Everything requires a login these days, and you’re only one person. Experts tell you to mix it up with your passwords, never use the same one twice, add numbers, then symbols, on and on. But how to remember all that? You spend way too much time resetting your passwords, and don’t feel much more secure at the end of the day. Well, that jig is up. Get Password Boss now for 86% off and rest assured that you just need one master password, and the pros there handle the rest, keeping you safe and sound.This app saves all your passwords and autofills your usernames for everything you do online. It randomizes and creates ultra-strong passwords for every account of yours, letting you do the easy part and simply use one master password to login here. It syncs across all your devices so you won’t have to remind yourself of that random string of letters from your iPad somewhere either. If you so choose, you can even share your passwords with select friends of family members. The custom two-step verification process keeps you extra safe by preventing data theft and even deleting data if compromised.No more letters and numbers that you’ve used a million times and you know are way too easy for hackers to guess. This one hub keeps your mind at ease and your data safe. For 86% off right now, streamline that crazy password process once and for all. This is a lifetime promotion so your online security is set for life so check out the link below for more details.Save 86% on Password Boss in the Boing Boing Store.

Malik Taylor, aka Phife Dawg, of pioneering hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest has died at age 45 from complications arising from diabetes. (more…)

Panorama photos of scenery are nice. Panorama photos of things that move from shot-to-shot are better. Huh magazine has a gallery of some great ones.[via]

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Tassos writes, "I’m one of Coney, who make all kinds of play where the audience can take meaningful part. I’m writing and game-designing REMOTE, a new piece of ticklishly interactive theatre, exploring the limits of human agency inside big pervasive systems of capital and technology." (more…)

Textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Randall Munroe's amazing Thing Explainer, and a lucky accident happened when someone in the textbook division noticed Munroe's amazing explanatory graphics, annotated with simple language (the book restricts itself to the thousand most common English words) and decided to include some of them in the next editions of its high-school chemistry, biology and physics textbooks. (more…)

The perfect accompaniment to your home-made poop emoji peeps: a marshmallow Jabba the Hutt. (more…)

Rentdownstairs was expecting a new baby, so they commissioned Atlanta woodworker Garrick Andrus to carve this amazing tentacled crib out of walnut for the impending bundle of joy. (more…)

An exceedingly rare and historically important Beatles record sold at auction today for $110,000. The 78 RPM 10" acetate includes "Hello Little Girl," apparently the first song John Lennon ever wrote (or at least recorded). The flip side is a song Meredith Wilson wrote for the 1957 play The Music Man, titled "Til There Was You." Take a listen below. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein handwrote the label on this particular record that now belongs to an anonymous collector. From Omega Auctions:This unique 10" 78RPM acetate record featuring 'Hello Little Girl' on one side and 'Til There Was You' on the other was cut in the Personal Recording Department of the HMV record store on Oxford St, London. Brian Epstein had the disc cut from the Decca audition tapes before presenting it to George Martin (EMI) on 13th February 1962 in his desperate attempt to get them a recording contract. This meeting, despite Martin's initial reticence, was to eventually lead to the breakthrough they were looking for. The disc was later given to The Fourmost to record their own version of Hello Little Girl (recorded 3 July 1963) and then to Les Maguire of Gerry & The Pacemakers (recorded Hello Little Girl 17th July 1963). This is the first time it has come to the marketplace, having been tucked away in Maguire's loft until now. Epstein's handwriting on the labels reads as follows: side 1 Hullo Little Girl, John Lennon & The Beatles, Lennon,McCartney' and side 2 'Til' There Was You Paul McCartney & The Beatles'. The acetate is in VG (Very Good) condition with light scuffs and scratches - nothing heavy. It has been played through once when digitally recorded at BBC studios and it played through well with crackle but no skips or jumps.More at CNN: "'Holy Grail' of Beatles records sells for $110k"https://youtu.be/wucEZvFL2pMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRDu7V7QCDQ

Artist, and Boing Boing pal, Gus Harper continues to create beautiful things. This collaboration with videographer Isaac Rodriquez is lovely. Gus has been experimenting with body painting.Gus had this to say about the project: It's a collaborative piece with me as the artist and professional cameraman Isaac Rodriquez as the videographer. We had this as a video installation at the last show. It was a big hit. The models are mostly body painted in front of my backdrops. It was just a way of documenting my body painting by capturing the ephemeral body art on film. The title comes from the fact that there is a lot of copper in the imagery. It made a port friend of my think about the iron age, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age… How through all this roughness there is always been the soft beauty of femininity.

