The director of housing for UCSC's Silicon Valley campus asked the university's 6,000 professors to consider sheltering their students to help bridge the shortfall between university-subsidized housing and the student body's needs, amidst the whitest of white-hot property markets in the nation. (more…)

I enjoyed Lyz Lenz's interesting article about Tucker Carlson's alleged descent from reasonable conservative to ranting race warrior.

Graphic designer Taishi Arimura creates all sorts of delightful and whimsical work, including these cool instant noodle action figures. (more…)

The Trump administration "held secret meetings" with officers in Venezuela's military to discuss overthrowing President Nicolás Maduro, reports The New York Times.

The Fitness Marshall has over a million subscribers and over 150 videos on his channel. His paltry take after three years of work comes to about $20 a video after record labels and everyone else take their cuts. (more…)

The web is vast, but real estate is limited even in this digital space. As such, there's a major saturation of .com domains online, preventing new players from getting their first choice domain name and ultimately forcing them to rename products or rebrand entirely just to build their digital footprint. However, choosing a .tech domain name for your brand can help you sidestep much of the saturation. You can register and use a .tech domain name for 10 years through Radix, all for $54.99.With a myriad of unregistered domains available, adopting a .tech domain gives you a much better shot at getting that first choice name, and it puts you in the same space as industry giants, like Consumer Electronics Show and Intel, as well as freelance programmers, tech enthusiasts, and the like.You can net a .tech domain through Radix and build your online presence without compromise for $54.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

Toilet snakes are reaching epidemic proportions in some parts of the world, but no more than in Mike Green's bathroom. (more…)

100 years after a printing error created one of the most legendary stamps in philatelic history, one of the 100 Inverted Jenny stamps from the only known sheet of misprints has been confirmed as legitimate. (more…)

In all my years of going to Burning Man, I've never stuck around long enough to see the Temple burn. Its Burn happens on the Sunday evening after the Saturday night Man Burn. Once it's over, the event is essentially done for another year. The street signs start coming down and all the participants are sent back to the "default world."This year, I decided to arrive late and leave late, instead of arriving early and leaving early. So, I was able to catch both Burns.In my inbox zine, I described the Temple's overall mood:

With hints of soy, lemongrass, and ginger, here's a candle crafted to smell like Chinese food. Because. That's why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcwKEoHtR6sRay Keim writes, "More than a decade since I first designed my New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion Paper Model Kit, I realized I could add an new spooky dimensions to it with an inexpensive hand-crank music box mechanism that plays 'Grim Grinning Ghosts'!"

The Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion is missing $50,000 worth of bugs; the loss wasn't immediately discovered because bugs are small and the Insectarium often moves its specimens around for exhibitions, lendouts, etc. -- but when 80-90% of your collection goes missing, you notice. (more…)

Apple pioneered the idea of "app stores," where operating system vendors got to decide who could distribute software that ran on their platforms, arguing that these "curated" stores would ensure high quality and protect users from malicious and inferior code. (more…)

Last year Equifax sheepishly admitted that it had breached hundreds of millions of Americans', Britons' and Canadians' private financial data and then suppressed the news (subsequent months revealed that the company had suffered multiple breaches, so many it didn't know what it had lost and wasn't looking very hard). (more…)

Researchers from Stripe surveyed "thousands of C-level executives and developers across five different countries" and found that companies finding hiring qualified developers harder than anything else -- even raising cash ("Access to developers is a bigger constraint than access to capital"). (more…)

This is the iPad cable I was looking for.In the world of ever changing Apple device cables, I had finally run out of functional old-style cables for my iPad 2. I use the iPad 2 for streaming on my exercise bike, and was in a panic this am, when I found the last surviving cable had passed on.My giant box of varied cables has no more of these. Once they out populated even regular USB.This two-pack of the old 30 pin style cable should keep me going for a few more years.iPhone 4s Cable,iPad 2 Cable,TechRise 2-Pack APPLE MFI CERTIFIED Sync and Charging Cable (Length 1 Meter) via Amazon

Competition scholar and cyberlawyer Tim Wu (previously) is best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," but his work ranges over all sorts of issues related to technology, competition, monopoly and innovation; in his forthcoming book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, he makes the case for breaking up the tech giants, starting with Facebook -- because the problem with Big Tech isn't "tech," it's "big." (more…)

On average, American households pay $186 a month for their TV, internet, and home phone services. That's too much, and you can often reduce the bill with a phone call to your service provider, according to a new article in Consumer Reports.

