Dumb Cuneiform aptly labels the nature of its work lest anyone be under any illusions here.

Jump into a reliable and flourishing career with a stamp of approval from CompTIA, the highly-acclaimed IT industry association. This five-part training begins by prepping you for the CompTIA A+ exam, which is essentially the benchmark for entry-level employees. From there you will master concepts needed to pass the Network+, Security+, Cloud Essentials, and Cloud+ exams—deeming you a well-rounded professional with a wide variety of career options. 86% of hiring managers say that IT certifications are of high priority. Don’t wait for a career to come to you, lay the foundation for your future today.

Amazon has a great deal on adjustable and reusable Velcro ties. The straps can be permanently looped around a cord or cable so it won't get lost. A pack of 100 costs $5 if you're a Prime member (try Amazon Prime 30-day free trial).

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Dogs get all the credit when it comes to training. Yes, they can fetch bones, sit on command, bark for food, play ball, walk on two legs, roll over, play dead, pull sleds, and probably perform about one hundred other chores and fun tricks. But can they sit on the loo while doing their business? I think not. Cats, however, can be trained to do this in as little as two weeks, as instructed in Perre DiCarlo’s nine-step Kick Litter manual.I first met DiCarlo two months ago at Boing Boing’s Weekend of Wonder. He gave a Powerpoint talk on how to train your cat to use the toilet. Who knew such a peculiar topic could be absolutely mesmerizing? Perre masterfully blended loads of humor with practical how-to steps that kept even cat-haters completely engaged.He ended up sending me a signed copy of his pamphlet-sized book, and I love it on many levels. The design is wonderfully whimsical, the toilet-training steps are clear with nice illustrations, and each page is adorably funny. As an added layer to the book, we also get a short story told in the first person, er, I mean first kitty, by Di Carlo’s cats Moxie and Cooper. We get to hear a charming account of the cats' training experiences, including the time Cooper fell into the bowl, and how Moxie, the female, was able to kick her litter addiction in only two weeks, while Cooper had a harder 2-month recovery time. Whether or not you want to help your own cats kick their litter addictions, or whether or not you even own or like cats, this is an entertaining quick read that might even sit nicely on your bathroom book rack.Kick Litter: Nine-Step Program for Recovering Litter Addicts

The BBC casts an eye over countries that do not exist—not just the odd slivers of land with tentative claims on micronationhood, but the superimposed quasi-countries that cohere because of ethnicity, politics, or because of something really weird going on on the Internet.

A leaked Comcast memo discloses that the company's consumer data caps have nothing to do with network congestion, contrary to its public claims.The internet service provider has often complained (such as when lobbying against net neutrality) that it must impose limits on service to prevent network congestion. The argument suggests that these measures are required for the public good: to manage traffic, to give everyone fair access to the "road," to stymie abusive or selfish "drivers," you shouldn't be using more than 250 gigabytes of data each month. (more…)

200 years of speeches made in the U.K.'s Houses of Parliament have been made available to download by Glasgow University. If you're interested in the mocking, backstabbing, occasionally-exulted language of British statesmen and women, you'll be there a while, as it amounts to 7.6 million speeches and 1.6 billion words. (more…)

Before you sigh and flutter your Eyelids of Good Taste, know ye that it is directed by Duncan Jones of Moon and Source Code fame. Expect it to be a bit weirder than the average CGI feast.

Chordi asks you to select an instrument and a chord pattern, then procedurally-generates thirty seconds of obviously procedurally-generated music. It's still "talking dog" territory—so fascinating that it doesn't matter how good it is—but it really does sound vaguely yet uncannily like a certain famous rock group jamming while drunk.Recommended settings for maximally-unpleasant results: "Tango accordion", "Minor key". The source code is on Github.

