Boing Boing

"The wildfire that has burned more than 7,000 acres in Yucaipa and surrounding areas was caused by an explosive used during a gender reveal party, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection." — KTLA One of many fires burning in California on Monday is the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino County. […]

While Labor Day is a moment to solemnly consider the role that work serves in all of our lives, there are certain workers among us who will not benefit from a day of celebration and reflection. Robot vacuums, you just keep working like normal this weekend. Look, it's not that we don't appreciate you. But […]

Whenever you happen to need a charging cable or a power battery…hey, wait a minute, where did that go? Between the house, your vehicle and all those evildoers that blatantly steal your stuff (otherwise known as family, friends and co-workers), it's tough to keep track of where all your tech accessories are at a moment's […]

Spoken Word with Electronics is an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds Greetings, all. Welcome back to the show. This week, the discussion is on meditation and making our body into a conductive circuit. A meditation device called the SOMA Quantum Ocean arrived […]

Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader poisoned with a novichok nerve agent and airlifted for treatment to Germany, has emerged from his coma. The doctors treating him, however, warn that he has a long road ahead to recovery. Germany's government said last week that tests on Navalny showed "unequivocal evidence" of the use of a […]

The Cheapskate's Guide is Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website. It's a paean to the personal website presented in the form of a David Attenborough-style nature documentary about an endangered species, touching upon the contemporary difficulties of reproduction and how it suffers in a web ecology dominated by giant social media companies. The personal website is […]

Foone recently examined the guts of a digital pregnancy test to find that it was a fully-functional system on a chip that simply looks at the lines on a standard test strip and reports what it sees. They originally reported that the pregnancy test, with its baked-in ROM and tiny display, couldn't play Doom. Foone […]

Classic first-person shooter Doom is 27 years old, but still receiving official updates. A few months ago, it received 60fps support. Now it's going widescreen. [via The Verge] For the first time in an official port, the original DOOM renderer has been modified to natively render 16:9 without any letterboxing. The FOV has been increased […]

Asked today by the presiding judge whether he consents to be extradicted to the U.S. on espionage charges, Julian Assange said "No." The district judge Vanessa Baraitser commented: "That was the response I was anticipating." There were no opening statements by either parties. The indictment says Assange and WikiLeaks "repeatedly sought, obtained, and disseminated information […]

After a truck was spotted driving around Lincoln, Nebraska, with the words "Fuck the N—–s" painted on it, the owner was soon identified and fired from his job. Cordis told the Omaha World-Herald on Sunday that he drove his 2002 Chevrolet Silverado K1500 to Gateway Mall near 61st and O streets at about 5 p.m. […]

It's already one of the most iconic items in film history. Unless you've been off-world for the past few years, you already know all about the all-powerful Infinity Gauntlet. It's the weapon wielded by the Mad Titan Thanos in his quest to reshape the cosmos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, culminating in a heart-stopping smackdown […]

Boy, they sure love to say the quiet part out loud, huh? A two-page document released late Friday by Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought effectively bans all federal agencies from using taxpayer dollars on racial sensitivity or other diversity and inclusion initiatives for workers. "These types of 'trainings,'" the memo claims, "not […]

Don't worry, it's sped up! The little critters fan out into the sand over the course of a day or so, welcoming us to Ant Farm Time Lapse YouTube. (Previously in Ants)

Earlier this week, an international team of scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration published two reports — one in the Physical Review Letters, and the other in The Astrophysical Journal Letters — about a strange gravitational wave phenomena they observed. Approximately 17 billion light-years away from the Earth, a black hole that was […]

From The Guardian, where the Snowden revelations were originally published in 2013: Seven years after the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were […]

The new National Geographic special "Bin Laden's Hard Drive" analyzes the porn collection found in the Abottabad compound of slain terrorist Osama Bin Laden. BIN LADEN'S HARD DRIVE premieres on National Geographic on Thursday, September 10, at 9/8C. Peter Bergen, who famously interviewed Bin Laden, is the correspondent and host of the special. More in […]

Learning to code is a skill many people realize they should take the time to understand, yet instinctively cringe at the actual prospect of doing. It isn't hard to see why. For its integral place in technology and growth, the thought of plunging into programming with all of its precision and technical mumbo-jumbo can feel […]

Whenever Donald Trump's wife pops up in the news, it's good to remember she was and remains a racist birther. Back in 2011, Melania repeated the racist conspiracy theory pushed by her husband, and called on Barack Obama to release his birth certificate during a TV interview on 'The View'. In the 2011 interview with […]

• China did not release images of the reusable spacecraft it says completed a two day space flight. China's government announced Sunday that its first reusable spacecraft landed after two days in orbit. The success of the Chinese experiment suggests a new way to achieve space flight at lower cost. "The secretive, military-run space program […]

Having a webcam isn't enough these days. We've assembled over 20 gimbals, lights, tripods, full kits, and more to elevate your video game, whether you're making elaborate YouTube videos or just trying not to get mocked on the company call. And if over the Labor Day holiday, if you use the coupon code GOFORIT15 during […]

Part puzzle, part science, part creativity and all fun, the Geeek Club launched a Kickstarter campaign to help make high-tech more accessible by creating fun robot kits that blur the line between playtime and serious engineering. The Kickstarter was a success — and now, you can be a creator of robots yourself with the Geeek […]

Back in the 60s, surfers weren't just dreaming up what would ultimately be recognized as the birth of the modern surf culture. They were practically making up their own language as they did it. Along with terms like the tube, gnarly, humpback and the now ever-present dude, surfers also started calling young surfers gremmies, a […]

Peter Strzok's new book, COMPROMISED, is published next week. In an interview with Politico, the former FBI agent says it's unlikely the FBI was able to do a thorough and complete counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump's widely reported business links to the Russian government and Russian organized crime, and that those financial mysteries, like Trump's […]

At least 4 boats sank, no injuries reported as of late Saturday

“It's more about the survivors of gender violence. That's really what it's about.” — Anita Hill

Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper Harvey Briggs, 52, went face-to-face with a man filming an arrest, handled his firearm while threatening him, then ripped the man's facemask off. It was all caught on camera; Briggs' actions first lost him his job and now his freedom. Briggs, 52, was booked into the Metro jail about 9 p.m. […]

Hear us out on this…but there's a case to be made that the telescoping ladder may be one of mankind's most ingenious inventions. For all of recorded history, man has used some form of ladders and scaffolding to scale any heights over 10 feet…and that usually meant toting a big, cumbersome, hugely inconvenient ladder around. […]

At The Washington Post, Daniel Drezner notes that a lot of gas was wasted last week on the idea that Biden was suddenly losing ground to Trump. This speculation was dashed on the rocks of the latest polls, which show the race tightening only by a hair and Biden still commanding double-digit national leads. Morevoer, […]

Yikes.

To be able to perform the feat of "floating into the sky with a cluster of balloons," David Blaine had to first gather a team of experts, jump out of a plane 500 times (to get a pro skydiver rating), earn a hot air balloon pilot's certificate, and earn another one that gives him the […]

American Cyanamid was a leading fertilizer company whose success broadened its horizons to a vast range of industrial and chemical products. It fell to pieces in the 1990s under the weight of patent lawsuits, corporate reorganizations and decades of environmental pollution. Here, a team of urban explorers takes a look at its huge abandoned research […]

On Thurday, a rally for Donald Trump was held in Fred Roger's hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. His 92-year-old widow Joanne made it clear in an interview with The Daily Beast that she's not a fan. "Fred tried to stay pretty quiet about politics, basically because his program was for children," Joanne Rogers said. She is […]

On September 5, the Burning Man Project is hosting Burn Night: Live From Home, "a worldwide, around-the-clock Burn Night extravaganza." Pre-recorded and live burns will be live-streamed for a full 24 hours. To encourage participation, they've created a detailed blueprint so at-home Burners can build (and later burn) a simplified two-foot Mini Man. Timing Your Burn Night […]

I have not heard this in years. Packed with the best.

