Joe Reddington makes his personal to-do list public, and he says "it’s the most useful thing I’ve done in years." Because he is writing his list for an audience, he has to describe the task clearly. The tasks now take "less thinking when I cast my eye down the list. That makes them easier to start, and that makes them easier to finish."My favorite item on his list: "Brainstorm doubling down on the 'Never leave the house unless it's going to be fun' unless cycling."

This looks like more fun than giving an elephant a shave with a blowtorch.[via]

This is pretty much what happened when my two-year-old wanted to paint our chicken coop.

These angel wing earrings will set you free. Between the wings is a 1″ spring steel handcuff shim.

Hopefully the person who made this mouse electrocution device did it as a joke and doesn't intend to use it.[via]

In 1969 The Rolling Stones hired the Hells Angels to help out at a free concert at the Altamont Speedway near Oakland, California. The Stones paid the Angels by giving the $500 worth of beer. One of the Hells Angels ended up killing an 18-year-old man. From Wikipedia:

Xeni's posted many times about her cancer, what it took to treat it, what helped, and the financial issues at stake. For CNN, she writes that Obamacare saved her life. With Republicans rushing to dismantle the healthcare law formally known as the Affordable Care Act, it's more important than ever to understand what Americans will face if insurance companies are put back in charge. Even if you think you have good insurance, you might be surprised to learn what it won't cover if the ACA goes away.

North Dakota Republican lawmakers introduced HB1203, a bill that would pave the way for drivers to negligently run over people blocking their way.

The eight richest people in the world (all men) have as much money as the poorest half of the world. They are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg.From The Guardian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1FvsMOX8iANothing seems real to me now until it's been youtubed on a cellphone camera; that special mix of artifacty shadows, blown highlights and uncanny detail everywhere else signifies the zenith of media-era simulated authenticity. Elliott's there, though, and it's terrifying!

Watching Laura Kampf build a poplar projector box is an education in 1) excellent craftsmanship and 2) tools I must now get. The way dovetail jointing is illustrated is particularly fascinating: in 5 minutes of well-shot arty youtube cinema I feel I learned more than a dozen talky howto videos where the content is buried somewhere after a minute of intro music, five minutes of "HEY GUYS" rambling, and nine more fooling around in the shop. Don't miss the sketchbook!

Comic artist R. Sikoryak, known for his Masterpiece Comics and his graphic novel version of the iTunes user agreement, is now creating faux comic book covers using tweets and speech excerpts from our High School Bully-Elect. Sikoryak is known for doing his art in the style of other artists and here he pays homage to the likes of Charlie Adlard (Walking Dead), Jack Kirby, Bob Montana, Chris Houghton (Adventure Time), and others. Here are a few of his covers. See all of the covers to date on his Tumblr blog.

This is not even remotely new, but with so many folks eagerly waiting for Ridley Scott’s film Alien: Convenant, which opens in May, it’s time to revisit this so you can laugh now and get freaked out later.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJuo0UzeV30

Why does The Caterpillar Lab only have 44 subscribers? Caterpillars set to smooth jazz, like these gorgeous stinging rose caterpillars checking each other out, make this New Hampshire nonprofit a hidden gem. (more…)

Adam MacLeod is an associate law prof at Faulkner Christian University in Montgomery, Alabama: when he received a speeding ticket generated by a traffic camera for a time when he knew he hadn't been driving his car (he'd been lecturing at the moment when the picture was snapped), he decided he would fight it to the bitter end. (more…)

There’s nothing quite like the rush of playing against a real human opponent. But from a developer standpoint, creating fun multiplayer experiences is incredibly complex. Fortunately, the Unity3D game engine has made all aspects of game creation, including multiplayer functionality, as accessible as ever.This Unity Course Bundle introduces all of the necessary elements of creating a modern multiplayer game. I learned how to quickly build a 3D environment using voxels and modular game assets without any previous experience. I then explored character equipment and weapon use to allow players to customize their avatars.Aside from the surface details, network-enabled multiplayer games also need robust communication functionality. This bundle taught me how to host a game on a live server and interact with a database to match players and facilitate chat systems.I highly suggest picking up this bundle to start working on your multiplayer masterpiece. For a limited time, the Building Multiplayer Games with Unity Bundle is 95% off — just $39.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WDWLeRKc2YJames O'Keefe is the Breitbart-affiliated fraudster and fake news pioneer who staged the hoax videos about Acorn and Planned Parenthood that disrupted the last two election cycles; his MO is to dress up in disguises and then attempt to trick progressives into saying damning things on camera (he's not very good at it, having been rumbled by both CNN and Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky). (more…)