When UK Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the new, sweeping UK spying bill this week, she reiterated her claim that metadata is like an "itemised phone bill" and does not contain anything harmful. (more…)

Zoe Quinn, sometime Boing Boing and Offworld contributor and object of pants-wetting apoplexy by Gamergate's jerk-squad, has sold a memoir telling her tale of being targeted for one of the Internet's most grotesque and cowardly pile-ons, and had the film-rights snapped up by Pascal Pictures, with rumors that Scarlett Johansson will play Quinn. (more…)

47-year-old Mark Heryer was killed on October 11th when he was run over by a 38-Geary bus. The SFPD concluded, without investigation, that Heryer's death was his own fault. The city will not release the footage from the bus's camera -- not even to Heryer's lawyer. (more…)

Those big, splashy shows of gratitude to America's soldiers at halftime? They're the best patriotism the taxpayers' money can buy. (more…)

Unlock a world of career opportunity by mastering the latest and greatest Apple platform, iOS 9. With hours of coding instruction and a library of pre-built app templates, you'll be turning out amazing apps and writing flawless Swift code in no time. And not just iPhone apps, learn to create apps for all devices including the Apple Watch and Apple TV! Pay what you want, change your life. What are you waiting for?Here's a breakdown of everything included in the bundle:1iOS 9, Swift 2 & Xcode 7 - Apple Mobile App Development$199 Value2100 iOS 9 & OS X Templates$500 Value3The Complete watchOS 2 Developer Course$300 Value4Pro Shot - iOS Universal Photo Editor App Template$299 Value5iOS 9 & Swift 2: From Beginner to Paid Professional$299 Value6Apple TV App Development for tvOS$199 Value7Piky . iOS iPhone App Swift Template$149 Value8Learn iOS 9 App Development with Xcode 7 & Swift 2$79 ValuePay what you want today for this incredible iOS 9 developer bundle today in the Boing Boing store.

The FCC has rejected Consumer Watchdog's petition to force Internet companies like "Google, Facebook, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix, and LinkedIn") to honor the "Do Not Track" flag that browsers can send to web-servers, informing them that users do not want their Internet activity to be tracked and shared with third parties. (more…)

One of the most controversial aspects of the secretly negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership is its inclusion of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) -- a procedure that allows a corporation to sue governments to get rid of laws that undermine its profitability. ISDSs epitomize everything that's messed up in "trade" agreements, have resulted in corporations being given billions of dollars in tax-payer money in "compensation" for environmental, safety and labor laws; and, most notoriously, were used by Philip Morris to attack countries that passed laws aimed at reducing smoking. (more…)

In 1919, a 16-year old LA Times office boy named Kenneth Taylor was given a back-page spread to show off his typewriter portraits of film stars; Taylor's work then spread to Photoplay, and a new medium was born. (more…)

Mur Lafferty writes, "Mothership Zeta is the first ezine project to come out of Escape Artists (publisher of podcast magazines Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Podcastle). We are an ebook-only zine that focuses on new fiction with a fun theme, along with nonfiction from experts in science fiction, science, and more!"

Log in to Facebook, create a post, and type in “Tsu.co.” Facebook will censor the link on all its platforms. That means facebook.com, as well as Messenger, Instagram, and the Facebook apps for iOS and Android.Facebook did something a lot scarier, too. The retroactively censored over a million Facebook posts which mentioned Tsu.co. So those Facebook posts, and associated images, videos, or comments? All deleted by Facebook. Gone.(more…)

This heavy duty grinder is a must for anyone who purchases culinary herbs as buds. It has a pollen screen to capture all the cumin pollen that falls through it when grinding cumin buds. It also has a magnetized lid, which obviates the need to tax your cumin-fume addled brain into remembering which direction you have to turn a threaded lid to remove it. Use code MLWLXBB3 to get one for $9.

Troy Little created a graphic novel version of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo memoir, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and he is keeping a comic book diary of his book tour. Here are a couple of pages.Here's the first seven pages:

Meet the Anonycop!

The cost of changing from a racist high school team name and mascot to one that isn't can be high.(more…)

The Woodcreek Faction removed the worst bits from the last on-stage smackdown, leaving the candidates at their most charming.

A study found that it's now the norm for smartphone apps to "spy" on their users, reporting what they do on their devices while the software is running.The research, conducted by MIT, Carnegie-Mellon and Harvard, examined the behavior of 110 titles and found that 73 percent of Android apps and 47 percent of the iOS apps reported the user's location. 49 percent of Android apps share personally-identifying information, whereas 25 percent of iOS apps do.The key revelation is they're not just phoning home: some of the Apps are leaking data to more than a dozen different domains.

Vigilante superhero tales tend to revolve around seeking justice outside of a failed system, and the idea that one man or woman can cause real change within that system by punching people. In short, they are fantasies, and popular in part because they suggest impossibly simple solutions to complex problems. In Cape, an interactive fiction story created by Bruno Dias for the ongoing Interactive Fiction Competition, you become one of those shadowy figures trying right wrongs in a crime-ridden city. But since wealth inequality lies at the heart of all the problems you encounter, well... let's just say that it's an uphill battle.You can choose your gender and your nationality, though your options for the latter are limited: Whether you're Kenyan, Vietnamese, Slovenian or Mexican, you're going to be an immigrant, you're going to be poor, and life is going to be hard. You begin your story in a moment of desperation, about to break into a townhouse in a recently gentrified neighborhood to find whatever valuables you can and survive another day.The story opens with a newspaper clipping that signals the precise flavor of dystopia that awaits. The article details a "passing tax" that will be levied on buildings based on their number of entrances and exits; apparently, suspects trying to evade police drones have been ducking into "passing houses" to escape surveillance, and they'd like to discourage that. Yes, the watchful digital eyes of a corrupt police state are all around you, co-mingling with the more traditional violence of thieves and gangsters. Tremendous suffering is fueled by the stark divide between the rich and the poor, and the absence of health insurance is a constant concern, especially since being poor is a great way to get mugged, robbed, or otherwise assaulted.Although you eventually acquire the ability to fly, you're far more of a street-level hero (or anti-hero), in the spirit of grim, ledge-sitting vigilantes like Batman and Daredevil. While there's nothing truly new here, particularly for people well-versed in superhero noir like Sin City or Gotham Central, it's the sharp, confidently hardboiled prose that makes Cape sparkle even in its quiet moments:

Stormchaser/photographer Nick Moir posted the gorgeous video clip below of a shelf cloud off Sydney, Australia. The whole shot is quite surreal, as if the cloud background was digitally added later.

https://youtu.be/x9n9dt2fKeEThis is wonderful. When Stoney Emshwiller was 18 years old, he filmed himself interviewing his older self. Thirty-eight years later a 56-year-old Stoney completed the interview by answering his younger self's questions. He's funded the production of a movie, called "Later That Same Life."

Chuck Rosenberg, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, is either woefully ignorant, protective of his administration's reckless mission, or both. "What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal — because it's not," Rosenberg said in a briefing. "We can have an intellectually honest debate about whether we should legalize something that is bad and dangerous, but don't call it medicine — that is a joke."The American Medical Association begs to differ. From Vox:

An 85-year-old woman in Vienna shredded more than $1 million in cash before dying just to zing her relatives. Amazingly, the National Bank of Austria (OeNB) will replace all the cash."If the heirs can only find shreds of money and if the origin of the money is assured, then of course it can all be replaced," said Friedrich Hammerschmidt, deputy head of the OeNB. "If we didn't pay out the money then we would be punishing the wrong people."(AFP)

See more photos at Wink Fun.I’ve never used a solar cooker, so I didn’t know what to expect when I made a meal with one. The GoSun is a 3.5 pound, portable, folding solar stove/oven that uses reflective metal panels to concentrate sunlight onto a double-walled Pyrex tube that is black on the outside, and a fiery orange-red on the inside.It was a sunny 88-degree day in Los Angeles when I tried it. First, I chopped up a large butternut squash into one-inch cubes and mixed it with olive oil and salt. I put the cubes into the long cylindrical cooking pan, slid it into the Pyrex tube, took the cooker into the back yard and pointed it at the noonday day. I went into the house for 20 minutes and when I came back and slid out the pan to check, the squash was sizzling. I like my squash well done so I let it cook for another 20 minutes. Oddly, the Pyrex tube was not hot at all. All of the heat was inside the inner chamber. And the squash was nice and browned. (It has a rated maximum cooking temp of 550F.)Emboldened, I cooked some chopped and marinated chicken next. After 30 minutes it was ready. It was probably ready before that, but I didn’t want to take any chances. My family remarked on how tender it was.The next day I cooked sweet potatoes. This thing is awesome. I can’t wait to take it to the beach.As a bonus, my cats are using the shipping box for a bed.GoSun Solar Cooker

Mailvelope is a browser extension that is described as the easiest way for mere mortals to send PGP-encrypted messages. Researchers at Brigham Young University brought in a group of people unfamiliar with Mailvelope and observed them try to install it and use it to send an encrypted email. Almost everyone was unable to do it. The researchers concluded that "modern PGP tools are still unusable for the masses."From the study:

In a decision that environmental activists see as a hard-won victory, President Obama today announced he is rejecting the request from a Canadian company to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The news ends a seven-year review process that was a focal point in the debate over the Obama administration's climate policies.(more…)

The dynamic hypercreative duo of Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock have a huge show of new paintings opening tonight (Friday 11/6) at San Francisco's 111 Minna Gallery. The reception starts at 5pm with DJs Dan the Automator, Maurice, and Bald Elvis. The exhibition, titled "Holding Pattern," includes their own individual paintings and several collaborations`. It will be on display through December 31. Don't miss it! Sneak preview below.

"I reckon if Thom Yorke fucking shit into a light bulb and started blowing it like an empty beer bottle it’d probably get 9 out of 10 in fucking Mojo," Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher told Esquire UK. "I’m aware of that."And here's Gallagher on Arctic Monkeys, Royal Blood, and the "new generation of rock stars":“They’ve got the fucking skinny jeans and the boots, and all that eyeliner. I’ve got a cat that’s more rock ‘n’ roll than all of them put together. Pigeons? Rips their fucking heads off...”“I go back to this: Fame is fucking wasted on these people. The new generation of rock stars, when have they ever said anything that made you laugh? When have they ever said anything you remember? People say, ‘They’re interesting.’ Interesting! That’s a word that’s crept in to music: ‘Yeah, man. Have you heard the new Skrillex record?’ ‘No.’ ‘Yeah, man. It’s really interesting.’ I don’t want interesting! Rock ‘n’ roll’s not about that. To me, it’s about fucking utter gobshites just being fucking headcases. Well, not headcases. But what I want, genuinely, is somebody with a fucking drug habit, who’s not Pete Doherty. Do you know what I mean?”(Esquire)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beRA4sIjxa8The Protopiper (white paper [PDF]) is a modified tape-gun that extrudes regular, precise lengths of hollow tubing made from packing tape, with which you can prototype room-sized objects at full size to get a sense of the masses and scales involved. (more…)

In his autobiography Ben Carson wrote, "I was offered a full scholarship to West Point." But West Point says he's lying. "When presented with this evidence," reports Politico, "Carson’s campaign conceded the story was false."The real tragedy is that since Carson did not go to West Point, we'll never know how much grain is being stored in Egbert Ludovicus Viele's pyramid mausoleum there! (Photo Ahodges7/Wikipedia)

The US spent five years locking its trading partners in smoke-filled rooms with its most rapacious corporate lobbyists, writing a secret trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all the while assuring us all that it would be great when it was done. It's awful. (more…)

Courtesy of Gawker comes a look at "the shitty memes of the KKK," which might be funny were it not the output of the 21st-century vanguard of a violent white supremacist hate group.The semiotics ricochet between "use every font", "9gag", and "Parade Magazine advertisement for a gold-rimmed plate depicting a white wolf." Pictured above, a charming example of intersectionality.

It seems obvious that the presidential candidate's stories of youthful violence are fables, but why? It's not just because he keeps changing the events to account for inconsistencies and incredibilities—it's because no-one can find the people he describes.

As body image, sex, relationships and gender issues come to the fore, blogs and news sites are quitting stock photo providers such as Getty. The problem: most of the material there touching upon these matters are packed with stupid, stereotypical pantomime caricatures.

NYMag's Max Read considers whether or not it is a good idea to preemptively block anyone you see with an anime avatar, that having become a signifier for a particular type of angry, prolix adolescent. (more…)

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.

Get inside Google, Twitter, Tastemade and 80+ of LA's most inspirational companies during NewCo Los Angeles. NewCo turns business conferences inside out. Instead of gathering in boring ballrooms, NewCo participants get inside the headquarters of a city’s most inspiring companies. For two days at NewCoLA, you’ll engage in behind-the-scene tours of cutting-edge work environments, learning from the city’s best entrepreneurs and getting a peek into new product developments and innovations.All company sessions have limited capacity and are already filling up. Sign up and choose your favorites now. Use the code BBoingNewCo50Free for a 100% discount on "Unlimited Passes." Once those passes disappear -- and they will -- get 30% off tickets with the code BBoingNewCo30off.

The first official trailer for “The Hateful Eight” hit the internets today. The new Quentin Tarantino film stars Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, and Bruce Dern.“See it in glorious 70mm on Christmas Day.”Don't mind if I do.[Facebook]

Doctors Without Borders released an internal report today that claims a U.S. warplane shot at people who were trying to escape the international medical aid group's hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after the building was bombed by American forces.(more…)