Even if you only use your PC for web browsing, media playback, or light document creation, default software can sometimes come up short. To give your Windows PC a bit of a boost, we've compiled a variety of helpful, paid apps that can enhance your user experience and make you more productive.In the Premium PC Power Bundle, you get these three essential apps:Netspot ProNetspot Pro is your best resource for optimizing your WiFi network. It‘s immensely helpful for troubleshooting your connection, but its mapping features are what really make it an essential. You can locate connectivity dead zones and determine the best places to put your wireless access points based on the layout of your home.Glasswire ProWith Glasswire Pro, you can closely monitor the network activity of up to three PCs. This centralized security system protects your computers from malicious hosts, and notifies you of unauthorized logins when you’re away. It even keeps track of remote machines, so you can be sure that websites or game servers you control stay secure. It's such a comprehensive security solution, PCWorld gave it a rare 4.5/5 star rating.CleanMyPCYou can’t always trust your desktop to clean up after itself when it downloads updates and installs new software. CleanMyPC makes sure your computer isn’t being slowed down by junk files or unnecessary autorun applications.Beyond these headliners, the bundle also includes the following apps:Zemana AntiMalware: A one-stop shop for preventing against malware, ransomware, and other browser junk7 Speed Reading EX 2017: This TopTenReviews Gold and Excellence Award Winner can help you read up to 3.471 times fasterPaintShop Pro X9 for Windows: An image editor that’s great for designing graphics and quickly annotating screenshotsSticky Password Premium: You'll get three years of access to this secure password manager that syncs with both Android and iOSStellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Home: Get back lost or deleted files and access the contents of corrupted disksAndroid Data Recovery Pro for PC: Extract photos, contacts, and more from a dead Android device directly to your PCData Shredder 5 Professional for Windows: If you’re selling an old computer, this app ensures that your data gets completely deleted beyond recovery by a new end userAll of these apps are included in the Premium PC Power Bundle, available now in the Boing Boing Store for $29.

You just don't see skill and expertise like this in Pittsburgh.

Chris McVeigh of Halifax, Nova Scotia builds all kinds of cool things with LEGO. Recently, he's been creating kits that showcase obsolete office technology. This particular kit, which he calls "My Old Desktop: DOS Edition 2.0," features a few reminders of the 1980s office, including a rotary-dial desk phone and a beige desk computer that can be partially fed one of the miniature 5.25" floppy disk replicas.If this is your kind of thing, be sure to take a look at all of his retro LEGO kits. He's even got a little tiny "Atari" console.(Colossal)

Here's something you don't see every day: a typewriter that hammers out musical notations. Made for use with music staff paper, the Keaton Music Typewriter was first patented in 1936 by San Francisco's Robert H. Keaton for use by composers, arrangers, teachers and students.The original model had just 13 keys but Keaton's second patent for this "music typing machine" was granted in 1953 and included 33 keys.If you've got a spare $12K, you can pick one of these little beauties up from Etsy shop WorkingTypewriters (back in the 1950s they sold for $225).The seller writes:

Nacho Guevara came to America without documentation, and since he got his green card, he has been using his photography skills to humanize fellow migrants in their homes. (more…)

Once a week, Kevin Kelly, Claudia Dawson, and I send out a weekly newsletter that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff. We have 11,821 subscribers. Here's issue #54. Get the Recomendo weekly newsletter a week early by email.Getting good stuff on craigslist:

Nominative determinism: "the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names."Exhibit A.

Last winter's epic rainfall brought the Oroville Dam, the country's tallest embankment dam and a crucial reservoir in California's beleaguered water supply system, near an epic collapse. Tens of thousands were evacuated as decision-making worsened the situation and an emergency spillway began to crumble. Now, one of the team leads studying the dam says more trouble is looming...