You’re a saver. Maybe even a little nostalgic. You want to hang on to all your data, all the time, because you just never know when you’re going to need it next or want to look at it again. Those old pictures, videos, emails and files are going to come in handy one day, you know it. Plus, it’s the smart move, because if something happens to your computer, you want to be ready for it. Now, for whatever you want to pay, you can back up 500GB of data using Zoolz Cloud. Every system, every file, every which way, this is the easiest and most reliable storage option available.Of course it’s automatic, meaning that cold storage files are backed up instantly. Want to make sure something in particular is saved for life? You can manually add items too using the smart selection feature. And when they say lifetime, they mean it: your files are safe and sound for keeps. Once you back everything up, it will add and adjust any changes you make to existing files using its duplication technology so that you don’t needlessly double up on existing files. But don’t think they skimp. All your data is backed up redundantly across multiple facilities here, so you’re extra secure.Storage this good can usually be pricey but lucky for you this is a pay what you want system. No matter your price, you’ll get access to this incredible backup technology that you can trust all your files with. It works automatically and seamlessly, backing up as you go, but giving you control over adding, editing, removing and sharing any files anytime. Check out the link below for more details.Pay What You Want for the Zoolz Cloud Backup Bundle in the Boing Boing Store.

In Dan Baum's excellent article in Harper's about the devastating consequences of the US government's war on drugs, there's a revealing quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Watergate co-conspirator:I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.Harpers.org is offline right now. Here's Archive.org's snapshot.

In response to the terrorist bombings in Belgium, Ted Cruz said, "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Of course, sending security patrols into Muslim neighborhoods will definitely radicalize them. Then Cruz can call for a massive militarized police force to occupy the radicalized Muslim neighborhoods, making the problem even worse. Then he can boast how he was right all along.

Michael C Ford has been sentenced to four years and nine months in prison, having pleaded guilty to running a sextortion/phishing operation from his work computer at the US embassy in London for two years. (more…)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "Readers may recall a long-simmering dispute over the use of common abbreviationsrequired in citations, a technical standard known as the Uniform System of Citation.One explanation of that standard is a manual every law student knows, The Bluebook,long published by the Harvard Law Review Association in cooperation with 3 other lawschools." (more…)

The latest figures on government-backed student loans are in, and with them, the news that the US government took $176 million out of ex-students paychecks and Social Security in the last three months of 2015. (more…)

In a surprising turn of events, the U.S. government on Monday paused its battle with Apple over an iPhone, and what may be its greater goal of mandating “backdoors” in consumer encryption. On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department told a judge it needs a couple weeks to try 'new' ways of accessing whatever may be on the device, without Apple's help--and with an assist from unnamed experts from outside the agency. (more…)

Not for the squeamish!What might human flesh taste like? It's apparently illegal to eat people, even yourself, so Greg Foot of the BBC's Brit Lab settled for having a tiny morsel of his own thigh removed and cooked so he could sniff it, and speculate. (Brit Lab, thanks Sean Ness!)

Author John Biggs, who cranked 'em out for Techcrunch and Gizmodo, is quitting blogging. He writes about the things he's learned and earned generating 11,000 posts.The first thing, of course, was the complete ruination of his health: he now "looks like a nervous beluga." But there are other perils—ambiguous ones, professional tradeoffs in the 3,300,000-word accumulation of mastery at something. You learn how to write fast and with dense precision, but it wrecks your ability to work long-form, to let a story unfold. You gain an uncanny awareness for what people want to read, but you can't remember what you want to read. You realize that while you're not really being read, authenticity works.And you won't believe what happens next…You learn that you can help people. In 2005 I wrote this post. It was about a WD-40 straw holder. It was a throwaway. A few months later I got a call. A nice lady was on the phone. She was trying to track me down. She said that the WD-40 straw holder post saved her company. She was able to sell hundreds of them and stay in business. I felt good for a minute and then wrote 16 more posts that day.

https://youtu.be/Kpu8pNcANbkStep 1: Buy a catnip banana for $3 on Amazon.Step 2: Give the catnip banana to your cat. Step 3. Record a video of the cat playing with it. Step 4: Edit the video, using the song "Whats It To Ya Punk" by Audionautix (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license) Step 5. Upload the video to YouTube. Step 6. Enjoy the mean-spirited YouTube comments, many of which will begin with "Step 7...."

