Smell of Books is an amusing selection of imaginary fragrances for bilibiophiles, with names such as "classic musty" and "eau you have cats.""Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?," the site asks. "…all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer."If you're wanting the real thing, though, count yourself lucky. The Demeter Fragrance Library, a selection of novelty perfumes and colognes, sells a scent called Paperback in all sorts of different product variations.There are also, allegedly, scented candles to help evoke the high of the smell of old paper.Lignin is apparently the magic ingredient: The chemical composition of "Old Book Smell"

Carrying this EDC card is like slinging around a handheld toolbox wherever you go. Its minimal design is small enough to fit in your wallet’s billfold, and it’s TSA-compliant so you’ll never leave it behind. It’s got hex wrenches, metric and imperial rulers, flathead and Phillip’s screwdrivers, and a bottle opener so that you’re ready when your car blows a fuse, your bike can’t seem to stay in gear, or you just need to pop a brew. In any case, you’ll always be prepared. Boy Scout’s honor.

I've been using Stanley's classic flask for years (I literally packed one, full of nice bourbon, in my suitcase this morning for the Melbourne/Sydney/Berlin trip I'm leaving on tonight), and I have no complaints: it's beautiful, easy to close, and rugged. (more…)

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We all wish we were this cozy.

https://youtu.be/V9iurC49t6cMy friend Tom Fassbender took a year off to go on a round-the-world trip with his family. He wrote a bunch of excellent dispatches for Boing Boing, which you can read here. He got back to the US a couple of months ago and just finished editing this video that has over 300 one-second clips of the trip.

Tattoo artist Clae Welch gives Casey Lubin eleven tattoos, in the styles of representative American tattoo artists from each decade in the last century. (WatchCut Video)

US police seized $4.5 billion through civil asset forfeiture (through which police can take money and valuables away from citizens without charging anyone with any crimes) in 2014; in the same period, the FBI estimates that burglars accounted for $3.9B in property losses.(more…)

Michael from Muckrock writes, "While J. Edgar Hoover wasn't a big fan of much media in the 60s -- he worked to rewrite one of Hitchcock's scripts and made Walt Disney re-work Tomorrowland -- there was one show that struck a chord: ABC's The FBI." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybxhvlyw-X0Matt Reimer's homebrew autonomous tractor uses open source components to accomplish the kind of automation that John Deere's super-proprietary tractors are known for. (more…)

Earlier today the Moscow City Court ordered the local Church of Scientology to set up a commission to liquidate in six months. According to AP, Russia's Justice Ministry successfully argued that the term "Scientology" is "trademarked and thus cannot be considered a religious organization covered by the constitution's freedom-of-religion clause."

Thirteen people were hospitalized on Sunday after they were found vomiting, convulsing, and behaving oddly in downtown San Diego, California. According to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, they had all overdosed on Spice, a dried plant mixture laced with synthetic cannabinoids that are structurally similar to the THC, the natural cannabinoid in marijuana.Unlike THC, which is has very low toxicity, synthetic cannabinoids can affect different brain receptors and can cause blood pressure spikes, vomiting, seizures, and other serious conditions.Synthetic cannabinoids have been illegal since 2013, but some people favor them over weed because they can use them and pass a urine test and keep their job or not violate probation.[via]

Army Col. John Hope blew the whistle on a task force that spent $43 million to build a useless gas station in Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction says the useless gas station should have cost about $500,000. As a result of pointing out the doubly wasteful project, Hope has “been singled out for retaliation and retribution” for “speaking truth,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.The gas station is useless because it supplies natural gas to cars that have been converted to run on natural gas. But there are hardly any cars that run on natural gas in Afghanistan, and the cost to convert a car to run on natural gas is $700. The average annual income in Afghanistan is $690, according to the Washington Post.More from the Washington Post:

