Boing Boing

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…)

https://youtu.be/a83PBf1UrIsWhy hasn't Trump been arrested for inciting violence?

https://youtu.be/3gLeUdpHkUoWhen they aren't patrolling the state highways of Missouri, the Missouri State Highway Patrol is making videos about making meth. In this episode, Sgt. Jim Wing reveals his special recipe for the "Nazi synthesis method."

12/8/15 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…)

Amélie Lamont, a former staffer at website-hosting startup Squarespace, writes that she often found herself disregarded and disrespected by her colleagues. One comment in particular, though, set her reeling — and came to exemplify her experiences there. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tdyU_gW6WENeil Cicierega's "Bustin." (Thanks, UPSO!)

The Snooper's Charter is the mass-surveillance bill the UK government is trying to ram through Parliament. It's incredibly, irresponsibly broad -- and that's been the conclusion of every independent expert who's looked at it to date. (more…)

A blockchain is an online database that stores information across a network of personal computers, making it not just decentralized but distributed. This means no central company or person owns the database, yet everyone in the network can use and help run it, but not tamper with it.The most popular use of blockchain technology today is bitcoin. The bitcoin blockchain manages around 200,000 bitcoin transactions a day, moving the equivalent of US$150 million around the world without the need of banks or other financial intermediaries. Bitcoin is just the beginning for blockchains. In the future, blockchains that manage and verify online data will launch companies entirely run by algorithms, make self-driving cars safer, help us protect our online identities, and track the billions of devices on the Internet of Things.The Blockchain Futures Lab at Institute for the Future has an excerpt from Bitcoin for the Befuddled, (2014, No Starch Press), in which authors Conrad Barski and Chris Wilmer imagine a whimsical but entirely possible snapshot of a chock-a-blockchain world 15 years in the future.Let’s follow Crowley the Crocodile as he goes about his day in the year 2030, from the moment his bitcoin-powered bioalarm clock wakes him, until he eats his late night pizza ordered using a rating service that runs without human owners.A Typical Day in a Blockchain-Enabled World Circa 2030

Ian Clark's long academic paper in the Journal of Radical Librarianship takes a while to get to the point, but when it arrives, it's a very, very good one: in the post-Snowden era, we can no longer address the "digital divide" just by providing access -- we also have to teach people how their online usage is spied on, how that will harm them, and what to do about it. (more…)

Public and private universities alike have been transformed into financial shell-games for Wall Street's wealthiest hedge-funds, while tuition and student debt soar, adjuncts are exploited, and the lifetime expected returns on a university degree plummet. (more…)

Barcelona design firm Bel & Bel makes chairs out of the front farings of old Vespa scooters, with the option of working turn-signals (no side-mirrors in sight, alas). (more…)

A police officer in Fort Worth was taken off patrol Monday after video surfaced showing him pepper-spraying passing bikers from the side of the road. WFAA reports that a force spokesman admitted "pepper-spraying drivers is not a department-endorsed tactic" and confirmed an investigation was underway.News 8 spoke Monday to Jack Kinney, the man who recorded the video with his helmet camera, and Chase Stone, who edited the video and posted it to Facebook. They say a group of about 200 motorcyclists were traveling up northbound U.S. 287 in Fort Worth Sunday afternoon when a Fort Worth police officer pulled over one of the motorcycle group's "safety vehicles," which is a vehicle that follows behind bikers in case of an incident.In the edited video, which slows down and zooms in at one point, so viewers can see more clearly, the officer appears to spray something directly into oncoming traffic as he exits his vehicle. The bikers say it was pepper spray.… "His intent was to hit the bikers for sure, there’s no doubt about it," Stone says.The emerging defense appears to be "people were complaining about the bikers weaving," as if pepper-spraying them at speed is going to make the roads safer.

To celebrate Pi Day (3/14), have fun with MyPiDay, developed last year by Stephen Wolfram and company. Enter your birthday or any other number and see where it first appears in pi. Background in Wolfram's post here.