I love Michael Sweater's collection of 60 darlingly ironic and awful comics.It feels like each comic perfectly captures the frustration and fultility of today.Please Destroy My Enemies by Michael Sweater via Amazon

Collectors Weekly's feature on "headbages" tells the story of the 1000+ badge collection of bike-mechanic-turned-evolutionary-biologist Jeffrey Conner, who published a book on the subject, featuring an alphabetic index of photos from his collection.(more…)

Kids Pass is a service that offers discounts on family activities in the UK; their website makes several common -- and serious -- security problems that could allow hackers to capture their users' passwords, which endangers those users' data on other services where they have (unwisely) recycled those same passwords. (more…)

Jack Stratton, the leader of the band Vulfpeck has offered a book on Amazon, "How I Made $290,000 Selling Books." It was much funnier when the page first went up and Amazon provided an order link to purchase the book for $290,000. They have since replaced that link with a note that the book is "currently unavailable."By the way, this dubious side project aside, I cannot recommend Vulfpeck enough; they've become my favorite band. On the surface, they're pranksters and ironists, but strip away a few layers of irony (and then a few more) and they are the exact opposite: incredibly sincere, making fantastic, mind-blowing "minimalist funk" music.One of my favorite Vulfpeck songs is "Wait for the Moment," featuring Antwaun Stanley. It has special resonance for me because it's about a ~10 year old kid, but it's done in my favorite funky musical style, which happens to have been the dominiant musical style at the time that I was a ~10 year old kid!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4G0nbpLySIMy other favorite Vulfpeck song (also feat. Mr. Stanley) is "1612," which can be seen as an elaborate device for remembering a four-digit keypad code. My biggest fear is that someone will hack into my iTunes account and find out how many times I've played these two songs.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRHQPG1xd9o

Said to be the first example of a portable, miniaturized selection of books, this 17th-century traveling library toured England and was reportedly commissioned by William Hakewill, MP., who liked it so much he made several more.

Dave and Buster's will sell you a 1,970 calorie appetizer (the "Carnivore Pizzadilla"); Texas Roadhouse adds marshmallows and caramel sauce to the sweet potato in its "16-oz. Prime Rib with Loaded Sweet Potato" to bring a single meal up to 2,820 calories, and The Cheesecake Factory's "Flying Gorilla" cocktail crams 950 calories into a single beverage, making it calorically equal to a Big Mac and fries. (more…)

If you're using an anonymity tool -- Tor or something like it -- to be anonymous on the internet, it's really easy to screw it up and do something that would allow an adversary of varying degrees of power (up to and including powerful governments) to unmask you. (more…)

Conversations with People Who Hate Me is a new podcast from the Welcome to Night Vale folks in which Dylan Marron, who voices Carlos the Scientist on Night Vale, tracks down the people who troll him online and has long, thoughtful, substantive (and funny!) discussions about where they're coming from. (more…)

Cinemetrics is an emerging field of media studies, and NerdWriter deftly applies cinemetrics to There Will Be Blood to mine it for insights. (more…)

In classic Sesame Street parody style, the puppets take on 1980s pop music in this mashup music video. As they've been known to do, the Street's Glee Club once again amusingly switch up lyrics to fit their narrative. So, for instance, a-Ha's "Take on Me" becomes Cookie Monster's "Bake Cookie" and Rick James' "Super Freak" becomes Oscar's "Super Grouch." There's even a rickroll (because, of course there is).Previously: Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage' starring Big Bird and the Sesame Street gang