• Liberty University hires forensic accountants to investigate "all facets" of Falwell's tenure, including school's financial and real estate operations When you're in a whole lot of trouble, a dumb thing to do is threaten journalists. But Jerry Fallwell Jr. is not the smartest man. He was forced to resign from Liberty University, the Christian […]

The president has called fallen U.S. service members “losers."

Shouldn't surprise anyone at this point that Trump is just straight up repeating Vladimir Putin's talking points, and placing the interests of Russia before America. Impeached and manifestly unfit President Donald Trump said the United States must look "very seriously" into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but that the White House has […]

Bishakh Som's artwork has been featured in solo shows at ArtLexis Gallery and at the Jaya Yoga Center, and in group shows at The Society of Illustrators in New York, the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, Issyra Gallery, the Grady Alexis Gallery, and, most recently, at De Cacaofabriek in the Netherlands. Bishakh received the prestigious Xeric grant in 2003 for her comics […]

I have a few different LED headlamps, but this one is by far my favorite. It features a band of LEDs that throw light in a wide area in front of you. It lights up the entire area around you, as opposed to LED headlamps that illuminate just a spot. It uses 3 AAA batteries and […]

Earbuds can be supremely frustrating. The appearance of a $30 pair doesn't often differ noticeably from a $150 pair. And alarmingly enough, you can't always detect much audio difference between the two either. That often means buying a pair of wireless earbuds for commuting or working out can turn into a crapshoot without some trusty […]

National newspapers in Britain traditionally call August 'The Silly Season,' the month when news is so slow that even the most ludicrous of stories will sometimes be used to fill a hole on a page. It's the Silly Season that led to a dead carp in Northamptonshire being memorialized on the front page of The […]

Despite never having been invited to screen one of his films at the New York Film Festival, John Waters was happy to design the poster for this year's event. From Film at Lincoln Center: Of the design, John Waters said, "Since none of my films were ever chosen to be in the New York Film […]

Computer generated unicorns on demand, from @balpha. URL format: https://unicornify.pictures/avatar/$HASH?s=$SIZE $HASH is any hexadecimal number, up to 64 digits.$SIZE is the requested image size in pixels. It should be a power of 2 between 32 and 128 (inclusive). Example: https://unicornify.pictures/avatar/7daf6c79d4802916d83f6266e24850af?s=32 If you want bigger and/or higher-quality images, the avatar generation code (including a command-line app) […]

It took the LockPickingLawyer a fraction of a second to remove the anti-theft lock on a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

Before internet treasure Tim from Grand Illusions started socially distancing, he had a great example of how fiberoptic cables work. Think of them as an extremely thin, extremely long camera lens or magnifying glass. When placed atop something such as text, the text is visible at the other end. As he shows, if the image […]

3Blue1Brown has a good two-part introduction to error correction codes, which are what make it possible to check the integrity of data and in some cases fix it.

The privately built border wall built by Fisher Sand and Gravel is in danger of failing during a flood, according to an engineering report. From The Texas Tribune: Company president Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News, had called the Rio Grande fence the "Lamborghini" of border walls and bragged that his company's methods […]

Coby from 545 Lawn Care has a 1985 GMC Van modded to be driveable upside down while seated in the cargo area looking out the rear window. Worth watching just to hear an amazing American upper Midwest northwoods accent. Handles well in the snow, too! Image: YouTube / 545 Lawn Care

If you must have sex with someone outside of your household or social bubble, dispense with the kissing and consider wearing a mask, says Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. While it sounds silly, the suggestions are scientifically sound. From Dr. Tam's statement issued this week: The lowest risk sexual activity during […]

Michael Forest Reinoehl, the man suspected of shooting and killing Aaron "Jay" Danielson during a night of rowdy protests in Portland, Oregon, was himself shot dead last night by police moving to arrest him. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals service reports that Reinoehl, 48, drew a gun on federal officers when they confronted him […]