If your website looks like the above, it just got old. HEY LOOK, IT'S EVERY BOOTSTRAP WEBSITE EVER [adventurega.me]Want to make an original website yourself?Forget that! Who would ever want to put in all of that effort for a website? Just open up your web browser and type "bootstrap template" into your favorite search engine, like Yahoo! or Bing, and you're on your way! There are hundreds of templates to choose from, but go ahead and pick this same exact template from the first result on google, edit a few lines, and you're on your way! No one will notice!GOOGLE THAT SHIT

Adam West still wins.

Minecraft's combat system always reflected its simplicity, and basically amounted to clicking things until they died. It's just been overhauled with a game update centered entirely on combat. Ideas that seem simple become more challenging when you have to account for lag. (more…)

Ken Shirriff embarked upon a teardown of counterfeit Apple laptop chargers. On the outside, they're typo-free and very convincing. Inside, though, they're a dangerous mangle of cheap parts and inexplicably bad decisions.The most important feature of a charger is the isolation between the potentially-dangerous AC input and the low-voltage output… The counterfeit MagSafe charger has a dangerously small distance between the low voltage side (top) and the high voltage side (bottom). This is why you shouldn't buy counterfeit chargers.I'm puzzled as to why counterfeit chargers never manage to have sufficient clearance distances. They use simple, low-complexity circuits so the circuit board layout should be straightforward. Except in the smallest cube phone chargers, they aren't fighting for every millimeter of space. It shouldn't take much additional effort to make the boards safer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arOkGC9lCAkLove Hulten writes, "The Echo Observatory is a handcrafted tribute to fractals and self-similar patterns. It's a mysterious artifact that both generates and visualizes complex mathematical formations, in real-time." (more…)

Russian law provides for a national censorwall that entertainment companies can populate with the URLs of websites they dislike, without much oversight or review (it's similar the system used in the UK in that regard). (more…)

I haven't read T.W. Piperbrook's Contamination post-apocalyptic zombie series but it has 4.1/5 stars with 744 customer reviews on Amazon. Right now you can get the first 4 books as the Kindle editions for free.

On Tuesday, Jason Thompson and his four-year-old son Xavier were riding home on a Toronto bus. Suddenly the bus stopped and the driver told everyone to stay in their seats. A police officer got on the bus went up to Thompson, and told him to get off the bus. Thompson asked why but the officer wouldn't explain, repeating his order to get off the bus. (more…)

On Wednesday night, the person who runs the Twitter feed for San Francisco's BART system began answering riders' frustrated tweets with frank, honest statements that eschewed the bland "thank you for your feedback" and the chipper "we're working on it!" norms of corporate social media in favor of brutally honest assessments of the sorry state of the system, starting with, "BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality." (more…)

Fanfreak's Space Skull tee is $20 at the Neatoshop; how is it that I've never seen this design concept before?

Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning writes, "I filed my Freedom of Information Act request in 2014 for Training Material related to theInsider Threat Program. I had almost forgoten about it, when the package arrived in the mail. In it was this slideshow." (more…)

For Christianity Today, theologian Michael Horton explores the "theology" of Donald Trump and his followers. It reads as superficially civil, yet completely contemptuous and comically unprepared: a growing trend among conservative and Christian commentary on Trump.Vague on doctrine, infiltrated by consumerism and a sentimental moralism intent on helping us all “become a better you,” and sort of interested in “family values” as long as they don’t interfere with our own family breakdowns, many cultural evangelicals are tired of losing the culture wars. They want a winner—“a strong leader.” I’m hardly the first to point out that it’s the stuff of which demagogues are made.It is not that Trump has caused this transformation in portions of the so-called “evangelical electorate.” Rather, his candidacy has revealed the inner secularization of significant portions of the movement, which surveys have documented for some time now. Four theological words highlight the problem.I made the digital paintover above in honor of the trash fire currently consuming evangelical political hearts. In other Trumpery news, a Republican National Committee member today suggested that they're going to freeze Donald Trump out of the nomination irrespective of how many delegates he secures. Riots it will be, then.

