Brew Cutlery raised over $20K on Kickstarter to make these handsome, heavy (150g) utensils with integrated bottle-openers in their handles; the backers who got the early sets are effusive in their praise of the look, materials (18/8 stainless steel) and craftsmanship (each piece is hand-finished). Not cheap, though: $50/set. (more…)

In this footage, Sgt. Eric Kannberg deals calmly with a belligerent drunk, Cory Counts, using de-escalation techniques even after Counts gets physical. After Kannberg gets a push from Counts and it comes time to haul him to the drunk tank, Kannberg decides not to pursue through a crowd, instead stalking him at a distance until a safe opportunity presents itself. Counts earned a misdemeanor charge and the the ignominy of having the footage posted to Spokane P.D.'s Facebook page. (more…)

Right now, Amazon has a great deal on a Seagate 5TB external hard drive. It's $110 (the same price as the 4TB mode). I've been looking for a way to back up all the computers in my household (with Time Machine) and I might buy this. I think can just create several partitions on it and plug it into the USB port of my wireless access point. Has anyone had success doing it this way?

This week on HOME: Stories From L.A.:A roving. shifting company of dance and performance artists is nudging its audiences to think about home differently -- by bringing one-off, site-specific performances to houses, live-work spaces and tiny apartments all over the Los Angeles area. Meet homeLA.HOME is a member of the Boing Boing Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please rate/review the show on iTunes. NEW: Subscribe to the newsletter.Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

See more sample pages from this book at Wink.Formica Forever

Here's a gallery of flowers, mainly orchids, that look like monkeys, Darth Vader, naked men, human lips, dancing girls, laughing bumble bees, swaddled babies, parrots, human skulls, flying ducks, tiger heads, happy aliens, angels, doves, ballerinas, egrets, and moths.[via]

YouTube's Russian-to-English autotranslare describes the incident thusly: "Prosrali load to 100.5 billion. Ship murmanchanin Vasilyev went in Sabetta with pipes that are loaded in Arkhangelsk in the MRTS. In Sabetta came to clean the deck. Pipes certain German order."[via]

Police in Hyannis, Massachusetts were on the lookout for 31 year old Shaun Miller, who was wanted for drug trafficking. Officers went to a house were he was believed to be staying, and when they encountered an "elderly man" there, the "officers determined that the ‘elderly man’ was in fact Miller, and at that point, officers pulled off Miller’s realistic disguise and placed him under arrest," according to a statement issued by the US Attorney’s Office.[via]

Jimmy Nelson is a legendary photographer of humanity. He shares seven insights gleaned from his 48-year career, each one backed up with an interesting anecdote about how he got better at his craft. (more…)

Jeepneys are the unofficial national vehicle of the Philippines. Originally made from modified surplus US jeeps after World War II by companies like Sarao, they developed into a colorful and stylized form of public transportation. (more…)

Dan Bongino is a former secret serviceman running for office in Florida. In a tweet, he suggested that coverage of his backers in Naples Daily News was "propaganda."https://twitter.com/dbongino/status/767356783169941504Asked by Politico reporter Marc Caputo to be specific, they end up on a call (after some Twitter trash talk), where things go horribly wrong for Bongino. (The action gets most classy about 7m 30s in)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VXBqnx2ONECaputo's being tricky—Bongino's "propaganda" remark isn't aimed at any specific claim in a specific story, even if it was a response to a tweeted Daily News URL. But Caputo knows how to work an angry idiot, and Bongino soon shits himself on a recorded call.