Researchers from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab (previously) have published an extensive report on the image filtering systems used by Chinese messaging giant Wechat to prevent the posting of banned political messages and other "sensitive" topics that are censored in China. (more…)

If you were wondering what you've missed in Destiny, hardcore game fan and apparent self-appointed historian of all things Destiny, Byf, offers this gargantuan update.Destiny was a fantastic game from Bungie, the folks who originally brought us Halo. After a few years of some really engrossing game play in a hybrid FPS/RPG type universe, they released Destiny 2. Everyone stopped playing. Now, Bungie is trying to resurrect their once amazingly popular franchise with Destiny 2: Forsaken, aptly named.I have tried. I can not yet re-engage. They maybe fixed a lot of the early on complaints with game mechanics, physics and what not -- but Destiny is still chock-full confusing, poorly told story telling.

Speaking on the never-ending campaign trail for his insatiable ego, Donald Trump today called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to harness the full power of the Justice Department to go after whoever wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times that said all those mean things about him. (more…)

Longtime Burning Man enthusiast and video maker Mark Day shares “A quickie iPhone hyperlapse of some Burning Man 2018, including some lovely robots, as befits the "iRobot" theme.” (more…)

In just five days, a key EU vote could visit untold harm on the whole world's internet by subjecting all public communications to algorithmic censorship: the proposed Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive will force sites to build vast databases of known copyrighted works, and then block any user submissions (text, audio, video, code, stills) that seems to match a copyrighted work, and anyone can add anything to the blacklist of unpublishable works, without any proof of copyright and without any regard to fair dealing and other vital protections for free expression. (more…)

Jeffrey Winder appealed his guilty verdict after punching "Unite the Right" organizer Jason Kessler in Charlottesville the day after protester Heather Heyer died. A jury determined Winder should serve no jail time and pay the lowest fine possible. (more…)

Brown University researcher Lisa Littman has become the latest cause célèbre for academic freedom grifters after publishing an irresponsible article promoting "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," yet another disease model of gender identity and expression. Imagine a disease called "rapid-onset homosexuality" to understand the problem with "ROGD." Now all the usual suspects are defending her biased garbage. (more…)

This weekend I'm camping in a secret location with a bunch of nutty geniuses. Two of them are Jon Wee and Owen Morse, a comedy juggling team who work together as The Passing Zone. They're performing Saturday night, September 8, 2018, at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in St. Joseph MN, not far from Minneapolis-St. Paul. (more…)

A 'worst idea video,' which a publicly traded CEO allowed to be published on the internet yesterday.It turns into stoner car discussion instantly.

Earlier this year, Microsoft brought sweeping changes to Skype's UI, giving it something of a SnapChat makeover. The communication app's user base, I among them, was less than impressed, to say the least. Where it was once an easy way to receive forwarded telephone calls and chat via video or audio with folks across multiple platforms, the changes made it a shit sandwich to do much of anything with. The outcry from Skype users was such that, last month, Microsoft announced that they'd continue to offer the old school version of Skype's desktop app. Now, in the name of not alienating their users, they've taken their software UI rollback one step further. They're bringing back the features that folks actually use Skype for, back to the application and making it easier to ignore the service's new SnapChat-like features. From Ars Technica:

Inside North Korea collects Oliver Wainwright's gorgeous photos of the striking public aesthetic of a brutal dictatorship. (more…)

