Say goodbye to your annoying, bulky key ring. KeySmart ($15.99) organizes your keys in one convenient, compact, and lightweight place. The extended frame lets you easily attach longer and foreign keys, and the included expansion pack can hold up to 10 keys, rather than just four. This handy gadget is meticulously designed to allow for quick and easy key access with less of the bulk.

The UK government has budgeted £175m/year to bribe ISPs to magically divide their customers' "data" and "metadata" and store a year's worth of the latter. This isn't even close to the real cost of creating and maintaining the massive storehouses of highly sensitive data on every Briton, and so ISPs are warning government and the public to expect much higher broadband rates in the future in order to recoup the cost of mass surveillance. (more…)

https://youtu.be/D7_0SOTQLIQAn internet classic from 2011. “Don't worry honey, Biggie's coming back.”(more…)

A hankering for Hot Pockets saved the life of a man whose apartment was hit by a small plane. Jason Bartley, a 38-year-old factory, worker lost everything in the fiery crash--except his own life.Nine people were killed.There's a GoFundMe to help Jason get into a new home, and replace some of what's possible to replace. “Jason had no renter's insurance and is literally left with nothing,” his friends write.The NTSB is investigating the crash.From Ohio.com:

https://youtu.be/mXLzfAHl4-kSimone Giertz says, "I built an alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning by slapping me in the face with a rubber arm. I picked apart a clock, wired it to an Arduino UNO and controlled a 165 rpm brushless DC motor through a relay."(Thanks, Matthew!)

The latest Humble Ebook Bundle features Make: books from "Planes, Gliders, and Paper Rockets" to "Bicycle Projects" to the "Illustrated Guide to Home Forensic Science Experiments" -- 17 titles in all, with more to come. Name your price and get $200+ worth of ebooks, with charitable donations to the Maker Ed projects.

Matthew Ritter's interest in epitaphs began in junior high, when a history book displayed the haunting message on the grave of an ancient Roman: "What I am you soon shall be." He started writing epitaphs of his own in the margins of his notebooks, summing up the imaginary lives of imaginary people in a few concise lines.14 Hours Productions recently released Welcome to Boon Hill, a "graveyard simulator" where Ritter finally got a chance to put those skills to work. The game is exactly what it sounds like, and little else; your character arrives at a 16-bit graveyard called Boon Hill and wanders around at their leisure, reading the messages carved into over two thousand graves. There are no surprises, no jump scares, nothing to collect or achieve, except perhaps insight into your own mortality.The game is also partly inspired by Spoon River Anthology, a poetry collection that tells the story of a fictional small town through the verses on the epitaphs of its inhabitants. While Welcome to Boon Hill isn't quite so cohesive, the graves you read feel a little bit like creative prompts that can start to form a larger picture in your mind. Sometimes their message is concise: how someone died and when, a life in two bullet points. Other times they suggest a much richer story, or offer some sort of takeaway: a moral or a cautionary tale to guide the living away from their mistakes.And then, of course, there are the graves memorializing people who aren't much older than you—maybe they're even younger. After a while, it's hard not to think about what someone would write on your grave if you died today, or at least how you'd want to be remembered. Have you done enough? Have you loved enough?"I feel there's something to be experienced by exploring a graveyard, just for the sake of exploring a graveyard." Ritter explains in a trailer for the game. "It's not really about death, it's about life. Epitaphs are written for the living."Welcome to Boon Hill is available now on Steam for both PC and Mac. https://youtu.be/QONSv7mzGh4

An important story out today confirms that SecureDrop, the open source whistleblower leak system originally programmed by Aaron Swartz and maintained by Freedom of the Press Foundation, works.(more…)

Between Jan. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2014, Los Angeles County district attorney records show at least 375 people were shot by on-duty officers. No officers have been prosecuted for any of those shootings.About one in four of those people were unarmed.Law enforcement officers in LA fatally shot Black people at triple the rate of White and Latino people, relative to population.That's the lede from Southern California Public Radio KPCC's important, interactive investigative report on “officer-involved shootings” in LA, and there's a lot more to be upset about in those numbers, too.

Hilarious and silly, A Book of Surrealist Games is a fantastic introduction to the surrealist mind-set. In addition to just being fun to peruse, this collection of written, visual and verbal games is great for exercising your mind, and staying creative.In addition to the games, this oddly organized book is packed with poems, illustrations and stories. While a bit dated, it is a wonderfully nostalgic tour of the spirit of surrealism.Some of the game directions are vague, and the images may not be the best, but I've had a lot of fun with this book over the years. Exquisite Corpse is one I'd expect to see our Boing Boing forums make good use of.A Book of Surrealist Games by Alastair Brotchie

London's Metropolitan Police released a video today showing a man trying to steal a convertible red Porsche. He used a knife to cut a hole in the roof, and hopped it. Interestingly, pedestrians walked by without pausing. The guy eventually left the car using a fancy dismount and went on his way. According to the police report, the same man went to JD Sports on Oxford Street, and "was seen trying to leave the shop with stolen trainers, a sports top and tracksuit bottoms. When staff challenged the man he threatened them with a lock knife." He remains at large.

https://youtu.be/833Qe7AmKo4"Oh! Oh wow! Everythings's different. Even me!"(more…)

This is the best price I've seen on a 20000mAh USB portable charger. It's $36, but if you use the promotion code Y4DFT2KK at checkout you can buy it for $18 (at least it was $18 the last time I checked.) I bring a 20000mAh charger when I travel and it keeps my iPhone 6 Plus fully charged for a few days with heavy use.

People who are upset that Starbucks is not religious enough for them now have an option. They can buy this reusable, travel mug with Satanic symbols from Etsy seller Cara the Corpse for $20.

Todd writes, "I made this ridiculous thing. Click on his head for more lorem."(more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.The Complete Beatles Songs has gone through several editions over the last 20 years as author Steve Turner continues to dig deeper to find the origins and meanings of every song the Beatles wrote. I’ve read a few books about the Beatles and I was surprised to learn so many new things and see so many photos I’d never seen before.The book has turned out to be Turner’s life project, and it's worth it. Turner interviewed hundreds of people and pored over warehouses of archives to learn the often surprising and fascinating circumstances that led to the lyrics behind the band’s songs.For instance, here’s how Lennon came up with the title for the song "Happiness is a Warm Gun":

A meta-analysis of green tea's impact on metabolism and weight-loss, undertaken by the Cochrane trust, finds no statistically significant correlation between drinking green tea and losing weight. (more…)

The Senate's 6,700 page, $40M report on the CIA's participation in torture has apparently never been read by a single member of the Executive Branch of the US Government, because the Department of Justice has ordered them all to stay away from it. (more…)

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE.You can get both EMU Club Adventures books, signed, sketched and delivered here.Show your support for your local Ritualized Tribal Warfare Surrogates team by purchasing a t-shirt here. (20% off today, 11/11, only.)More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3SN97v4Q6kEmily writes, "64oz Games is working once again to improve Braille accessibility in popular board games, this time in tabletop RPGs. This kickstarter will allow them to purchase a high resolution 3d printer to produce a polyhedral die set (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20 & Percentile) with Braille as well as print numbers. This will also allow them to continue to produce high quality Braille teaching materials that improve Braille literacy world wide." (more…)

Respected UK tech elder statesman and journalist Rupert Goodwins blasts the UK government's plan to impose secret gag-orders on researchers who discover government-inserted security flaws in widely used products, with prison sentences of up to a year for blowing the whistle or even mentioning the gag orders in a court of law. (more…)

A panel of academic booksellers, librarians, and publishers asked the public to vote on which academic book from a list of 20 is "the most influential." Charles Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" (1859) dominated with 26% of the vote, beating out the likes of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eight-Four," Adam Smith’s "The Wealth of Nations," and Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." The top five also included "The Communist Manifesto," "The Complete Works of Shakespeare," Plato's "The Republic," and Immanuel Kant’s "Critique of Pure Reason."University of Glasgow humanities and English Language professor Andrew Prescott said that Darwin’s text is “the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter."“Darwin used meticulous observation of the world around us, combined with protracted and profound reflection, to create a book which has changed the way we think about everything – not only the natural world, but religion, history and society,” Prescott said. “Every researcher, no matter whether they are writing books, creating digital products or producing artworks, aspires to produce something as significant in the history of thought as Origin of Species.”(The Guardian)

Wonkblog explains "why designers can’t stop reinventing the subway map." It's an abstraction problem generally solved by the London Underground nearly a century ago, but everyone wants to keep trying. Spoiler: it's because New York City's subway system is hard to map.

The Fuse Chicken Titan Lightning Cable is an MFI certified cord sheathed in steel conduit. The connectors are sealed over the cable to reduce the possibility of damage at the ends. The Titan has a lifetime warranty that you probably won't need because Apple will almost certainly make Lightning obsolete before you die. The Titan Lightning Cable is $35 from Amazon.

This delightful-looking deck of cards, featuring classic computers, is yours for $15 from the already-successful Kickstarter campaign.The selection is good and each card has the right stats: CPU model and bit-width, clock frequency, RAM, display resolution, maximum number of on-screen colors, and the year it was launched.

Astronomers have spied a cold world three times as distant from the Sun as Pluto. (more…)

The legendary painter and educator has inspired a placeholder text generator based upon his calm yet encouraging dialogue. Friendlier than the classic lorem ipsum, it should provide all the happy little texts you ever need.

The subreddit r/CucumbersScaringCats is dedicated entirely to the proposition that cats are scared of cucumbers, and to providing video evidence in support of that proposition. (more…)

Extensive 12-Week Online Program to Learn to Code. Love Your Job, Work Flexible Hours, & Get a Raise.Become a job-ready developer by building a portfolio of real-world apps and interacting 1-on-1 with the best mentors in the field. This Interactive Coding Bootcamp ($39) is as robust as it gets, including live instruction and job-hunting assistance, on top of 33+ hours of top-notch video courses (some from Stanford, Harvard, etc.). Jump into this 12-week curriculum for 92% off!

Mark says:

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Diary keeper Greg Heffley can’t just endure middle school in peace. His helicopter mom is working on a petition to get people to stop using electronics for 48 hours. His new pet pig, who’s learned to walk on two legs, gets more house privileges than he does. And even more annoying, his Grandpa, who can’t pay his rent at Leisure Towers anymore, has moved into Greg’s bedroom, which means Greg now has to sleep on the floor of his baby brother’s room. Worst of all, Greg ends up on the school camping trip to Hardscrabble Farms, which lives up to its reputation for being the worse camp ever.The just-released Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School is the tenth book in the series, and happily it’s just as fresh and humorous as its predecessors. In fact, I laughed so loud while sitting alone on the couch of our living room, I was worried someone would spy me and think I’d finally gone around the bend (why do I always feel this way when I’m laughing out loud by myself?). The theme is old school vs. new school, or old geezers’ ways of doing things versus progress, and whether or not you’ve read books 1-9, Old School is a fun read for any age.Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School

Following up on the bizarre coordinated blocks against reporters by some protesting at the University of Missouri yesterday, a statement from David Kurpius, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism:(more…)

The less said about The Room 3 before you play it the better: and yet I will say things now. The award-winning puzzle series from Fireproof Games has returned for its third outing, and it's the best one yet.If you've never played the series before, the premise is pretty simple: you open elaborate puzzle boxes inside creepy rooms. (More accurately, you open cubes, pyramids, spheres: all the popular polyhedra.) The lore around the game involves a mythical fifth classical element known as Null, which is the source of all manner of strangeness and otherworldly thrills. There's a late 19th century supernatural flavor to the game, which often feels a little bit like Myst meets 7th Guest.In previous Rooms, you had a mystical eyepiece that revealed hidden messages and panels, but here it takes on a magnifying quality as well, allowing you to explore many of the puzzles in miniature. And the puzzles are what has earned The Room a well-deserved following: their ability to intrigue and innovate again and again, to seem but attainable enough that you don't throw up your hands but challenging enough to keep you flipping switches and rotating gears for hours on end.The Room 3 succeeds at this just as brilliantly as its predecessors. It is available on iOS now, with an Android version to come at a later date.https://youtu.be/2g9pqTyEaXo

Rapper and proud pothead Snoop Dogg is launching a line of cannabis products, called Leafs By Snoop."It's a true blessing that I can share the products I love so much with y'all today," Mr. Dogg said. "From the flower, to the concentrates, and edibles - it's all hand-picked by yours truly so you know it's the hottest product out there. It's the real deal and you gotta get out to Colorado to try it first!"(CNN)

UK retailer Tesco is hiring "Christmas Light Untanglers" so they can provide this new service at their stores.Ideal candidates are "able to untangle 3 meters of Christmas lights in under three minutes" and "passionate about Christmas."From the job description at Tesco Careers:

Cambridge University today said that Stephen Hawking is cancelling several public appearances because of ill health.(more…)

Last week's Senate Commerce Committee hearings invited testimony on the Consumer Review Freedom Act, which would ban the increasingly widespread practice of inserting "non-disparagement" clauses in consumer contracts that are used on products and services from apartment buildings to cellphones to dental care. (more…)

Vizio made news last April when it pushed out a firmware update that turned on all its' sets spyware features out of the box. Since then, it's only gotten worse. (more…)

Di-Andre Caprice Davis is an artist from Kingston, Jamaica who creates some really wonderful animated GIF art.

The creator of the groundbreaking, snarf-inducing TV show (which featured robot-puppets adding a snarky running commentary to some of the worst movies ever made, ever) is bringing it back in its original form (as opposed to the side projects like Cinema Titanic and Rifftrax), assuming he can raise an eye-popping $2,000,000. (more…)

Starting with the Agat, a 1984 Apple ][+ clone, moving through several other mass-market and semi-mass-market models, including the gorgeously named Robotron, which was mostly produced in the GDR, and the hobbyist Radio-86RK (an 8-bit computer you assembled yourself, a bit like the Altair) and my favorite, the Apogei BK-01 which was as orange as a very, very orange thing. (more…)

https://youtu.be/f2hUKOchIL8Phoenix, who is in kindergarten, replaces a wheel bearing on his daddy's 2001 Corolla.I would trust this 5 year old boy with my car more than I'd trust any auto mechanic I've ever taken any of my cars to ever.(more…)

Jesse Jane McParland, age 9, showed her stuff at the Junior World Kickboxing Championships. If the producers of the Walking Dead don't give her a starring role in Season 7, they are crazy.

Zain Khalid pens the perfect McSweeney's humor-short: self-reflexive (snark, indeed!), demographically loaded, and ha-ha-only-serious. (more…)

When Make: Electronics was published about five years ago, it was widely hailed as the greatest book about learning electronics ever written. With beautiful photos, easy-to-read schematics, clear, jargon-free text, and dozens and dozens of fun and educational projects, author/illustrator Charles Platt made a book that has ended up in every makerspace and library I've visited.A few weeks ago the Second Edition of Make: Electronics came out, and it's even better than the first edition. Charles rewrote the text, replaced the photos of breadboarded circuits with diagrams showing component placement, included new projects, added new photographs with a ruled background to indicate the scale of tools and components, and included a chapter on Arduino.This is the book to get if you want to learn electronics.(Disclosure, I was Charles' editor when I was editor-in-chief of MAKE)

An Australian taxi lobby, in an effort to demonstrate why taxis are more awesome than Uber, asked people to tweet their taxi stories. People responded with complaints about surly, incompetent, and crooked taxi drivers.From Mashable:

Austrian artist Carl Kahler's 1893 cat painting "My Wife's Lovers," thought to be the world's largest painting of cats, sold at a Sotheby's auction for $826,000. The cats in the painting belonged to San Francisco art collector Kate Johnson. (more…)