In the Bronx (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere) when your belongings are seized as "evidence," it can be impossible to ever get them back, even if you're never charged with a crime. (more…)

Robert Moses gets remembered as the father of New York's modern urban plan, the "master builder" who led the proliferation of public benefit corporations, gave NYC its UN buildings and World's Fairs, and the New Deal renaissance of the city: he was also an avowed racist who did everything he could to punish and exclude people of color who lived in New York, and the legacy of his architecture-level discrimination lives on in the city today. (more…)

Microsoft's deceptive hard-sell to gets users to "upgrade" to Windows 10 (the most control-freaky OS to ever come out of Redmond) is made all the more awful by just how much personal, sensitive, compromising data Microsoft exfiltrates from its users' PCs once they make the switch. (more…)

An anonymous phone-bank worker at Britain's Department of Work and Pensions describes the cruel system under which call are handled, designed to purge the faintest hint of sympathy and to likewise deny callers access to basic, vital information without which their benefits will not be approved, or can be terminated. The DWP is who you call if you've been widowed and need help caring for your children, or when you get a cancer diagnosis, or when your organs fail. (more…)

Leonard Richardson isn't just the author of Constellation Games, one of the best debut novels I ever read and certainly one of the best books I read in 2013; he's also an extremely talented free/open source server-software developer who has been working for the New York Public Library on a software project that liberates every part of the electronic book lending system from any kind of proprietary lock-in, and, in the process, made reading library ebooks one trillion times better. (more…)

A PSA from Donate Life America.Checking that box on your driver's license renewal, or application, is simple and saves lives.(Thanks Robert O'Neal!)

My mother bought me Garanimals. Outfits guaranteed to make you look catalog perfect if you selected the right tags. I still looked like Oscar the Grouch.https://youtu.be/rXceQWHxcpoKids today are so lucky! They have Hot Topic and Garanimals! Codified children's styling was apparently re-introduced in 2008! Strangely, I've never seen them even though my daughter is only nine, and absolutely the right age. I guess she doesn't need the help!

With the leak of exploits developed by The Equation Group, the long-secret, NSA-adjacent super-elite hacking squad -- published by The Shadow Brokers, who have some extremely heterodox theories about auction design -- it's now possible to audit the source code of some of the NSA's crown-jewel cyberweapons. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY4BwbfHBMATonight in Kansas City, MO, at Midamericon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, the Hugo Awardswere presented to a rapt audience in person and online, with voters weighing on a ballotthat had been partially sabotaged by a small clique of people who objected tostories about wowen and people who weren't white. (more…)

The police in Caldwell, Idaho told Shariz West that they thought her ex-boyfriend might have run into her house and they asked for permission to look inside; she said yes, but then the cops engaged in a 10-hour armed standoff against her empty home (the family dog was inside, but there were no humans), blasting holes in the walls, crashing through the ceilings, smashing out the windows, and filling the house with tear-gas, which destroyed most of the family's possessions. (more…)

In June, the Defense Department’s Inspector General released a report on the US Army's accounting, revealing that the Army had invented $6.5 trillion in "improper adjustments" ($2.8T in one quarter!) to make its books appear balanced though it could not account for where the funds had gone. (more…)

Dann and Greg May's Polyhero dice are kickstarting a new set of odd-shaped polyhedral random-number generators: the Wizard Set complements last year's Warrior Set with seven dice shaped like potions, fireballs, bolts, wands and orbs. (more…)

The Brennan Center has rounded up a rogues' gallery of candid, on-the-record admissions from Republican politicians, officials, and operators about the true nature of the unconstitutional voter restriction laws that were cookie-cuttered across the Tea Party state governments: they don't fight voter fraud (because that's not a thing), but they do disenfranchise traditional democratic voters: people of color and students. (more…)

Battle is a town in East Sussex, England. Battle has a railway station. A pilfered road sign directing travelers to Battle Station is currently £23.95 on eBay. "This deserves a good home" writes Ben Goldacre.

When carrying around a bulky DSLR camera isn't ideal, we use these impressive add-ons to help turn our smartphones into quality cameras.Flexible Tripod for Smartphones and CamerasThe Flexible Tripod for Smartphones and Cameras ($8.99) is perfect for capturing a group shot or leveling out your phone on an uneven surface. Its flexible legs can wrap around anything, even a tree branch, so it's great for taking photos while on a hike or while sightseeing. We were impressed with its sturdy construction that can even support a digital camera or oversized phone.Universal 3-in-1 Lens Kit for Smartphones & TabletsIf you really want to start taking next level pictures with your phone, we suggest you invest in the Universal 3-in-1 Lens Kit for Smartphones & Tablets ($11.99). These three lenses—fisheye, wide-angle, or macro—clip right onto your smartphone’s lens and help you take pictures that’ll look like they were taken with a much pricier device. The lenses clip on and off to keep from damaging your phone, and they come in a convenient carrying bag for easy transport.