Today we travel to a future without pets. What would it take for us to give up our fuzzy, slithery, fishy friends? Should our pets get more rights? And if we didn’t have dogs or cats, would we domesticate something else to take their place? Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | PatreonIn this episode we also run through a couple of possible ways we might wind up in a pet-free world. Which, to me, sound really sad. Thankfully (spoiler alert) it’s probably never going to happen. Illustration by >Matt Lubchansky▹▹ Full show notesCheck out all the great podcasts that Boing Boing has to offer!

Ladar Levison shut down his secure email service Lavabit in 2013, when the Feds served a warrant and gag-order on him, seeking to get him to backdoor his service to let them snoop on someone. Everyone since then has known that the target of the order was Edward Snowden, but Levison faced jail time if he ever admitted it out loud, under the terms of the gag-order. (more…)

Join me in the liminal space between deep culture horror and ironic satisfaction: Awkward metal band photos

Carrying small pliers and screwdrivers can be helpful and comforting. When traveling without checked baggage, I feel strange leaving behind my small multitools. Being without tools is weird. (more…)

I wanted a stand for my iPhone 6 Plus, and after looking around, I took a chance on this $5 TaoTronics adjustable kickstand. I wasn't disappointed. The body is made of anodized aluminum, and the kickstand is made from some kind of black plastic. To adjust the angle, you press a button near the hinge. Once its set, it won't budge. The body has rubber feet to keep it from sliding around. I'm very happy with it. For $5, it's a great deal.

Medium/Robert Del Naja created this lovely video, starring Kate Moss, for Massive Attack's "Ritual Spirit" (a collaboration with Azekel) from their killer EP of the same name. "Me and Kate have been friends for years, but had never collaborated, so last year we booked a studio with Medium and set up a shoot," says Massive Attack's Robert "3D" Del Naja. "During the session Kate was dancing in the dark, lighting herself with a naked bulb. She perfectly captured the essence of this track… intimate and ritualistic. We edited it back in Bristol to keep it raw with no re-touching, I didn't want to lose the spirit of that moment.Massive Attack's Ritual Spirit (Amazon)

Vinyl is where it’s at. The sound quality is so warm, so pure, it’s like every song was written and performed just for you. If only everyone listened to music as it was intended to be heard like this. Well now, at least everyone at your parties will listen up. For 53% off you can nab this ION Audio Vinyl Motion Turntable that combines the timeless hotness of spinning vinyl with the high tech sound quality 2016 has to offer. It’s a gorgeous combination and the best of both worlds that will jolt your old record collection alive again.Rocking this suitcase means that when you roll up somewhere, people know they’re about to get down to the new sound. The retro style here ensures that your jams get noticed and the portability is clutch so that you can bring the music with you, no matter where the party is. It plays all your records from 33 ⅓ to 45 to the 78 RPM’s. There are built-in speakers with excellent high fidelity sound and crystal clear audio thanks to the high tech makeover of this classic system.Best yet? You can even use this baby to convert any of your LP’s to digital files with the converter software included here. Play your favorite songs on vinyl then convert them to listen anywhere you want, all for 53% off now. This will be the statement piece in your house or at any event you tote it to, and the beautiful retro look is only enhanced by the high tech upgrade that makes the songs even smoother. Check out the link for more details.Take 53% Off the ION Audio Vinyl Motion Turntable in the Boing Boing Store.[embed]https://youtu.be/1QDEwV2PvoM[/embed]

Next month, the Isle of Wight Zoo in England is opening a National Poo Museum! The new exhibition will include preserved feces from a wide array of animals, from the Lesser Madagascan Tenrec to lions, and of course a 38 million-year-old coprolite, fossilized crap such as the specimen seen above."It's stinky, unpleasant and sometimes dangerous stuff — but it’s all around us and inside us too — and perhaps surprisingly our planet would be a much poorer place without it," a museum spokesperson told the County Press.

MinutePhysics responds to CGP Grey's video "The Trouble with Transporters," below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

Italian model and actor Fabio Lanzoni has become a United States citizen, reports NBC News."This is one of the happiest days of my life," Fabio said in a statement. "Over the course of my career I've had the opportunity to travel the globe and America is still the greatest country on earth. There is no such thing as an Italian dream or an English dream but the American dream is alive and well. Each day people look to come to this country to seek a better life for themselves and their family. That was my dream and my thanks to the USCIS for helping turn that dream into a reality. I am proud to be an American." I had this idea years ago.

I've owned a 12" Retina MacBook for about nine months and feel rather ambivalent about it. It's surprisingly powerful and effective for work, but Apple seems to have given up on the USB-C ecosystem at launch. The single power/USB port severely hobbles it, Apple's only made a couple of comically inappropriate adapters, and the third-party options are outright trash that doesn't even work. Enter OWC's USB-C Dock—loads of useful ports!—which Glenn Fleishman says is the first thing worth buying. But you'll have to pay $160 to get it.If you haven’t purchased a MacBook yet and can wait, it’s worth looking at Apple’s next laptop releases. Thunderbolt 3, which will use USB-C as its connector type, is due out later this year and is already announced for a special Dell developer edition laptop model. Apple’s roadmap is unclear, but it’s likely we’ll see a revised MacBook at the March 21 event or in April, as the first model appeared just over a year ago; it’s just possible it’ll have Thunderbolt 3 included. Other MacBook models will likely see updates this year, too, and Thunderbolt 3 is a natural for the Pro.

In Understanding overconfidence: Theories of intelligence, preferential attention, and distorted self-assessment, an open access paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psych researchers from Washington State U, Florida State U and Stanford report on their ingenious experiments to investigate how subjects' beliefs about intelligence affect their own intelligence. (more…)

[caption id="attachment_452875" align="alignnone" width="944"] Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut and first human in space[/caption]"Поехали!" (Let's Go!)The long-running annual celebration of space culture “Yuri's Night” returns Saturday, April 9, with parties all over the globe honoring Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. (more…)

Above, "Game of Thrones" before the computer graphics. Guardians of the Galaxy:Pirates of the Caribbean:Life of Pi: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse: See more at Design You Trust. (via Neatorama)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Gappers are creepy little orange, multi-eyed, round creatures that love nothing more than to hang out on or near goats, shrieking all the while. As you might imagine, this is very stressful to the goats. They stop eating; they stop giving milk. If your family gets its livelihood from that milk, you’re in bad shape when the gappers are around. They emerge from the ocean, find the goats, and wreak their shrieking havoc.The village of Frip is made up of three ocean-side shacks. The girl Capable and her widowed father live in one. Mrs. Romo and her sons live in the second. Sid and Carol Ronson and their daughters (who “sometimes stood completely motionless in order to look somewhat pretty”) lived in the third. In Frip, the children must check on the goats eight times per day in order to remove the gappers and return them to the sea (from which they will reemerge again and again). The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a fable about the perils of putting oneself before the community and the ultimate merits of sharing amongst a community. The gappers have bothered the three families’ goats equally for ages, until one of the smarter gappers realizes that Capable’s goats are slightly closer than the others. Once the gappers converge, Capable is unable to keep them away. She asks for help, but she is refused:“We feel strongly that, once you rid your goats of gappers, as we have, you will feel better about yourself, and also, we will feel better about you. Not that we’re saying we’re better than you, necessarily, it’s just that, since gappers are bad, and since you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us.” Capable is, in fact, quite capable – she takes care of those around her and solves problems for herself. The illustrations are lush and whimsical. The book is a lovely parable for children, but the tale and visuals are engaging for readers of any age. – Meagan Rodgers

Improv Everywhere (previously) keeps on bringing the hits, but seriously, this one takes the cake. (more…)