EFF Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon has posted an excellent, practical guide to talking to your member of Congress -- how to do it, how to maximize your efficiency, and why you should. (more…)

Our dungeon master is back from his honeymoon so we are starting up out game again. Feeling generous, I bought this 35-pack of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 dice to make things easier. It's $13. For $18, you get a 100-pack.

In Eastern Europe, organized crime and the government are the same thing, so the US is having a tough time stopping the ransomware attacks emanating from those countries. The LA Times has a story about a recent attack on a community college in Los Angeles:

A perfect teaser for Better Call Saul season 3. The show returns this spring with 10 new episodes, and it looks like Gus Fring, the wonderfully evil meth kingpin in Breaking Bad, will play a role.

Nine News Australia's anchor Amber Sherlock flipped out just before going on air that her colleague Julie Snook was wearing white, just like her, even though she advised her against it. Sure, they weren't live yet, but the Internet doesn't care. "It is an issue. Go and grab a jacket!"Sherlock must be well-loved by her colleagues, especially whoever leaked the clip.(News.com.au)

A teacher at Pennridge High School in Pennsylvania gave students an assignment that included biographical snippets from the life of poet Maya Angelou. Some people are upset.From Detroit News:

When Facebook implemented Open Whisper Systems' end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol for Whatsapp, they introduced a critical flaw that exposes more than a billion users to stealthy decryption of their private messages: in Facebook's implementation, the company can force Whatsapp installations to silently generate new cryptographic keys (without any way for the user to know about this unless a deep settings checkbox had been ticked), which gives the company the ability to decrypt user messages, including messages that have already been sent in the past.. (more…)

https://youtu.be/ukug2h1kS4QElectric eels are incredible animals. Besides being able to shock animals, it uses radar to locate prey. This 1950s film features a happy scientist and his beloved pet eel, Joe, who happily shocks five people in the office with his superpower.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdnpNJZVUE0Rainey from EFF writes, "EFF just launched a new video about its efforts to encrypt the web. It features bestselling author Baratunde Thurston explaining why encryption matters and two simple ways to ensure the web we love is encrypted."

When you open the box for a Storm Trooper snuggie blanket, you'll discover a card telling you that by buying the blanket, you've waived your right to sue the manufacturer and will subject yourself to binding arbitration if your blanket gives you cancer or burns you to death or any of the other bad things textiles can do. (more…)

In the village of Antia on Greece's Evia island, shepherds use whistling to communicate over long distances. This isn't a code but rather a real language.

Writer and director William Peter Blatty, creator of The Exorcist, has died at age 88. Batty is best known for writing the story of poor, possessed Regan and her demonic resident Captain Howdy. He won an academy award for writing the screenplay for The Exorcist film in 1973.Here is Blatty on The Tonight Show, January 17, 1974, talking about the surprisingly polarizing response to his classic novel of occult horror:https://youtu.be/lEKPFSRqY-o?t=51m33sTweet from William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QskkIFALFWkWhen the shepherd begins to rise to their feet, the ram, spooked by an approaching car, turns and puts them down again. [via]https://gfycat.com/SoupyMeagerGecko

In a new video for Vox, writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan discusses the importance of representation and why we need a show like Modern Family centered on Muslim characters.[via Mic]

NBC Nightly News shared this absolutely adorable footage of animals at the Oregon Zoo frolicking in the snow. The storm was big enough to cause the zoo to shut down to the public for the day, but the animals didn’t seem to mind. The Oregon Zoo’s Twitter account has been sharing even more videos:https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/819591911203688449https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/819282065279418368

The EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) say that since 2014, Chrysler shipped 104,000 trucks with "defeat devices" designed to cheat emissions tests -- like VW's cheating, this software was designed to produce low NOx ratings when the trucks were undergoing emissions tests, but to ramp up NOx emissions during normal road use, trading emissions for fuel-efficiency. (more…)