YouTuber Latheman666 takes maglev to the next level by adding nine neodymium magnet cubes to a levitating magnet and then floating a pyrolytic graphite disc about 1mm above the neodymium. Hypnotic! (more…)

A new study suggests that the ominous background music often heard in shark documentaries correlates with viewers' fearful and negative opinions of sharks. (For the source of this musical cliche, see the 1975 trailer for Jaws above.) From the Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers paper in the scientific journal PLOS One:

Tired of lady villains being given pathetic, exploitative backstories to justify and explain their wicked ways? Sarah Gailey writes In Defense of Villainesses: women who are flawless, ruthless and require no pathological explanation.

What did Lochte say after his teammates told the police what really happened?"...and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you medaling kids!"

Sidelined but not fired by Republican millionaire Donald Trump to make way for a new campaign manager, Paul Manafort is nonetheless resigning from his post. The rumor? He's under federal investigation for his role in shady goings-on in Ukranian politics.

Funklet is a new archive of drum patterns (not sampled loops) from classic funk songs, complete with brief histories and musical context. Each can be edited in a simple embedded sequencer and shared. [via r/InternetIsBeautiful]

Chipmaking is a relentless competition to make transistors smaller and smaller. Such refined technology is as inscrutable to users as angels dancing on the head of a few hundred copper pins, so James Newman set out to make a working CPU whose every connection can be explored and understood by students."Like all modern processors the Megaprocessor is built from transistors," he writes. "It's just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones... Thousands of them. And loads of LEDs."The resulting machine took two years to construct and recalls the earliest room-filling electronic computers, with banks of blinking lights and ropes of cable linking each refridgerator-sized peripheral. But this time, it's by choice rather than limitation: with a light on every connection, you can see the logic and movement of data through the chip in person.Ten meters wide and 2 meters tall, the 16-bit Megaprocessor is deliberately simple and slow. Clocked at 20kHz, it could feel at home in an airport-sized Commodore Amiga or classic Mac, though it's not quite as complicated as the Motorola 68000 that inspired it.There's already software to play with, though, including a rough implementation of Tetris. You can download an emulator to get started on making your own."I didn't plan on ending up here. I started by wanting to learn about transistors," Newman writes. "Things got out of hand.

Matt Stutzman was born without arms, but that has not stopped him from becoming an excellent archer. It's amazing to watch him do everyday tasks like drive and answer his smartphone, too. (more…)

On Monday night, 19 year old Austin Kelly Harrouff of Florida went homicidally berserk for reasons yet unknown. He stabbed to death a random couple twice his age, also attacking a neighbor who tried to intervene. Then Austin began biting the dead man's face off.Horrible new details are out today. When Austin's frightened mom called 911 to report his erratic, menacing behavior with family, she told the emergency dispatcher that her son was wearing a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat when he wandered off into the night ranting about being a superhero. And in a YouTube video uploaded before the attack, he spoke to the camera about bodybuilding and steroids, and of taking “a lot of shrooms.”A person familiar with the family gave reporters two snapchats Austin sent out hours before the attack. The snapchats show him making faces for the camera with the words "Trump" and "the horse" captioning the images.(more…)

In 1995, after a year-long closure, Disney re-opened Horizons, the GE-sponsored original Epcot ride devoted to showcasing different ideas about the future, a kind of heir to the Futurama at the 1939 New York World's Fair; fearing the ride was likely to be shuttered soon, two Epcot superfans began covertly exploring and documenting the ride, figuring out its ways and means until they learned how to penetrate it and hide from Disney employees while sneaking in their friends and having little celebrations. (more…)