In psychology they call thinking that you see the world as it truly is, free from bias or the limitations of your senses, naive realism.According to our guest in this episode, famed psychologist Lee Ross, naive realism also leads you to believe you arrived at your opinions, political or otherwise, after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions. In other words, you think you have been mainlining pure reality for years, and like Gandalf studying ancient texts, your intense study of the bare facts is what has naturally led to your conclusions.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is brought to you by The Great Courses. Get 80 percent off Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior presented by Professor Mark Leary along with many other fantastic lecture series by visiting this link and ordering today!This episode of You Are Not So Smart is also brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10 percent off, go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code SOSMART.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.As Ross points out in the interview, your personal reality isn’t the perception of what is “out there,” but an observation of what is going on inside your head. Bertrand Russell put it like this, “The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself,” a point illustrated by this static, non-moving image (mobile readers click this for bigger version):Your brain takes in the information from your senses, but your reality isn’t made up of the atoms of the “real world.” It’s made up of the atoms of your brain. It’s an interaction, a conjuring. Among those brain atoms, the picture is moving, but here is the kicker, since every human brain will make this picture move within the subjective reality of each person looking at it, there is no human reality in which the image isn’t moving. There’s no objective stance, perceptually speaking. According to Ross, our political realities are no different than that swirling mass which isn’t really swirling. On most emotionally charged issues, there is no objective perspective that a brain can take, despite the fact all the people on each side of any debate believe their side is the one rooted in reality.Ross says that since you believe you are in the really-real, true reality, you also believe that you have been extremely careful and devoted to sticking to the facts and thus are free from bias and impervious to persuasion. Anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they’ve pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have. Therefore, you assume, anyone who disagrees with your political opinions probably just doesn’t have all the facts yet. If they had, they’d already be seeing the world like you do. This is why you continue to ineffectually copy and paste links from all our most trusted sources when arguing your points with those who seem misguided, crazy, uninformed, and just plain wrong. The problem is, this is exactly what the other side thinks will work on you.Lee Ross was one of the first psychologists to study naive realism, and he writes about it in a new his book ,co-written with Tom Gilovitch, titled The Wisest One in the Room. In the original paper, co-written with Andrew Ward in 1995, the two scientists concluded that naive realism leads people to approach political arguments with the confidence that “rational open-minded discourse” will naturally lead to a rapid narrowing of disagreement, but that confidence is usually short-lived.When confronted with people who disagree with your estimations of reality, even after you’ve pushed a bunch of facts in their faces, you tend to assume there must be a rational explanation for why they think and feel the way they do. Usually, that explanation is that the other side is either lazy or stupid or corrupted by some nefarious information-scrambling entity like cable news, a blowhard pundit, a charming pastor, or a lack thereof. Since this is where we often end up, they say what usually happens is that our “repeated attempts at dialogue with those on the ‘other side’ of a contentious issue make us aware that they rarely yield to our attempts at enlightenment; nor do they yield to the efforts of articulate, fair-minded spokespersons who share our views.” In other words, it’s naive to think evidence presented from the sources you trust will sway your opponents because when they do the same, it never sways you.Listen in this episode as psychologist Lee Ross explains how to identify, avoid, and combat this most pernicious of cognitive mistakes.After the interview, I discuss a new study that found people are much more critical of other people’s arguments than they are of their own, unless tricked to think one of their old arguments was someone else’s.In every episode, after I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Jennifer Foote who submitted a recipe for frostbitten molasses cookies entombed in ginger. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesLee RossThe Wisest One in the RoomCarlin on CampusPaper: The Selective Laziness of ReasoningNeuroskeptic – The Selective Laziness of ReasoningConsciousness Image: http://bit.ly/1GTwCEuIllusion Image by Paul Nasca: http://bit.ly/1GTwHbc

Fan footage of Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Sesame Street's All-Star 25th Birthday (1994) in which she appeared as "Kathie Lee Kathie." I hope she put $5 in the swear jar as Elmo demanded.