Above, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Below, "The Graduate," "The Shining," and "Star Wars: A New Hope." Many more at The Walk Of Life Project" (via WAXY)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp9AFQqGDbEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL9CQwZvXxghttps://vimeo.com/158195794

In honor of Pi Day (3/14/16 = 3.1416), here's a page from The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics (1958) that shows you how to calculate Pi by dropping toothpicks on a wood floor.We see circles everywhere. The wheels of automobiles, the rims of cups, and the faces of nickels and quarters are all circles. The sun and the full moon look like circles in the sky.The distance across a circle, through its center, is called the diameter of the circle. The distance around the circle is called its circumference. Measure the diameter of a quarter, and you will find that it is about one inch long. You can measure the circumference of the quarter, too. First wind enough string around it to go around once. Then unwind the string, and measure it with a ruler. You will find that it is about three times as long as the diameter. Measure the circumference and diameter of the rim of a cup and you will get the same result. The circumference of any circle is a fixed number times the diameter. This fixed number cannot be written exactly as a fraction or decimal, so we use the Greek letter pi to stand for it. It is almost equal to 3-1/7, or 3.14.Strange as it may seem, there is a way of calculating the value of pi by dropping a stick on the floor. The floor has to be made of planks of the same width. Use a thin stick, such as a toothpick, that is as long as the planks are wide. Simply drop the stick many times. Keep count of the number of times you drop it and the number of times it falls on a crack. Double the number of times you drop the stick and then divide by the number of times it fell on a crack. The result is your value of pi.For example, if you drop the stick 100 times, and it falls on a crack only 62 times, divide 200 by 62. The result is about 3.2. This is not a very accurate value of pi. The more times you drop the stick, the more accurate a value you will get. When you drop the stick, whether or not it crosses a crack depends on where its center falls, and how it is turned around its center. When a stick turns around its center, it moves around a circle. That is why pi, which is related to measuring a circle, is also related to the chance that the stick will cross a crack.By the way, The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics is a large book filled with stunning illustrations. It's part of a series, which includes Birds, Biology, Dinosaurs, and oddly enough, Elves and Fairies. Here are a few sample pages:Here's a link to a PDF of The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics.

https://youtu.be/8S0FDjFBj8oWill Smith is an SNL writer and UCB Comedy who manages to pull off a five-and-a-half minute TED talk that isn't about anything excerpt the talk itself. Through gestures and emotions, he makes it interesting.

Microsoft plans to turn Minecraft into a test suite for artificial intelligence research, reports the BBC. As a simplified but all-encompassing model of the world, it's perfect for tutoring 'bots.…Microsoft suggests the open-ended nature of Minecraft makes it particularly useful because of the huge variety of situations it can simulate from first-person perspectives."It allows you to have 'embodied AI'," explained Matthew Johnson, the principal software engineer working on AIX."So, rather than have a situation where the AI sees an avatar of itself, it can actually be inside, looking out through the eyes of something that is living in the world."We think this is an essential part of building this kind of general intelligence."

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission was on track to deliver deploy 20,000 MW of grid connected solar power by 2022 ("more than the current solar capacity of the world’s top five solar-producing countries combined") but because India specified that the solar panels for it were to be domestically sourced, the USA sued it in WTO trade court and killed it. (more…)

Everyone codes. That’s just the way the world works these days, and it’s certainly the way the job market works. It’s an essential job skill that everyone who doesn’t already know should try to wrap their heads around. Here are three boot camps that will get you off your butt and into gear with the must-know programming languages. Say hello to a whole new career.Frontend JavaScript Coding BootcampThe Frontend JavaScript Coding Bootcamp offers seven courses across thirty two hours of content that you can access anywhere, anytime for 94% off right now. You’ll learn to build web apps using ReactJS, D3JS and EmberJS while mastering routes, templates and data models. Java is the backbone of beautiful web experiences and you’ll add these scalable web apps to your resume.Python Programming BootcampWhat runs those little web sites Google and YouTube? With this Python programming bootcamp that’s now 96% off you’ll get over fifty hours of training in this incredible coding language. The hands-on lessons will have you building web apps like a subnet calculator, complex network devices, and mastering user scripts and API’s. With this interactive intro to machine learning you’ll go from zero to hero in this crucial code.Interactive Coding BootcampIf you’re new to coding, this Interactive Coding Bootcamp will get you up on your feet and building products you can add to your portfolio. For 92% off you’ll get over thirty hours of content covering HTML, CSS, jQuery and others to teach you the fundamentals of computer languages and algorithms. After these lessons you’ll grasp both front and back end applications and actually build apps to call your own and show potential employers. All of these courses will rocket you to a raise or whole new career. Get started today learning these languages at your own pace to start speaking like a code pro.

