkey, and plays a jaw harp. (more…)

No office sounds busy without a dot matrix printer ripping in the background.Also: The HALO theme on 8 floppy disk drives.

The old Canadian Conservative government of Stephen Harper had many controversial policies (cough climate denial cough), with mass surveillance powers very near the top of the charts. (more…)

This magnetic phone mount is $4 on Amazon when you use code MHE52LAQ. It's usually $9, but occasionally the price drops to $4.I started using a magnetic phone mount for my car over a year ago, and I think it is the best way to secure my phone to the dashboard. I've tried lots of other kinds of mounts, and this is the most convenient. The only downside is that you have to apply a thin metal plate to the back of your phone or phone case so it will stick to the the magnet on the mount. But the plate is very thin and it's not a bother.The magnetic mount attaches to an air vent on your car. This could be another downside, but since I live in Los Angeles, I'm almost always running the air conditioning so it keeps my phone from overheating when the sun is on it. That makes the air vent mount an upside for me. (With other mounts, the phone would get so hot that the safety shutdown would sometimes activate to prevent damage to the phone.)

"My husband freaking out over a potential road rage fight," writes Em Spiers.

John McAfee observed something unusual running on a fridge at the local Home Depot: porn.https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/782724362034118656Previously.

Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay by Ben KatchorDrawn and Quarterly2016, 112 pages, 8.8 x 10.9 x 0.7 inches (hardcover)$23 Buy a copy on AmazonLike a lot of bourgeois bohemians in the 1990s, I was a huge fan of the RAW comics anthologies which, among other incredible discoveries, introduced me to the work of Ben Katchor. One might not think that a comic strip about urban architecture, culture, city development and decay, real estate photography, memory, and loss would make very compelling comics, but then you probably haven’t met Katchor’s beloved comic strip character, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, a collection of Katchor’s Knipl strips, was originally published in 1991 by RAW/Penguin as a cheap paperback. Twenty-five years later and Drawn & Quarterly finally gives Katchor and Knipl their due in a lovely hardbound, landscape edition of the original RAW strips.If you’ve ever stared in wonder at the decades-old, sun-bleached product boxes inside of the display window of the only original hardware store left in town, or smelled an old typewriter repair shop, or purused gag gifts and tricks in a magic shop that’s been in the same city location for generations, then you’ll understand some of the lost urban culture that Cheap Novelties so deftly and melancholically evokes. As Julius Knipl is called out on building photography assignements, we see these vanishing haunts through his lens, momenents before they leave the city landscape forever, and we hear Knipl’s thoughts on the loss, reflections on his own rather homely life, and urban trivia – all rendered in a very confident and characterful hand in ink-and-gray marker washes. Cheap Novelties was one of the series that launched the whole “graphic novel” revolution in comics. After touring the city disappearing beyond Julius Knipl’s lens, you will understand why.– Gareth Branwyn

Author Sean Williams writes, "Last weekend I was MC of a small con in Canberra, Conflux 12. To keep people limber, psychically as well as physically, I devised a form Sci-fi form of Tai Chi, which GOH Alan Baxter helped me demonstrate over the course of the weekend." (more…)

Doges are done; sneks are so September. What's next? @Hay_Man's Peasant Memes! (more…)

Runestone's Interactive Python project has adapted 2012's classic How to Think Like a Computer Scientist textbook, updating it to cover recent programming advances, and creating a fully interactive version with quizzes, code examples, and coding challenges. (more…)