Six weeks after Mother Jones published its explosive undercover expose on the abuses, shortcomings and waste in America's vast private prison system, the Department of Justice has issued a ban on renewal of federal private prison contracts (where they are not able to do this, officials are told to "substantially reduce" the scope of those contracts), with the goal of "reducing -- and ultimately ending -- our use of privately operated prisons." (more…)

Currently a columnist for Deadspin, GQ, and other outlets, Drew Magary crafted his voice writing blisteringly satires of NFL players, coaches, and fans like Rex Ryan, Michael Vick, Rex Grossman, and “Tommy from Quinzee” at the NFL-related humor blog KissingSuzyKolber. He gained his greatest renown in a 2013 profile of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson for GQ that brightly illuminated Robertson’s homophobia and lead to Robertson’s brief suspension from the show.But to get a grasp of this captivating writer’s career to date and put his new novel, The Hike, in its proper context, it helps to go back to the start of his online career. Magary began to draw attention in the blogosphere as “Big Daddy Drew” on a blog called “Father Knows Shit” and as an early, popular commenter on Deadspin, and the blogging medium and FKS’ uproarious view of fatherhood remains a touchstone for his work. As he recently told me, “You know me, I never shut … up about dad crap. I try to use any available material I have in hand because it helps make the characters feel grounded and because I always try to get deep inside myself and try to get that on the page.”Magary’s first novel, The Postmortal (2011), is a fascinating update to the epistolary form as he used a series of blog entries to craft his novel’s premise of a world without aging and the myriad complications to society that result. It was a deft move that combined the strengths of his non-fiction and online satire into the novel’s form and content. In his review for Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder wrote, “The Postmortal is a dark, bleak tale, but it’s also an exciting page turner, with bits of black humor thrown in to keep it from becoming bottomlessly depressing.” In my own review for Rougarou, I wrote that “The Postmortal offers a compelling examination of humanity’s paradoxical mental fragility and arrogant need to have our existence validated by others,” and that Magary was a promising SF writer.The Hike demonstrates an expansion of this fragility through a parent fearful of losing his family to aging, poor choices, and those forces further outside human control.Following Frauenfelder, I can say that The Hike is also a page-turner with a more traditional narrative form—a third person narrator, straightforward plotting, etc.—that results in a successful work of contemporary fantasy. It displays a writer in command of his voice and experimenting with more traditional forms of narrative, while being inventive, funny, and, by the end of the work, quietly profound and touching. In short, if one has enjoyed Magary’s fiction and non-fiction and one likes fantasy literature that is not necessarily in the Tolkienian, wizards/dragons/elves mode, then The Hike is for you. Although I found it less ground-breaking in both structure and story than The Postmortal, the ending of The Hike is both carefully earned and satisfying.Throughout The Hike, Magary’s hallmark style of bombastic invectives at life’s unfairness (as well as his prodigious profanity) often overshadows his subtle but nuanced observations of the human condition. It appears to me that deep down, there is a sensibility in his writing that cannot for one moment understand life’s mysterious cruelties that fuels this writer’s boiling, indignant rage.The Hike opens with Ben, like Magary a husband and father of three in the DC area, on what he imagines to be a routine business trip to a dumpy mountain inn in eastern Pennsylvania, a “wedding mill” Ben calls it, to meet with a vendor. Upon arriving, Ben decides to venture out for what he imagines will be a pleasant walk in the surrounding countryside. Quickly, Ben discovers that the path has taken him away from everything he has known as “normal”—he is quite off the Map app in his phone and finds himself in a hellscape worthy of Dante. Ben’s adventures with his phone, including tantalizing moments when it connects to a cell tower and he can hear his family’s voices, as well as his on-going battles with its capricious GPS sensor and battery, become a funny running sub-plot. Turns out, it’s often nice to have a Virgil when Siri is unavailable, and a highlight of the novel is the revelation of just who is Ben’s Virgil.The Hike grabbed me early on with its uncanny depiction of Ben’s horrifying realization that he is utterly unsure of how to get back to his room, his car, his familiar life. In short order, he encounters two terrifying killers, men masked by the torn faces of Rottweilers. Once away from these dual Cerberus figures, Ben meets a girl from his past—though in this scene, Ben is no longer a soon-to-be-middle-aged businessman with a balky, surgically repaired knee, but a hale and randy college student once again. After a night of sex and rehashing their brief history, she sends the present, older version of Ben on his way with a note bearing just one line: “Stay on the path.” It is a command that comes to define Ben’s attempts to complete his quest to get back to his family.From the “is it really adultery to have sex as a past, unmarried version of yourself that might actually be a hallucination” sendoff down the path, Magary’s plot twists and turns in ways that will feel comfortable to readers of fantasy—his protagonist encounters various demons, temptresses, giants, and other specters, while enduring near-starvation, a battle royal, imprisonment, forced labor, and despondent isolation. In addition to images of the fantastic, Magary draws on elements from video games (not in any way to the extent of Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), though I could see some readers making such a connection). And while it builds on The Postmortal’s critique of gerontophobia in youth-obsessed America, The Hike is far more interested in exploring a parent’s primordial fears of loss and abandonment.This is a novel about the overwhelming desire that we often have of returning to our sense of our “normal” often formed in childhood. As well, Magary mines the adult fears of losing our youth, vitality, and those we cherish. Reading the novel, I often found myself thinking back to The Inferno’s first lines: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” This is truly what The Hike is about—the journeys in adulthood that begin, so often, with the mundane but devolve into visions of despair. As in all good journey tales, The Hike ultimately strips Ben down to his core through his darkest fears and by revealing what sins he will and won’t commit in order to return to those he loves.Ultimately, the novel pulls back from much of its potential for existential exploration in favor of a good adventure yarn, but as a second novel from this talented writer, I believe it’s worth the time to seek out and explore the book’s dark forest of ideas.

I have a copy of Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity, by Oyvind Nydal Dahl. It's a full-color introduction to electronics, and is useful for kids and adults who want to get started in hobbyist electronics. Right now, this 328 page book is on sale for just $11 on Amazon.

To these monkeys, people are just machines that make dental floss.

The online enyclopedia is "reimagined as a cosmic web of knowledge" at Wikiverse: a representational web upon the literal web that implemented a conceptual web.

r/videos rediscovered a remarkable (albeit old) video of an eBay auction for a DVD "backing card"—the art from the box—that warns browsers in no uncertain terms that they are not getting the movie itself. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=qMXgVoL45HcLas Vegas is one of America's most unionized cities, and importantly, the unionization rates are especially high in trades dominated by women, such as cocktail servers and hotel cleaners, making Vegas one of the most equal places in America in terms of wage-parity between women and men, and also between young workers and older workers. (more…)

Lynx Art Collection has some fun retro-future space posters in their collection, like this one titled Astronaut Hang Time. They also have a bunch of cool travel posters, like this one for Mars: (more…)

Amy Schumer got drawn into a complex controversy over comments made by a friend who has written for her Comedy Central show. Her response Wednesday night suggests she's ready to pull the plug on the whole show. (more…)

Swearballs let out a tirade of curses when you throw them at something. The fine family of products includes F-Bomb (demonstrated above), a Magic S Ball with foul-mouthed Magic 8 Ball options, and Swearball Classic, which lets you add your own recorded swears and rants: (more…)

Mark Rober teamed up with The Backyard Scientist to see what happens when you fill a pool with 25 million water balls then try to jump in. (more…)

Amid the horror of floods that have covered southern Louisiana in recent days, a grim note of irony: Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-queer Family Research Council, is among those whose homes are underwater. Perkins believes natural disasters are sent to punish gays. (more…)

At the Rio olympics, every inch of the tennis arena beyond the court itself is bright lime green. Therefore, factionman chroma keyed it against a variety of interesting and charming backdrops.