Alexey Kovalev is a critical Russian journalist who's lived through Putin's gutting of the Russia's press freedoms, producing a tame, whipped domestic press who act as stenographers for Putin's annual four-hour Christmas press-conferences. (more…)

The new data-sharing rules enacted by the Obama administration will allow the NSA to lawfully share the unredacted, full take of its surveillance databases with sixteen other US government agencies -- meaning that, for example, Trump's door-to-door deportation squads could use that data to figure out who's doors to break down, and his Muslim surveillance database could bootstrap itself with NSA data. (more…)

In a 24-hour period, America experienced: its next president giving a press-conference in which paid shills applauded or booed as suited his needs; its next president wielding a binder of blank pages as a prop, declaring it to be his "conflict of interest plan"; its next president setting out a way to launder bribes through the State Department; its Congress holding a 1AM vote to ban the Budget Office from investigating the real costs of legislation; its Senate voting to strip 22 million people of health-care (including me and my family). That was all in one day. (more…)

Artist and photographer Adam Makarenko creates miniature exoplanets and then photographs them, with gorgeous results that go beyond CGI. (more…)

The track Batman is really the only thing worth listening to on the incredibly odd tribute album, Jan and Dean meet Batman.Shortly after the release of Batman as a single, William Jan Berry was injured in a largely career ending car crash.

The Everything Report may be ahead of its time, but not by much.

Researchers in a southern Brazil grassland spotted a tarantula munching on a foot-long snake. It's the first time a tarantula having this particularly hearty meal has been documented in the wild. The non-venomous snake is a Erythrolamprus almadensis and the tarantula is a Grammostola quirogai that boasts .8-inch long fangs. Federal University of Santa Maria graduate student Leandro Malta Borges found the dining tarantula under a rock. From National Geographic:

This short documentary by Enric Ribes and Oriol Martínez is titled Xiong Di, which translates in English to "brother" or, according to the directors, "fellas.""I repeat the same things every day,” says Qu Maomao, 27. “Same clothes, same place, same process." (Dazed)

Anker generally makes high quality electronic gear, and judging by the reviews on Amazon, the tiny SoundCore Nano Bluetooth speaker is no exception. It's got a battery life of 4 hours, and can be recharged with the included Micro USB charging cable (which also can be used as a way to connect the speaker to a computer instead of Bluetooth).

NASA claims this image taken by the Cassini probe depicts Saturn's moon Mimas with the distinctive Herschel Crater, but we know better. From NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute:

This stand for the Apple Watch mimics the classic design of the original Apple Macintosh. It's made from "scratch-free silicone" and supports the Apple Watch's Nightstand Mode. elago W3 Stand [White] - [Vintage Apple Monitor] (Amazon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-NBcP0YUQI"I think that it was in my generation that people who made video games really became designers rather than technologists," Shigero Miyamoto says.

https://youtu.be/hTWIokjzeH0Fleb is a puzzle designer and puzzle collector. In this video, he shows how to fit a wooden square into a bag that looks too small. "Square in the Bag" was the 2012 Puzzle of the Year and was created by Hirokazu Iwasawa.

https://youtu.be/pGwOZSrFayIThis happened in 2010, but it is worth watching. A reporter who has questions about how public money is being spent meets a passive-aggressive communication director who can't keep his hands to himself.[via]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NCEeZtRCRI&feature=youtu.beAmber Sherlock, a television personality in Australia, was angry that a colleague, Julie Snook, wore clothes almost the same color as her own. On-camera, with the screen split and an increasingly alarmed and discomfited guest looking on—also wearing white!—she insisted Snook change her attire and did not commence the segment until she had done so.

The hit musical Hamilton performed a concert version of the show at the White House in March. While the first few numbers were live streamed, the rest of the performance was limited just to those in attendance. But now in honor of Obama’s last few days in office, the musical just released the White House performance of “One Last Time,” in which George Washington (Christopher Jackson) delivers his farewell address with a little help from Alexander Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda). It’s one of my favorite songs from the show, and you can watch the moving performance above as well as some more excerpts from the concert right here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_edbv-LPX9c[via Entertainment Weekly]