Today only take an additional 15% off the below drones today using coupon code: DRONE15 at checkoutThe Code Black is our top-selling drone of all time—and for good reason. This powerful, palm-size drone is not only insanely fun to fly, but can capture some serious video footage from up above. With a flight time of about 10 minutes and an ultra-smooth ride, it’s a great introductory drone for anyone looking to dominate the sky. This exclusive offer can’t be found anywhere else on the web, so be sure to snag this great price before it flies away!The Snowflake’s smooth maneuvers, flawless 4-way flips, and 360˚rolls in any direction make it truly best in class. Soar, hover, flip, and tilt with ease or join a fleet of drones, thanks to advanced anti-collision technology. This fun quadcopter, with its durable design and gyro-stabilization, is fit for any terrain and any pilot ready to hit the skies.Take flight in fresh air or zip the mini SKEYE Pico Drone through your office in between meetings—we guarantee it’s more fun than a coffee-break. This nimble quadcopter is stealth enough to rest on the tip of your finger, and nimble enough to flip, zip, and dive through tight spaces. It’s the smallest, most lightweight drone in the world, so innocent coworkers and friends will never see it coming. Just throw it in the air—literally—and hover your heart out.There’s a new drone in town, and it goes by the name Sky Runner. It climbs walls like Spiderman, and is almost indestructible like the Hulk. Like stunts? This drone can run, soar, and climb on both land and air—it’s the perfect indoor and outdoor drone for the lazy summer days ahead.The Panther Air Drone is not your average quadcopter. With its unusually large size yet light durable foam body, the Panther boasts a 4.5 channel radio control to seamlessly maneuver forward, backward, up and down, rotate, and coast laterally. Capture hi-def snapshots and video footage of the world below, and seamlessly control it all from the 2.4GHz transmitter. Last but not least, the Panther packs a major party trick with its built in 360-degree flip stunt mode so you can pull off smooth loops with just the press of a button.Even a fear of flying shouldn’t prevent you from soaring to great heights! Fly up, down, and every way in between with the Striker Spy Drone. Encased in a hardy plastic shell, yet still light enough to maneuver, this drone handles even the most complex tricks you throw at it with ease. The internal gyro ensures a smooth flight no matter the conditions, and the built-in camera allows you to film and snap photos of your aerial shenanigans. In no time at all, gravity will be nothing more than a technicality.

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Enjoy the original IBM 5150 PC as implemented in javascript, with various boot images to toy around with.

Lisa Rein writes, "Fresh from a Supreme Court victory in a marijuana case, and armed with a campaign song written by John Lennon, maverick psychologist and prominent LSD researcher Timothy Leary decided to run for governor of California in a bid to unseat the incumbent Ronald Reagan, only to be knocked out of the race by a felony conviction and 10-year sentence for possession of two half-smoked marijuana joints, as a symbol of Nixon's newly proclaimed War on Drugs." (more…)

Perfect for all your underwater stealth-drilling needs, the Nemo Power Tools SPECIAL OPS is submersible to 100 meters, has an 18v lithium battery, and is all-black for maximum concealment.

The amazing animated video to The Jezabels' "Come Alive" features a swirly, timeless impasto style. All smoke and fire and light, every frame's literally a stark, beautiful painting.It was directed by Darcy Prendergast & Xin Li from Oh Yeah Wow, using oil paint on glass. It might seem grim for a monday morning, but stick with it! The Jezebels are on tour in early 2016 and their second album, The Brink, is out now.

Once again, Jen Wang (my co-creator on In Real Life and author of the amazing Koko Be Good) is convening a don't-miss "convention of independent comics artists," Dec 5/6, at the Think Tank Gallery, with Noelle Stevenson and Jaime Hernandez heading the bill. (more…)

Munroe's upcoming book, Thing Explainer, occasioned an interview in Time; in characteristically wonderful style, he answered all the questions with one-panel cartoons. (via /.)

Why interrupt your post-Thanksgiving turkey bliss to wait in an epic line, when the best deal of the season is a click away? We're treating you Mac enthusiasts to the ultimate Black Friday bundle, packed with apps to give your machine a mega boost in the right direction. From Drive Genius to AfterShot Pro to PDFPen, this bundle hits all the spots, and is sure to deliver the best gift you could give or receive this holiday season.[embed]https://youtu.be/1dPvNsi1FvE[/embed]Save 92% On The Black Friday Mac Bundle today in the Boing Boing Store. Here's a breakdown of what's included in the bundle:1Drive Genius 4$99 Value2AfterShot Pro 2$79.99 Value3PDFpen 7$74.95 Value4Mixtape Pro$69.99 Value5MacX DVD Ripper Pro$59.95 Value6BusyContacts$49.99 Value7Prizmo 3$49.95 Value8MotionComposer$29 Value9Dropzone 3$10 Value10DaisyDisk$9.99 Value

The Hilton College of the University of Houston's Hospitality Industry Archives includes a wonderful selection of menus from the 1850s and 1860s. (more…)

Rebecca Solnit is a brilliant writer whose essay Men Explain Things to Me sparked the discourse about "mansplaining" and whose 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell is one of the best history books I've ever read -- so why do so many interviewers want to talk to her about the fact that she chose not to have babies? (more…)

Seemingly harmless browser extensions that generate emojis, enlarge thumbnails, help you debug Javascript errors and other common utilities routinely run secret background processes that collect and retransmit your login credentials, private URLs that grant access to sensitive files, corporate secrets, full PDFs and other personally identifying, potentially compromising data. (more…)

Judith (AKA Miss Mantis) remakes kitschy-sweet porcelain figurines, transforming them with polymer clay, flocking and paint into statuettes of anthropomorphic insects going about their weird, daily business:. Some favorites: Bee Lady "Mìfēng", Fancy Dancing Mantis Gentleman, Bee Lady "Alice", Little Praying Mantis Boy, and Scandalous Mantis Dancer. (more…)

Excel skills aren't just good to have, they're essential to your career success. Start from the basics and advance your skills through these dual expert-taught courses. You'll be fully prepped to earn yourself a coveted certification, and score the job or promotion you've been waiting for.Certify your excel mastery and save 99% on this course in the Boing Boing Store today.

After bigots alerted Southwest Airlines ground crew that there were two people speaking Arabic in the boarding area, the airline's employees opted to harass a Palestinian-American pizza-parlor owner and his friend who were returning to Philadelphia from Chicago. (more…)

While looking for a new wheel for our hamster, my wife spotted this cat exercise wheel, which began life (where else) on Kickstarter and is now an object in the stream of commerce. (more…)

There's nothing like an Alex Schomburg Golden Age comic book cover. Feast your eyes on Sub-Mariner #12, Winter 1943. I'm not a WWII historian, but I don't recall the Germans having pink helmets, pink rifles, or pink and green swastika flags.Stan Lee on Schomburg: "Alex Schomburg was to comic books what Norman Rockwell was to The Saturday Evening Post...When it came to illustrating covers, there simply was no one else in Alex's league."[via]

Paintings by incarcerated Native activist Leonard Peltier have been removed from the walls of the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries in Tumwater following complaints form a group of retired FBI agents.(more…)

Standard & Poor’s, Gallup, the World Bank, and George Washington University gave a five-question test on personal financial concepts to 150,000 people in more than 140 countries. Only 33% of people passed by demonstrating competency in three out of the four topics covered: risk, inflation, interest, and compound interest. Here's the quiz:

Walk into a bookstore, and chances are you’ll see books divided into sections by genre. Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Mystery, and so on. It’s the most common system of categorizing books, conversationally and from the data-management perspective of the book world. Genre is also incredibly limiting at times.There are dozens upon dozens of subgenres across the genres of popular fiction (Romance, Crime, and Science Fiction/Fantasy, plus some others). Science Fiction gets sliced up into Space Opera, Mundane SF, Hard SF, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, etc. These subgenres can get hard to keep track of, especially since their boundaries are often porous, and even life-long fans often disagree on the borders between sub-genres, policing them inefficiently but with gusto. At times it’s fun to argue classifications, try to find exactly the right place to frame a piece so that its cultural and narrative context is most clear. And narrow sub-genres can be useful for putting works into clusters for conversation, but it’s also really easy to slice so thin that the discussion becomes obscure or self-serving rather than practical.(more…)

The company says it's not policy to do this -- yet -- but they're testing locking Yahoo Mail users out of their accounts unless they turn off ad-blocking. (more…)

Movie stars, pro athletes, and rich people will no longer have to suffer the company of their lessers at Los Angeles international airport. For about $1,500 to $1,800 the elite will be dropped off behind closed doors, away from aggressive paparazzi and slack-jawed gawkers. They'll be whisked through security check points and greeted by security personnel trained to pay proper respect to their betters. Instead of dining at Sbarro and Wetzels Pretzels like the schlubs in the dingy terminals, they'll nibble on gourmet meals prepared by dedicated catering teams. Once it's time to jet off to Biarritz and St Bart's, they'll be whisked by car to the waiting plane.The Guardian has more:

This is Gordonville, Pennsylvania resident Leroy Stolzfus, 22, who recently finished the Harrisburg Marathon in three hours, 5 minutes and 45 seconds, close to what it would take for him to qualify for the Boston Marathon. He did it wearing his traditional Amish clothing.Stolzfus told Penn Live that his nontraditional running garb doesn't bug him one bit. "In the summer heat, he said he tries to drink more water, but he doesn't do anything 'out of the ordinary.'""Leroy Stolzfus clocks a 3:05 at Harrisburg Marathon in full Amish garb" (Penn Live)photo by Daniel Zampogna, PennLive

Bats and skateboarders have something special in common. They both use inertia to land their tricks which, in a bat's case, means landing upside down.(more…)

Don't miss this amazing film.(more…)

Disneyland's Haunted Mansion sports a hall of changing paintings in which people and scenes are transformed into sinister versions of themselves. Though these have gained in technical sophistication over the years, transitioning from rear-projection slide-fades to crisp electroluminescent effects synched with the lightning in the opposite windows, the core graphic concepts have been largely invariant since the Mansion first opened its doors. (more…)

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the French National Assembly has declared a state of emergency with sweeping powers, without any substantial debate. Included in the bill are the power to order the nation's ISPs to block websites without any judicial review or court order, and for authorities to seize and search electronic devices without a warrant.(more…)

Back in 2004, when designer David Albertson and I were creating a prototype for the magazine that would become MAKE, one the things we came up with was an item called 1+2+3. It was a one-pager with instructions for making a simple project in three steps. We ended up incorporating 1+2+3s into every issue of MAKE. This book collects 69 fully-illustrated 1+2+3 projects (including several that I wrote and illustrated) from the pages of MAKE.Have you ever wanted to make your own "dice popper" (as seen in the game Trouble)? This book will show you how. You'll also learn how to make a projector that shines an alien head on the wall, an amusing "wobbler" made from two coins, a box that makes a great "boing" sound effect, a light-up hoodie, a simple motor, a $5 smart phone projector, and many more projects. This is a great book to go through with your kids. I guarantee they will say "Let's make that!" at least a few times.

Genetic Cars is a transfixing simulation of procedurally-generated vehicles attempting to traverse rough terrain. Each round comprises genetic variations of the previous round's most successful car.You can randomize the terrain and tweak mutation rates, gravity and other variables. (Moon gravity is chaotic fun; Jupiter seems, for some reason, more convincingly real than the default Earth settings)

I love marveling at good type design because I know how much effort it takes to make things look just right.To me, there’s no deck of playing cards that uses intertwining fonts better than the Type Deck. It took designer Chris Cavill over 5 months to get this project off the ground and I think it was worth the effort.Each suit of the deck has been uniquely handled, while maintaining a cohesive style throughout.Usually, the lion’s share of time and effort in a deck of cards is given to the court cards. But not in the Type Deck.Though the illustrations of the royal cards are crisp and beautiful…They are pushed back and subdued to let the typography be the star.No matter what Chris says, these cards were never meant to be played with. They were meant to be studied.And when I grow up as a graphic designer I hope to create something that hits typographic nerves like this deck does.But for now - I'll just have to be content with what I have.

Be sure to read Adrian Chen's gripping profile of former Westboro Baptist Church twitterer Megan Phelps-Roper, who left the church after coming to realize the futility of its hate gospel.[caption id="attachment_435637" align="alignnone" width="880"] Megan Phelps-Roper, picketing with Westboro when she was still an active member of the family hate cult.[/caption]

Donald Trump, back on top of Republican polls, has called for the creation of a national database of Muslims. Similar to the systems used by the Nazis to track Jews during the Holocaust, the idea has not gone down well, even among his party's rival candidates. (more…)

Dozens are reported dead after gunmen stormed the luxury Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali's capital earlier today.The attackers reportedly took up to 170 hostages before Malian special forces stormed the building to free the captives. The government of France, Mali's former colonial power, has dispatched 50 commandos to the Saharan nation.The remaining hostages were freed in the shootout, reports USA Today, and the gunmen killed.Mali is in the grip of unrest following a 2012 military coup and Islamist insurgency in the north of the country.Reuters reports that al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Mourabitoun has claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes soon after 129 died in a series of bombings and shootings across Paris.

Beset by blackmailers and tabloid rumors, actor Charlie Sheen was recently forced to announce that he is HIV-positive. The most newsworthy thing to come out of it, I think, is a nondisclosure agreement that potential sexual partners must sign in order to get into his pants. Is this a general practice among celebrities? As crazy as it seems, I wouldn't blame them.