Many people find it easiest to learn things by doing them. If you’re looking to give a doer in your life an interesting, hands-on project, check out these tech-focused DIY kits:DIY AT-AT Cable Organizer & Card Case ($32.99)With this kit, you get to put together a wooden replica of an AT-AT that keeps cables, pens, and other desktop detritus organized. And it’s legs are totally posable to let you re-create the battle on Hoth.CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit ($69.99)To set up a Raspberry Pi computer as quickly as possible, this Complete Starter Kit includes a MicroSD card preloaded with the aptly-named NOOBS OS, and all the hardware you need to boot it up.The Complete Raspberry Pi 3 Training Bundle ($19)The Raspberry Pi is capable of so much more than emulating old video games. You can learn how to use it for penetration testing, robotics, distributed computing, and internet-of-things devices with this course bundle.TinyTesla Musical Tesla Coil Kit ($197)You can build a singing Tesla coil, also known as a zeusaphone, with this kit. By controlling your plasma speaker from a laptop or midi source, you can put on quite an electrifying performance.Extpro DIY Assemble Toy Set Solar Powered Car Kit ($10.95)You and your kids can get excited about robotics and renewable energy together with this homemade Solar Powered Car kit. This project is best for ages six and up.SunFounder Raspberry Pi Robot Kits ($149.99)For a much more advanced electronic car project, this Raspberry Pi Kit will have you building a 4-wheeled robot. You’ll learn Python to program its camera and movements, or you can drive it in real time with an external device.littleBits Electronics Synth Kit ($112.94)The littleBits analog synthesizer modules can be combined to make some truly amazing sounds. They snap together magnetically, so you can try out different arrangements without needing a mess of patch cables.Makeblock mBot Kit ($94.99)If you’ve got a little one that’s itching to learn about programming, electronics, and robots, they can do it all with this mBot Kit. After putting it together, they’ll learn to control their robot’s Arduino brain with the Scratch graphical coding environment.

Geoff Ryman -- the brilliant science fiction author who curated last year's 100 AFRICAN WRITERS OF SFF project, continues to publish and curate excellent, exciting science fiction from across Africa. (more…)

Trump's Scottish golf courses are hemorrhaging money (they lost $1.8M in 2015) and the only way they can be profitable is if they're allowed to expand, but that's almost certainly not going to happen. (more…)

“My friend John Hodgman had never cosplayed before,” says Boing Boing pal Adam Savage, “So I invited him to walk the floor with me at Comic-Con as Chewbacca. (He's on the left.).”Lordy, there are tapes.(more…)

Over at the Penmanship Porn subreddit, Eschermer showed his or her page of a transcription from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."Another example:Elegant hostility:

Fort Pierce, Florida police officer Robie Troutman was sitting in his patrol car parked at the police station when he noticed someone trying to open his car doors. He spotted Aaron Orlando Rodriguez III running away. Troutman caught him hiding behind another car.According to Troutman's police report, “Rodriguez said he saw my vehicle was running so he attempted to steal the vehicle so he had a ride home."(TCPalm via Fark)

Slug mucus sticks well to wet tissues, which appeals to surgeons. David J. Mooney of Harvard University made a glue similar to slug snot, and "tested the adhesive on pig skin, liver, heart, and cartilage and found that it was stronger than both cyanoacrylate (superglue) and a surgical sealant called CoSeal," reports Chemical and Engineering News.

In 1967, John Lennon tooled around London in a Rolls-Royce Phantom V personalized with a psychedelic paint job. After years traveling around to various US museums, the car recently returned to London for a new Rolls Royce exhibit at Bonhams. Rolling Stone's Jordan Runtagh tells the story of the trippy whip:

Physics Toys is a website (and Instagram account) of kinetic curiosities. Check out all the cool double pendulums, which exhibit chaotic behavior that put fidget spinners to shame. Here's a neat statuette of an alchemist who have a levitating magnetic cube between his hands.

Someone in Azerbaijan uploaded this weird clip of a hirsuit humanoid creature. At Mysterious Universe, Paul Seaburn writes:

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Raised Without Gender looks at young people in Sweden who express their gender and identity in an affirming approach, instead of outdated disease model approach developed in Toronto last century. (more…)

The 30-year-old fire chief at a fire station in the Tokyo city of Hachioji was arrested for defrauding a woman into giving him three of her used swimsuits. Takumi Murakami told the woman via Facebook, "Do you have any athletic swimsuits that you are not using? I'm collecting swimsuits for swim teams in foreign countries that can't afford to buy their own, so I'd be very grateful if you could help me."Via Japan Kyo:

Amazon has a sale on 10 3-foot lightning cables for $10. The are definitely not certified. I bought them because we lose cables frequently and will probably lose them before they break.

Last night the GOP had another failure – this time to pass the "skinny repeal bill," which lost to a 51-49 vote. John McCain's "no" was the night's big surprise vote, with audible gasps – as well as come clapping from the Democratic side – which you can watch and listen to here.