Remember when the idea of printing any object you could dream up was total sci-fi bologna? Those days are over. The future is now, and 3D printers are here. We’re giving one away from Makerbot, your chance at experiencing unadulterated techie bliss.The Makerbot 3D Printer uses advanced design software to configure the exact layout of any object and print it out to your specifications. You have the option of either utilizing pre-made templates or designing your own printed objects from scratch. Once you’ve decided how ambitious you want to be, go ahead and print anything from kitchen utensils to figurines formalized in the depths of your imagination. A Captain America statuette? A vase? Miniature models of the Empire State Building? All are possible with this powerful yet compact printer, one that puts creation itself at your fingertips.You’ll be the talk of the town, for sure. Your co-workers will glare at you in envy for all your self-printed desk trinkets. Your friends and family will shower you with adoration upon receiving some of the most unique gifts they may have ever seen (we recommend a miniscule turtle sculpture, a real crowd pleaser). What are you waiting for? Enter the giveaway now, and this printer could be all yours.Can’t get enough high-tech geekery? Check out these other deals to further pique your techie interests. Complete Raspberry Pi 2 Starter Kit[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Complete Raspberry Pi 2 Starter Kit[/caption]You’ll love the Complete Raspberry Pi 2 Starter Kit, which offers a microcomputer you can tinker with, as well as 6 courses to get up to speed on all things physical computing. It’s available for just $115, a whopping 85% off MSRP. Complete Arduino Starter Kit & Course BundleAnd the Complete Arduino Starter Kit & Course Bundle combines a starter kit complete with the hard electronic parts you need to build circuits, plus 3 premium courses walking you through the process--all for just $62.99, or 87% off MSRP.Get both of these deals in the Boing Boing Store now!

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Plug your router into it, and the WiFi Reset Plug does just one job: it monitors your Wifi network and resets your router whenever it loses its connection. If you're thinking it's a great idea, maybe… you need a better router? It's $60! [via The Internet of Shit]

My publisher, Tor Books -- the largest sf/f publisher in the world, a division of Macmillan -- is hiring two editorial assistants, one to work for my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (as well as editors Miriam Weinberg and Jen Gunnels) and the other to work for Liz Gorinsky and on Seven Seas, a manga imprint. (via Making Light)

It took me about 1 second from hearing about the Doctor Who Coloring Book to order one. I have been tearing sheets out of coloring books and using my office combo-printer to scan and print pages for my daughter and I. Allows for us both to work on the same image, and compare our results! For the record: The War Doctor is the best doctor.The Doctor Who Coloring Book via Amazon

Almost every motorcyclist has suffered a long, extended wait at a traffic light. Sometimes you just wait, and wait, sometimes you go for it. Walter F. Kern offers these helpful tips:Here's How to Trip a Traffic Light:Get off your motorcycle and push the "walk" button if it is safe.Sometimes you may just have to look both ways and run the light. In some places it's OK to "proceed with caution" after 15 minutes, in some places after 2 cycles. You need to know what the law is in your area.If you fail to trigger the switch, wait at least one more cycle and then proceed when it is safe.Sometimes it helps to kill the engine and restart it just to get the magnetic fields going over the tripping device. Put yourself right over the detector in the pavement. Give the bike a couple of good revs.Turn right and then do a "U" turn when you can.Threaten legal action. Start by calling the street department and complaining. Every week re-check the light. If you get no action, send them a nice professional letter threatening them with a lawsuit.As you approach the intersection, there are lines cut into the pavement where the sensor was put in. The sensor pad is octagonal or square. Put the most metal over the intersection of two sides.Another trick is to put out your kickstand. If you can get the kickstand out, there is more of a metal area to detect. Don't forget to retract your kickstand when the light finally changes.Rig your bike with an electro-magnet under the frame. This is wired into the brake lamp circuit and induces enough of a field to trip most lights.Consider the purchase of a device that will trip the light for you. Two such products are the Green Light Trigger and the Red Light Changer.A new trend is the introduction of special motorcycle boxes that show you where to stop your bike to trip the light. The front-most "box" has additional diagonal lines, with a bike icon painted in the box.Roll forwards and back in an effort to trip the sensors.If you are waiting for a left-turn signal light to change, you can always proceed through the intersection on green and make three successive right-hand turns. This only works with regular city blocks.Some states have sensors in the lights that can detect flashing lights of police cars and ambulances, and will quickly change the light. You might try flashing your lights to see if that will trip it.

This wonderful illustrated ad appeared in the July 1971 issue of African-American culture magazine Ebony. (via Weird Universe)

This Pilot Parallel Pen ($8) comes with two ink cartridges (red and blue), but you can a box of 12 cartridges with different colors of ink for $7.Here are some videos of talented people using this pen:https://youtu.be/YltKznOa6Y0https://youtu.be/TbQgFbbFCtchttps://youtu.be/oBondidbiRghttps://youtu.be/rpQD0cIv5Z4

There are two Trumps, says Carson, one more cerebral than the other.Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who recently ended his campaign, said he and Trump have “buried the hatchet” after trading nasty words during the primary. He also said there are “two different” Trumps: the one the public sees and a more “cerebral” Trump in private.Speaking at his posh Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump praised Carson and said he would play a “big role” in the campaign, in both political and policy capacities. But he declined to offer specific descriptions.Don't you get the feeling that Republicans (and the #NeverTrump right-wing pundits) will ultimately support Trump? The only conservative principle that seems to matter now is fear. Or they could end up with Ted Cruz, who is even worse, because he means what he says and Trump has always looked vaguely like his stalking horse.To take your mind off all this horror, here is a photograph from the future from Boing Boing's broken ansible, in which lovers Trudeau and Obama ("Trubama" as the holotabloids have it) take the Presidential Hoverbikes for a spin.

New York City's Robin Hood Labs at Blue Ridge Laboratories have opening for paid fellowships to develop apps and technologies to give low-income people legal assistance in civil proceedings, like evictions, debt collection, and immigration procedures. (more…)

On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood! And let me tell you it was really great. And I have a great relationship with the Moldavian people. They love me.

Video games are awesome. In fact, haven’t you always wondered how exactly do they pack that much awesome into a little screen with a few buttons? Playing every day certainly hasn’t lead to any answers but now you can find out how games are made and tackle some yourself. Simply pay what you want for this Hardcore Game Dev Bundle and you can take ten courses that will teach you how to code video games like a true professional. Whether you already know how to program or you’re a total tech newbie, these lessons will have you spinning game like you could only dream before.There are over 108 hours of game-making content here. The course on SpriteKit in Swift will show you how to build actual games for smartphones and tablets and even guide you through the process of creating artwork and designs so your games look amazing. Using XCode and GamePlayKit, you’ll configure game architecture, setup backgrounds and main menus and even make a marketing plan to attract and retain players. From HTML5 to Java to Android Marshmallow, every system is ready to be mastered. With Java you’ll even get overviews on animation, learn conditional statements, loops and events and end up building an actual multi-step mobile game you can call your own.All of this will add quite a punch to your resume, taking your current career to a whole new level or earning you enough gold stars to seek a whole new job. All these courses are yours, you just pay what you want and learn on your own time. The technical skills in these lessons are mandatory for any modern coding work these days, but because it’s gaming you’re learning something super fun and getting a better understanding of your favorite pastime. Check out the link below for more details.Pay What You Want for this Hardcore Game Dev Bundle in the Boing Boing Store.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.On October 2, 1950 a boy named Charlie Brown first appeared in American newspapers. Peanuts popularity grew steadily and on January 6, 1952, the strip’s first Sunday edition debuted. For the next 48 years, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, and all the other players appeared in full color on the comics page.But I wasn’t there for any of that. Rather, I found Peanuts in the early 1980s, when comics pages had already started to shrink and the famous characters of the strip were more readily accessible to kids through specials. Even then, I didn’t read the comics page as much as I did the dusty paperback collections with titles like Happiness is a Warm Puppy and A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Growing up as a fan, the single greatest headache was trying to find all the strips. I wanted to know when Snoopy changed from being a dog to being another kid in a funny costume. I wanted to know when Charlie Brown first fell in love with the Little Red Haired Girl. But it couldn’t be done. Although most had been reprinted in one collection or another, there was no single resource that had all the strips.Enter Fantagraphics Books. Beginning in 2004, Fantagraphics collected and published The Complete Peanuts. While this series collected all the daily strips, the Sunday strips were spun off into a second series, Peanuts Every Sunday, the third volume (of ten) of which has just been released. These are the strips I never had access to as a kid. These strips were not collected in those old black and white trades.Peanuts Every Sunday reprints the strips in chronological order, in full, glorious color. While some commentary is provided in both the foreword and afterword, mainly the strips are left to speak for themselves. Each strip is given its own page, in its original size, complete with the date the strip originally appeared in newspapers.These are beautiful books. Full color dust jackets and numbered bindings make for books that look great next to each other on the shelf. But you’ll need a big shelf. At close to $50 per volume, this is not a collection to get into lightly. But for the fan, they are a collection absolutely worth having. – Joel NeffPeanuts Every Sunday: The 1950s Gift Box Setby Charles M. SchulzFantagraphics2015, 576 pages, 10 x 13.5 x 3.1 inches $53 Buy a copy on Amazon

This handy USB gadget has three USB 3.0 ports and a RJ45 Gigabit ethernet port. It's regularly $25, but if you use code VK5JTT8L you can get it for $20.

The Obama administration declared itself to be the "most transparent administration in history," but a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that Obama's Justice Department worked tirelessly behind the scenes to kill any chance of increased Freedom of Information Act access to governments at all levels, from lobbying Congress to kill FOIA reform to urging other administrative agencies to obstruct FOIA requests. (more…)