A week after his dreadful debate performance with Hillary Clinton, polls have headed south for Donald Trump.Clinton is currently a 72 percent favorite in our polls-only forecast, up from 55 percent just before the debate. That corresponds to a roughly 4-percentage-point national lead for Clinton, about where the race was as of Labor Day — before a series of mishaps for her in mid-September. Our polls-plus model, which blends polls with an economic index and generally produces a more conservative forecast, has Clinton with a 69 percent chance instead.But don’t take our model’s word for it: Take a look at the polls for yourself. UK paper The Independent tries to understand the nature and depth of the cycle:The bigger question for Trump is how and if he can actually pass Clinton. In the RealClearPolitics average, Trump has led Clinton for only eight days this year. There have been three days this year that Trump's polling average has been above 45 percent compared with 196 days this year that Clinton has topped that mark. Trump often disparages talk about his having a ceiling, pointing to similar arguments in the primary. But in the general, he hasn't been able to manage a polling average of 46 percent in the head-to-head contest even once. In recent weeks, he has crept upward — but now Clinton's creeping along ahead of him.Two faint lights for Trump: despite polls worsening badly elsewhere, he seems to have extended his lead in key battleground state Ohio, at least among some pollsters. Also, last night's Vice Presidential debate saw Tim Kaine in shabby, blustering form next to a calm and unruffled Mike Pence. These men were both strategic picks with mirroring objectives in mind: to win hard conservatives to Trump's side and GOP moderates to Clinton's. The consolation for Clinton is that suburban whites have gone to Trump anyway, so there wasn't much for Kaine to lose by this point.

Vancouver has been wracked by a white-hot property bubble driven primarily by offshore speculators, mostly Chinese, who have driven up the price of housing beyond the means of working Vancouverites, crippling the city's daily life as workers, students and families struggle to find somewhere -- anywhere -- to live. (more…)

Mass protests in Poland and across the world have led Poland's far-right government to drop its Vatican-pleasing total ban on abortion, which was so sloppily overbroad that it potentially criminalized miscarriage and surgeries to save foetuses' lives. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and oh, so much more. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

September is a new website launched by left-wing groups in Ukraine, Belarus, and other former Soviet states, devoted to finding common cause among activists across the region (the name is a bit of an inside joke about the October, 1917 revolution, embodied in the site's strapline, "It’s not October yet, but it’s close"). (more…)

Kody Keplinger's young-adult book, Run, has a queer character in it. In its review, the trade publication Voices of Youth Advocates (Voya) suggested this was inappropriate for younger readers: “The story contains many references to Bo being bisexual and an abundance of bad language, so it is recommended for mature junior and senior high readers.”Asked why it thought a bisexual character made it inappropriate for young readers, Voya's editors went defensive in record time:Since this is Bi Visibiliy Week, I understand your need to find and destroy your enemies in a public forum, however, Voya magazine and I are not your enemies."The complaint referred to was privately emailed; it was Voya's decision to publish it, without permission, along with this response. In another response, it doubled down on the notion that sexuality is inherently inappropriate for exposure to younger readers:Sexuality (the act or the discussion or the mention, in some cases) and language generally reserved for adults are two issues that are legitimate concerns when addressing the maturity of a teen reader. ... This does not have anything to with with whether the sexuality was homo, hetero, bit or other – sexuality is sexuality. It just happened to be that the sexuality in this particular title (Why does that upset you?)(Bonus points were not awarded for the parenthetical suggestion of emotional fragility.)When scrutinized, Voya's archives were found to have covered many books "CHOCK-A-BLOCK with heterosexual sex". Only queer moments were subject to such "legitimate concerns."To readers (and many authors) this wasn't just the usual media practice of hiding queerness from the young while slyly showering them with heterosexual titillation. Voya's responses cut deeper: the pompous and sarcastic gatekeeping, the infuriating suggestion that minorities wanting representation are the real censors, the clenched-teeth insinuations that you do not belong here.The Guardian quotes Daniel José Older nailing it. Most of the iceberg is still underwater:Daniel José Older, a YA novelist and Guardian contributor, told me by phone that Voya’s response was familiar to those pushing for greater diversity in children’s literature – though usually such responses are not aired in public. “Every so often a Shriver will come out and let her defensiveness and feelings out, and then we get something to critique,” Older said. “But in general, the folks that don’t want the industry to change don’t have to say anything, because they have the luxury of keeping quiet and getting their way. So then we’re very public in trying to get ourselves seen on the page, and we become the aggressors because we’re the ones making noise.”The apologies soon commenced, but Voya's first attempts were not very good, going for the sort of "sorry that you were offended" PR-judo that has become a media cliché in its own right: Voya reviews editor Lisa Kurdyala posted, then deleted, another tin-eared (but slightly better!) apology to Facebook, accepting that the lumping together of bisexuality and bad language was inappropriate, but rather missing the point on everything else.Finally, in response to Bustle magazine, came the real deal:On Friday, September 23, 2016, Voya began what has become a terrible example of bad social media and customer relations. Voya failed dreadfully in response to a legitimate concern about an error in a review. To compound the problem, Voya responded in exactly the wrong ways to further legitimate complaints regarding the original response. This egregious series of interactions was Voya’s fault from beginning to end, and represents the company at its worst moment.We apologize unconditionally to our colleagues and supporters for the damage, pain, and confusion the mistakes have caused. Not only have we caused tremendous insult to commenters online, we have potentially put our supporters in the uncomfortable position of being criticized for supporting us. We are taking steps to ensure that these mistakes are never made again.The "sincerity curve" of Voya's responses and apologies is noteworthy. It's rare to feel one's reservoir of cynicism so completely refilled to the brim! Sneering and groveling, it all comes from the same place.

Christopher Jobson of Colossal says, "This quick video demonstrates how to use a long elastic string anchored at the horizon of a canvas to sketch a drawing with two point perspective. "

Author Clive Thompson once wrote an essay about the experience of reading War and Peace on his iPhone. On his blog, he writes about how Sarah Boxer read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, all 1.2-million words.From Boxer's essay:Soon you will see that the smallness of your cellphone (my screen was about two by three inches) and the length of Proust’s sentences are not the shocking mismatch you might think. Your cellphone screen is like a tiny glass-bottomed boat moving slowly over a vast and glowing ocean of words in the night. There is no shore. There is nothing beyond the words in front of you. It’s a voyage for one in the nighttime. Pure romance.In a curious way, I think reading Proust on your cellphone brings out the fathomless something in the novel that Shattuck calls “the most oceanic—and the least read” of 20th-century classics. It makes you feel like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo in his submarine, which is just right.

As part of CrashCourse’s philosophy unit, Hank Green asks, “Is it possible to make true assertions about things that aren’t real?” Turns out the answer is pretty complicated.

YouTuber Tommy Edison—who aims to highlight “the funny side of being blind"—takes us through the experience of finding and reading braille signs in public places.

The first teaser trailer for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events features Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket himself. All eight episodes of the highly anticipated upcoming series drop on Netflix on January 13. Enjoy the cruel whimsy and whimsical cruelty of what’s to come.

Using four of the American covers as her inspiration, artist Lena of Illustory has created these portraits that perfectly capture the essence of each Hogwarts house.You can purchase prints over at Redbubble.[via Nerdist]

The folks at Sneaky Zebra are back at it again with another sleek celebration of cosplay. This one was filmed at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia.

Yahoo email accounts were scanned by the company on behalf of U.S. intelligence services from last year. This represents the first example of a U.S. service provider providing complete access to "all arriving messages," reports Reuters.It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.It might not seem terribly meaningful to users, given the revelation that 500m Yahoo accounts (surely all of its users, or close to it) were hacked anyway, but there's a difference between a one-off break-in and a standing invitation. Over four years of Mayer's leadership, Yahoo suffered a "stunning collapse in valuation" and was sold to Verizon for $4.83bn. Completion of the deal is reportedly threatened by the recent stories about Yahoo's security failings.

In 2015, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer ordered the company's engineers to build a tool that scanned Yahoo Mail messages in realtime for "characters" of interest to a US security agency, either the FBI or the NSA. (more…)

The Boars, Gore, and Swords book club reading of the Boiled Leather chapter order combining George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons continues with this week's "Captain Davos: Civil War." Ivan and Red covered Bran II (ADwD) in a previous episode, and continue with Tyrion IV and Davos II. They discuss their civil war over Civil War, Book Tyrion and saying one of the worst things you can say to a woman, and Davos's series of info dumps. You can also head over to their Patreon for their latest episode of Great British Bake Off coverage. To catch up on previous television seasons, the A Song of Ice And Fire books, and other TV and movies, check out the BGaS archive. You can find them on Twitter @boarsgoreswords, like their Facebook fanpage, and email them. If you want access to extra episodes and content, you can donate to the Patreon.

Sara writes, "This new report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University explores the current state of technology criticism and argues to recognize a wider range of contributors and approaches to the popular critical discourse about technology. The report also advocates for a more constructive approach to technology criticism that fosters conversation and poses alternative visions for a more inclusive technological society. Following this constructive approach, the project offers resources including an extensive reading list and a practical style guide for better technology writing." (more…)

Cards Against Humanity raised funds to create a Super-PAC devoted to "driving Trump nuts." (more…)

Though Twitter brings in a hell of a lot of money, it's not enough to satisfy the company's investors, who are said to be contemplating a sale to Google or Salesforce; in The Guardian, Nathan Schneider moots the possibility of turning Twitter into a co-operative platform. (more…)

Rapid7 security researcher Jay Radcliffe (previously) has Type I diabetes, and has taken a personal interest in rooting out vulnerabilities in the networked, wireless-equipped blood-sugar monitors and insulin-pumps marketed to people with diabetes, repeatedly discovering potentially lethal defects in these devices. (more…)

Following the release of the sourcecode for the Mirai botnet, which was used to harness DVRs, surveillance cameras and other Internet of Things things into one of the most powerful denial-of-service attacks the internet has ever seen, analysts have gone over its sourcecode and found that the devastatingly effective malware was strictly amateur-hour, a stark commentary on the even worse security in the millions and millions of IoT devices we've welcomed into our homes. (more…)

Sales of Manhattan co-ops and condos have plunged 20% in Q316, relative to the same quarter last year -- sales in excess of asking price dropped from 35% to 17%; days on market before sale increased from 67 to 72; median growth in sale price fell to 2.6% from 18%. (more…)

Understanding advanced mathematics can change how you see the world, so prepare for an eye-opening journey into the world of fixed points, courtesy of Michael at Vsauce. (more…)

Trump hit on something Joe Biden takes very, very seriously.

In 2010, three psychologists published a paper on "power poses", with their finding that people who adopted "power poses" -- think of superheroes on skyscrapers -- felt more powerful and took more risks. (more…)

Following complaints and a scathing exposé by Review Meta (previously) Amazon announced it will now ban incentivized reviews, a form of shill review written in exchange for free or reduced-cost products. (more…)

Red Dwarf never gets old! Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat are back! I just watched season eleven's kick-off episode, Twentica. Reminiscent of Star Trek's famous The City on the Edge of Forever, the crew travels back in time to prohibition America. Oddly, they find the prohibition is on science!I could not be happier! Red Dwarf is back! Now just give me the Mighty Boosh and Black Books.

German prosecutors have dropped an investigation into comedian Jan Boehmermann over a ribald poem he wrote about Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reports the BBC.Boehmermann's televised performance quipped that Erdogan fucked goats, among other insults, leading to an official complaint and an investigation.Boehmermann is a satirist and television presenter well-known for pushing the boundaries of German humour.The poem was broadcast on ZDF television. The comedian was later given police protection.Mr Erdogan has drawn much criticism in Turkey and internationally for attacking political opponents, including harassment of journalists. Many accuse him of authoritarian methods, stifling legitimate dissent and promoting an Islamist agenda.The Turkish government cited an ancient lese-majeste law making it illegal to insult foreign heads of state. Though saying the law should be scrapped, German Chancellor Angela Merkel approved the inquiry and was critical of Boehmermann.In the resulting uproar over free speech, however, both Merkel and prosecutors came under withering criticism—and stories about Boehmermann and his work only proliferated.Other people who have quipped about Ergodan's alleged affection for quadrupeds include UK foreign minister Boris Johnson.Previously: German chancellor allows prosecution of satirist who insulted Turkish president

A steamroller going over a golf ballLess than I expected!

They are by no means the first in the tiny food video genre, but Tiny Kitchen has certainly upped the production values enough to earn a 2016 Streamy Award for fun vids like these Tiny S'mores. (more…)

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.