The reviews for The Emoji Movie are in, and they probably make Adam Sandler feel great.Highlights from critics:

"Hey, let's kick these pieces of copper pipe."

Forget Comic Sans and Papyrus, writes John Brownlee. Mistral is the font to hate.

Class Apples by 8 Bit WeaponThe Apple II had only rudimentary audio capabilities, so Class Apples, apparently the only album ever made on one, is doubly-incredible: a contemporary technical feat underlying a classical chiptune feast.

In 1990, Peter Kuper (previously at BB) drew a grimly prescient cartoon featuring Donald Trump and the Wall he built. It's a few thousand miles north of the currently-planned location, but Kuper nails most of its key design elements.

Czech designer Michal Sobel couldn't deal with the ad world any more, so he left to make art celebrating his favorite thing: space exploration. (more…)

Comic Parchment is a font combining the best elements of the world's two most widely-loved and respected faces: Comic Sans and Papyrus.Comic Sans accurately and elegantly translates classic comic book charm to the digital context, and Papyrus adds a soulful, mouth-wateringly ragged contour to its otherwise classic serifs. But only Comic Parchment weds the two in a perfect pop-culture marriage of whitebread childishness and ersatz ethnic ambiguity.The magnum opus of genius type designer Ben Harman, Comic Parchment is $5.

Wells Fargo didn't just steal millions from its customers with crooked overdraft fees, didn't just create 2,000,000 fraudulent accounts and threaten to blackball employees who tried to stop the frauds; didn't just defraud broke mortgage borrowers by the bushel-load -- they also defrauded 800,000 customers with car loans, forcing 274,000 of them into deliquency and "wrongfully repossessing" (that is, stealing) 25,000 of their cars. (more…)

Fallen Furniture offers this fabulous chair made from the engine cowling of a Boeing 737. (more…)

Andrew Tarusov created these delightful homages to classic films by replacing the original movie characters with superheroes. (more…)

Comedian Hari Kondabolu's documentary The Problem with Apu dropped a trailer in advance of its debut on TruTV. The film surveys opinions on one of the most recognizable Indian-American characters in the media: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and his outsize, often negative, role in shaping opinions on Indian depictions in the media. (more…)

If you often find yourself far away from AC power, or just want to guarantee that you’ll have GPS access on your next camping trip, the SolarJuice External Solar Battery is an excellent companion for outdoor adventures. It’s currently available in the Boing Boing Store for $59.99.The SolarJuice has a 26,800 mAh battery capable of powering up to three devices at once over high-speed USB 3.0. But more importantly, it absorbs power when you leave it in the sun, and it can bring your phone (or even a tablet) fully back to life several times over. It resists dirt and water, and is built to survive an accidental drop. You can attach it to your backpack with its sturdy carabiner clip to charge while hiking, and use its integrated LED panel as a powerful lantern for your camp site.You can get the SolarJuice 26,800mAh External Solar Battery here for $59.99.

After 7 years of grandstanding, the GOP failed to pass its utterly indefensible 'skinny repeal' bill to destabilize American healthcare. The Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, lost on a 51-49 vote that included some surprise yesses and nos.What a weird night this has been in America. GOP Senators wrote a health care bill over sandwiches at lunch, released the text at night, wouldn't answer reporter's questions about the content of the bill, then held a vote at 1am. And they failed.(more…)

In this case, I think the P stands for "Peace Officer," actually.

Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, called The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza on the phone last night. He was angry because Lizza had tweeted earlier that night: "Scoop: Trump is dining tonight w/Sean Hannnity, Bill Shine (former Fox News executive), & Anthony Scaramucci, per to 2 knowledgeable sources," and "Senior White House official tells me that Melania was also at the dinner tonight with Trump, Hannity, Shine, and Scaramucci."He wanted Lizza to reveal his sources. When Lizza refused, Scaramucci hilariously threatened to fire everyone on the White House communications staff. "I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source," wrote Lizza.Later on the call, Scaramucci went on a potty-mouthed rant about Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. Lizza dutifully transcribed it: