The House Homeland Security Committee Majority Staff Report has just published its investigation on aviation security, and the title really tells you everything you need to know: MISCONDUCT AT TSA THREATENSTHE SECURITY OF THE FLYING PUBLIC. (more…)

Autotrader.ca offers some insight into some odd, observed behaviors of motorcyclists. I've been riding for so long, most of this seems just commonsense to me.Here are a few:

Much of what goes into creating an amazing photo happens in the digital darkroom. Here's your chance to master all things photo editing: the Ultimate Adobe Photo Editing Bundle, now available in the Boing Boing Store for just $29.99.Across 8 courses and over 41 hours of intensive instruction, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Adobe’s suite of photo editing programs and utilize them to elevate your photography.Here are the courses in your bundle:

The Pokemon Pokeball weed grinder is $20 on Amazon. Gotta catch it before Nintendo stops them.

I don't think Stewart's ever been in finer form, and his "I've been living in a cave"/Transmet schtick plays well with Colbert's own persona.

Russel Cameron's grotesque, beautiful sculptures "possess human characteristics such as skin texture and some form of anatomical structure," fashioned into blobby, nightmarish, sexual forms. (more…)

Donald Trump thought he could use his usual tactic of "I've paid you enough already" to get out of a painting bill for his golf course, but the mom-and-pop paint store took him to court and won.From The Miami Herald:

Support Techdirt before Aug 2 and you can get one of their classic "the content of this shirt has been removed" DMCA tees and hoodies!

Deji from Access Now writes, "You remember that spooky story about the U.S. screening everyone’s social media 'presence' at the border? Well, now there’s a way to tell the government exactly what you think about it." (more…)

I have a 64GB iPhone, but I don't like using iTunes to transfer videos to it because it is a hassle. I have this little $30 USB/Lighting flash drive that holds 32GB of files, including videos, photos, and songs. I plug it into my computer, copy over a bunch of card magic instruction videos, and I can zone out on the plane for hours. There's a free app that I downloaded on my phone that plays the videos. This is a solid gadget that has performed flawlessly for me.

Dramatis personae: Denver Fenton Allen, a murder defendant. Bryan Durham, a Superior Court judge. And everyone watching in the peanut gallery-cum-courthouse in Rome, Ga., when things got fiery in Floyd County. (more…)

Now that I have mastered the art of looping earbud and charging cables, I'm ready to tackle bag resealing.

This man is having a bit of trouble carrying an air conditioner unit around the corner of a balcony about 10 stories up.

Want to look in your walls, Rob? Try this USB endoscope!I wanted to look inside the cylinders of my motorcycle, just for fun. Rob has a secret room, hidden in the walls of his house. This 5M long fiber optic cable sports a 2.2 megapixel camera, 6 adjustable LEDs for lighting, and a small array of tools to affix for poking or dragging.You can use this with a laptop, or with a USB-A to Mini-USB adaptor it'll work with USB OTG ready Android phones and tablets.DBPOWER 2Million Pixels 5M USB Waterproof HD 6LED Borescope Endoscope Inspection Tube Camera via Amazon

Colorado has already legalized pot, but now its residents in the small town of Hugo can get it for free! After hearing "complaints," according to the sheriff's office, investigators tested the water for THC and found that, yes indeedy, it contained THC. According to the Washington Post:

Flash Forward:RSS|iTunes|Twitter| Facebook|Web|Patreon |RedditIn this episode we discuss the history of drug laws, why some drugs are legal and others aren’t, and what would happen if we just let everybody lose to do whatever they want.

In this YouTube video, a fellow runs 10 amps through a cylinder of pencil graphite, burning his fingers (accidentally on purpose, I'd say).He has a good article about graphite on his site:

Exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and legendary hardware hacker Andrew bunnie" Huang have published a paper detailing their new "introspection engine" for the Iphone, an external hardware case that clips over the phone and probes its internal components with a miniature oscilloscope that reads all the radio traffic in and out of the device to see whether malicious software is secretly keeping the radio on after you put it in airplane mode. (more…)

Great opening lines from literature, in one large image.

The classic Roman salute, complete with a stiff quarter turn, is an entirely natural thing to do after a stirring patriotic speech in the service of an anti-immigrant populist strongman. She makes a smooth recovery, if you ask me, once she realizes what she just did. But it's the suggestion of oops that makes it: it's easy to find photos of politicians and pundits appearing to salute like this, but video showing that crisp, heel-clicking snap are magic. Some believe it was intentional, a dogwhistle a la "Sheriff's Star".

RidleyScotch/Reddit (via Mitch Wagner)

The baseband firmware in your phone is the outermost layer of software, the "bare metal" code that has to be implicitly trusted by the phone's operating system and apps to work; a flaw in that firmware means that attackers can do scary things to your hone that the phone itself can't detect or defend against. (more…)

“A lot of people can crochet. Jayna Grassel can do it FAST.”(more…)

I've been curious about a mysterious void between two rooms of my new old house. Boing Boing reader Medievalist explains how to proceed.

This engineer, active in Kidderminster, England in the 1930s, appears to be the artistic ancestor of San Francisco's Cyclecide bike rodeo. (British Pathé via Weird Universe)

The co-founders of Goodby Silverstein & Partners have made their own anti-Trump ad, just because they thought they should. It is very good, and a bit chilling.Via AdWeek:

One of those lame IRS scammers called me this morning. He said his name was Michael Lee. He didn't like it when I asked him if he was related to Bruce Lee. He also didn't like it when I told him that the amount of the lawsuit against me ($8,900) was too little for me to bother with. Then he threatened to take me on a helicopter ride to the court. When I told him that sounded like fun he got mad and called me a bad name.

On Monday, five kids, around the age of 10, reportedly used a CPR dummy to bash in the window of a convenience store in Peoria, Illinois. They were foiled by bars that prevented them from entering. From the Peoria Journal Star:

Yup. Someone playing Pokemon Go while driving ran into a Police car in Baltimore. Officer's body cameras caught the event.Via USAToday:

Our family has been going to the Neon Retro Arcade in Pasadena. It's a blast. $10/hour gives you unlimited free play on 50 classic arcade games and pinball machines. My daughter now loves Ms. Pac-Man. I bought this Pac-man ghosts embroidered iron on patch for $2 with free shipping on Amazon. It's about 4 inches long. Now we have to figure out where to put it.

A different look to Speaker Ryan's gang. [via]

Gregor Klingman's "Wild Kingdom" is a deck of art cards featuring hand-drawn snakes, wolves and other awesome creatures. Each suit is given a distinctive character—Hearts are "Courageous and Loyal" whereas Diamonds are "Clever and Wise"—and each face card has subtle variations. (more…)

Last spring, Five Thirty-Eight's Walt Hickey published analysis of the IMDB ratings of women-oriented entertainment (like Sex in the City), showing that the ratings for these shows were artificially depressed because men went out of their way to give them extremely low scores. (more…)

Outsider art is big on eBay, a lurking in the shadows of a vast website whose incredible blandness and shonkiness hides a myriad of fascinating subcultures. Paintings of aliens, clowns, Jesus, Trump and the like are fetching wild prices. (more…)

Boing Boing proudly welcomes our sponsor, Meh.I was completely unprepared for how disappointed I was going to be with my random box of crap from Meh.The folks at Meh told me I didn't have to like anything they sent. Dave told me over and over, it is ok if we hate the stuff. Having tried out most of what they sent me, I can safely say I was entertained, then frustrated, scared, confused, frustrated again, kinda bored and slightly angry. A box of crap indeed!When I opened the cardboard box, I still thought maybe I'd get something really great. I didn't think this was impossible! I'd seen some items listed that I was sure would be a lot of fun to play with. Right on top, first thing out of the box was something I thought would be great: the CAP Clip-A-Phone!This looked like a lot of fun! An SmartPhone mount for the brim of a baseball cap? What could go wrong? I grabbed an old hat, some hair clips and my Great Pyrenees. Amazing fun, right? I envisioned a hilarious Dog's Eye view of the world revealed through a camera clipped to my best friend's head. Luckily I didn't destroy my phone.CAP turns your hat into an unbalanced weight dangling just above your face. There is no way a dog, even with lots of hair clips, and a bandana tied over his head holding it on, could walk with it on. Putting the hat on my 9 year old daughter allowed my phone to drop about 3 1/2 feet to the ground, luckily, the hat and clip protected it from taking the brunt of the fall. The same thing happened from 6 feet up when I tried it on. Unless you wear your hat uncomfortably tight, this clip seems designed to sell replacement screens and phones.The one time I got the CAP to stick on my dog's head, the included bluetooth remote and app barely worked and I got no video anyways. We probably lost 90 minutes of our lives to this Clip.https://youtu.be/5XrMqukXe-sI found a video from SkyMall to show off the quality of this "Pulse Massager" but I was completely unwilling to electrocute myself. It just looks creepy and honestly, I'd probably have to shave myself, or my cat, to have tried this on anything living. The big idea being you stick some electrodes to yourself and shock your muscles into submission.Kinda like the Clip-A-Phone, I thought this AwoX StriimLIGHT Bluetooth LED Speaker Light was going to let me have music in my bathroom. The AwoX StriimLIGHT should just screw into the socket like any other bulb. It doesn't. I'm pretty sure this'll only fit into a lamp with a lampshade, because the form factor is so weird I can not get the bulb to mate with the threads in any recessed socket, or some Restoration Hardware fixtures. I did test it in my living room, however it didn't hold a candle to my stereo.I was only supposed to get 3 things to check out, but I'm guessing Dave wanted to make sure I was totally underwhelmed. They also included this WildSide blender. It is completely a blender. I guess if you need a blender it'd be pretty awesome, but I'm 44. I have a blender.My box of worthless crap was as advertised. Crappy. It was a lot of fun to play with the stuff and try to make it work, and I certainly wouldn't have been one of the 1500 lucky purchasers of that "massager," but every now and then a deal comes up on Meh that I just can't resist.--Jason

Like a bird likeabird a bird a birdabirdabirdabirdabirdabirdabird.A remix could fix the evident problems. The poor woman ("widely known for her rich-kid instagram") is being dragged out to support dad at the convention this evening; this track sadly gained no headway in 2014.

In the convention hall, Donald Trump has gotten enough votes from bound delegates to make it official.

Wikileaks have just published the Erdoğan Emails, which is claimed to represent years' worth of email from the APK, the Turkish ruling party, with messages dating from 2010 to as recent as July 6. (more…)

Michael Costuros is an "executive coach" in California's Marin County (birthplace of the hot tub) who every year takes a group of entrepreneurs to South America on a trip within a trip. Each spends $10,000 to hopefully leverage "the healing power of ayahuasca," Costuros says. From Chris Colin's feature in California Sunday:

The newly adopted campaign finance reform section of the GOP platform for the 2016 election calls for "raising or repealing contribution limits" for private individuals and demands an end to "requiring private organizations to publicly disclose their donors to the government," which means that the identity of PAC financiers will be completely secret, opening up offshore financing of US political candidates; finally, the platform condemns "forced funding of political candidates," meaning public election financing. (more…)

Ethan Persoff is releasing a new "Trump Tract" every day during the RNC, and he encourages you to print out stacks of them and leave them around Cleveland during the convention, "at a coffee shop, or in the bathroom at a $30,000/plate dinner, or hand-distributing these out in public." (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.North African Villages: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia

Thinkgeek's $60 Star Spangled Bangle is skinned with the Hubble's amazing "celestial fireworks" image, with 15 recessed USB-charged LEDs run for 8 hours and recharge in an hour. (via Ohgizmo)

In 2010, Lee Holeva, a Roman legion reenactor, lavishly documented his efforts to create a faithful reproduction of caligae, the "ancient milspec Roman footwear" (as Bruce Sterling calls it), worn by Roman legionary soldiers and auxiliaries throughout the Roman Republic and Empire. (more…)

The internet is aflame with mirth and wrath: Melania Trump's speech on the first night of the Republican convention in Cleveland contained several lines lifted from a speech delivered by Michelle Obama. Just at the point where her husband, Donald, secures his grasp on the party, they find that the apparent level his campaign operates at is just another false bottom and there is always worse to come.This side-by-side comparison is particularly damning:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBZYGMVBIVkThe trending hashtags of the morn all concern this very Sad! moment. #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuoteshttps://twitter.com/iJesseWilliams/status/755272484673302528https://twitter.com/LoniLove/status/755366328270139392https://twitter.com/thecamboucher/status/755383570722529280https://twitter.com/BET/status/755375697154101252https://twitter.com/NerdyWonka/status/755381221266382848

Click to zoom into Jonathan Potter's spookily beautiful-animated Julia set. The trick: webGL shaders applied to the scene, making it pulse and glow and coil like a dreaming machine. He also made a Mandelbrot in the same style, without the shaders (which limit how far you can zoom.) [via]

A fellow hoping to dine at an Ottawa McDonalds was informed by the woman serving him that they had run out of Junior Chicken sandwiches for the night. So he called her a bitch, argued for several minutes about the relevance and appropriateness of the term, raised other issues of interest to Men's Rights, and suggested she get on her knees to "service" him—all at steadily increasing volume and pitch. [via

Derp. Herp derp.

Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump's ghostwriter for the New York Times' bestseller, The Art of the Deal (1987), is terrified that Trump is running for president. He told Good Morning America today that he has a "deep sense of remorse" over writing the book.Schwartz spent 18 months with Trump in the 1980s to get to know him and his voice, and says Trump is "insecure," "easily provoked," and, with his "tiny" attention span, can't focus on anything. "He's not nearly as smart as people might imagine he is," Schwartz said. "In the face of someone like Putin, provoking him cleverly – because Putin is a heck of a lot smarter than Donald Trump – I do worry that with the nuclear codes he would end civilization as we know it."At the time, Schwartz enjoyed writing the book, and never thought it was important to speak out negatively about Trump – until Trump became the Republican nominee for president. Since then, Schwartz hasn't slept a full night through, and wishes he never would have written the book.