The human eye is an incredible, beautiful thing; but it's not perfect, especially when it comes to matching colors. Whether you're repainting your bedroom or picking out colors for a website, eyeballing it isn't the way to go. You're better off with the Nix Mini Color Sensor, a pocket-sized device that matches color with unparalleled precision and portability. It's on sale in the Boing Boing shop for $69.https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uux5F2F9TCcNamed the #1 Recommended Paint Color Matching Tool by CNET, the Nix Mini scans any color critical surface, saves it to your phone or tablet, and matches it to an existing color library of more than 31,000 brand name paint colors, as well as RGB, HEX, CMYK, and LAB colors. It's smaller than a ping pong ball and fits on your keychain for easy portability. Plus, it's engineered with integrated high CRI white LEDs, so you get a consistent, accurate light source for every scan.The Nix Mini normally retails for $99, but you can get your own in the Boing Boing shop for $69 today.

Talk about "old man strength"! Here's a video of 87-year-old Joe Stockinger deadlifting FOUR-HUNDRED-AND-FIVE pounds. Truly an amazing feat.Stockinger is a legendary powerlifter from Canada and has set (and then broken his own) world records in the past, according to this February 2018 article:

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo were in Prince's hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this week. To pay tribute to The Purple One, they played a metal rendition of his 1984 Purple Rain hit "When Doves Cry." I have to agree with what The Awesomer writes, "The whole thing is pretty cringey, but it’s worth watching for its sheer novelty."(The Awesomer)

One of the most wonderful history channels is Oversimplified, which has returned with an entertaining and informative two-part history of the American Revolution. (more…)

In passing, I've talked about the fact that my wife and I are full-time nomads. Lemme expand on that.A few years back, we bought a 21-year-old RV with the intention of living in it while my wife completed her degree in Vancouver, Canada. Typically, winters in Vancouver are mild by comparison to the rest of the country. The climate is similar to what you see in Seattle. Not so while we were there. It dropped to below freezing for weeks at a time. Snow, a largely unknown commodity in British Columbia's lower mainland, hung around for months. We were cold. We blew through hundreds of dollars worth of propane trying to stay warm. We were poor. Shortly before we were to make the rive over the mountains, I was informed that, after five years of service to a site that I had built, my services were no longer needed. It shattered me emotionally and financially. I was sent scrambling to find enough work, piecemeal, to make end's meet. There was cash coming in barely enough to keep afloat. Staying in a campground in the lower mainland costs around $800 per month. We couldn't foot the bill. We made do. Weekly, we would sneak into a local university sports complex for a shower. On one occasion, we had to decide between buying food or propane for heat. We chose food. This ended up costing us $1200, money that could have kept us going for months, to replace our hot water tank as it iced up and cracked in the cold. I had to ask my folks for help after that. It felt shitty. We drove without taillights on our tow vehicle for a month, too poor to afford anything but fuses to try and troubleshoot the problem. In Vancouver, with its being Vancouver, no one wanted our RV parked anywhere near their homes. We moved regularly, parking in industrial areas, parking lots and other less than savory locales. We found a driveway that we could park in and use the homeowner's electricity for $300 a month. It was an upgrade. It was also short lived. No one in the neighborhood wanted us there. After a couple of month's of fighting with bylaw enforcement, we admitted defeat. Miraculously, we landed on our feet: dear friends with a bit of property outside of the city invited us to stay with them. In the spring, we returned to Alberta, warmth and, with my partner going back to work, a measure of financial stability. Despite the shitshow that the fall and winter of 2015/2016 had been, we were absolutely hooked on RV living. The sense of freedom, even in hardship that being able to move your home, anywhere, at any time, affords, is intoxicating. More than this, I've always found that travel helps me feel more grounded and capable of dealing with the symptoms that come with my PTSD diagnosis. New places and experiences occupy me, force me to interact with the outside world and keep me from turning inward. So we decided this would be the thing: for half the year, my wife would work her gig as a drug rehabilitation counselor in Alberta. The other half we'd spend on the road, living somewhere warm. I'd continue to write, building my business back up and support us in our travels. By heading into Mexico, my partner would be able to find work for our six months outside of Canada as a Dive Master. Just before the time to make the drive south was due to hit, we agreed to take over the payments on my mother and her husband's motorhome: a 40-foot diesel pusher. It's a big rig that requires an air brake certification to drive. With four slide outs to increase our living space, a diesel generator to run all of our systems while we're away from shore power and an inverter that allows me to power everything I need for work while we're on the road, our new RV is an upgrade to what we were living in, in every imaginable way. Last winter, money was tight again. But not so tight that we were uncomfortable. We were able to roll through the vast and varied environments that south Texas and Mexico have to offer. We reveled in Mexican cuisine and culture. Our shitty Spanish skills received an upgrade. Along the way, we were subjected to incredible acts of kindness on both sides of the United States southern border. We saw far too many examples of cruelty and extreme poverty. The latter made us feel that our complaints from the previous winter were unfounded. My partner and I married while we were in Texas, surrounded by a small group of family and new friends. Our time south was everything we'd hoped for. In early April, it was time to return north once again. To make more money. To ensure that we'd maintain our right to Alberta's healthcare system by actually living there for a while and, most importantly, to prepare for our next trip south. This year, thanks to our home's massive freshwater, grey/black water holding tanks and other upgraded systems, we were able to spend six months living entirely off the grid in the wilds of north central Alberta. The quiet was astonishing. So were the mosquitos. With September in play, we're looking to run from the snows once more. This year, we may go south to revisit friends, family and delve deeper into Mexico. With the promise of a dive job on Vancouver island, we might return to British Columbia, unbroken by our last stretch of time in the province and better equipped to face any challenges that may be waiting for us. I look forward to the movement: to the miles traveled, to sunsets in places freshly discovered. Every mile traveled demands attention for fear of missing something splendid. I'll share what we find along the way. All photos via Séamus Bellamy

Every year, I wait for Apple to announce mouse support for the iPad. Every year, I am left unfulfilled. Apple's nailed the apps that I need to do my job on the go, but the lack of a mouse for interacting with text slows my workflow way the hell down. Tapping on my tablet's display and dragging words around is a poor substitute. As such, I'm constantly searching for a tablet that can give me what I need. Android's not an option as I can't use Scrivener with it. Without it, my working world would implode. A few years back, I invested in a Microsoft Surface 3. Its weight was such that I could carry it around in my backpack without tweaking the scarred muscle tissue in my neck. It was small enough that using it as a tablet to read a comic book or peruse the news didn't feel awkward. But I found, even with 8GB of RAM, that it was woefully underpowered, and while it could be used with a mouse, the trackpad built into its keyboard cover was terrible. In the end, I ended up selling it and returning to my iPad.Three years later, Microsoft released the Surface Go: while it looks like a Surface 3 doppelgänger, it's a far more capable computer. I bought mine a couple of weeks ago and so far, the complaints I've got about it are pretty minor. First, for a computer, this thing is wicked light--almost two pounds less than my 2015 MacBook Pro. It's an ideal carry for working on an airplane, typing in a coffee shop or simply having with you in case you feel the need to pull out a computer and do some work. I've caught myself checking to see if it was still in my bag, more than a few times. That's a win, as far as I'm concerned.I opted for the 8GB RAM/128GB SSD model. 4GB of RAM is too damn pokey. I then increased its storage capacity by popping a 400GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD card in it. There's more than enough room to stash all of the documents, Dropbox and SpiderOak Hive files and photos and right now, sixty HD movies to watch when I've got nothing better to do. As a tablet's it's merely OK--the iPad's got the Surface Go beat when it comes to a touch-friendly interface and apps. But I get by: with Windows 10 tablet mode, reading a webpage, chatting on Twitter or Slack and goofing on comic books feels good. The Surface Go's display, to my eye, is just as good as what you'll get from an Apple mobile device. Movies look great. Text is crisp. That's all I need. As a productivity machine--for typing, editing and a bit of photographic tinker work--the Surface Go is almost exactly what I'm after. There's enough room on its wee display to view a pair of documents, side-by-side, without going blind in the attempt. Being able to use Microsoft Word, Ai Writer, the desktop version of Firefox and the other apps I rely on to do my job has increased my productivity while I'm working away from home. It's not perfect, however: if you want to do anything more than the most basic of edits in Lightroom or Photoshop, you're going to have a bad day. Additionally, and this is more of a "me" problem than it is a problem with the Surface Go, Scrivener 3 for Windows, a release that'll bring the features of the Win10 version of the app into line with what Mac and iOS users currently enjoy, won't be out until the end of the year. I can live with this... provided it's only for a few months. I'm told by Scrivener's dev team that they're in beta testing with the update now. That news helped me to make the decision of whether or not to keep my Surface Go. I dig the Surface Go's keyboard. Yes, you have to pay for the keyboard cover separately. But that's the case when you own an iPad, too. The keys have better travel and feel better to work with than Apple's current crop of MacBook keyboards, but aren't nearly as nice as the ones baked into my beloved Logitech EasySwitch K811. Some folks might find typing with the Surface Go to be a bit cramped. But my fingers are trained from years of using and testing 9.7" iPad and iPad Pro keyboards, so it didn't take long to get up to speed. The keyboard cover's trackpad is light years better than the one that Surface 3 users had to contend with. It makes quick, smooth work of editing text and switching between apps (damn it Apple, get your pro-user shit together).There's other touches that I appreciate as well: the tablet's kickstand makes it easy to set up for viewing at a multitude of angles. I love that I can travel without the Surface Go's wall wart and charge it via it's USB C port, instead. That it comes with USB C at all is a win. It means that I can charge my headphones, smartphone (if I'm rolling with out my iPhone 7 Plus, which I frequently do) and computer all with the same cord, cutting down on the clutter in my rucksack. It feels solid: not beefy, but surprisingly sound for its size and weight. I like Microsoft's industrial design. Their gear looks good. I haven't attempted to throw any games on it yet, as that's not what I bought it for. When I get around to it, I'll let you know how things pan out.Overall, I'm pretty happy with this thing. Provided I don't break it doing something stupid, I'll be using it for years to come. Image via Microsoft

John Wiswell's story "Tank!" tells the sweet, sad story of a fannish tank that wants to attend a comic-con and is confounded by their nonbinary gender, their social awkwardness, and the fact that no one will believe that their main gun has been peace-bonded. (via Super Punch)

"What began as a simple concept," says the band Kodacrome, "snowballed into an all-consuming project, consisting of nine sets, electrically-wired lights and motors, and a borderline-obsessive stockpile of dollhouse-sized set pieces."Here's how they made it:https://vimeo.com/288074508

The area burning from the massive Delta fire in Shasta County, California tripled in size overnight, scorching 15,294 acres and counting as of Thursday afternoon, per California fire authorities. Human involvement is blamed. (more…)

My latest Locus Magazine column is Big Tech: We Can Do Better Than Constitutional Monarchies, and it's a warning that the techlash is turning into a devil's bargain, where we make Big Tech pay for a few cosmetic changes that do little to improve bullying, harassment, and disinformation campaigns, and because only Big Tech can afford these useless fripperies, they no longer have to fear being displaced by new challengers with better ways of doing things. (more…)

Stan Rehm writes, "An uncommonly sensible new policy in Los Angeles libraries now allows children with overdue book fees to 'read off' their fines in the library." (more…)

The techlash has sparked a most welcome interest in the ethics of technology (there are hundreds of university courses on the subject!) and with it, a bustling cottage industry in the formulation and promulgation of "statements of principles" meant to guide technologists in their work. (more…)

Twitter made its decision one day after Jones accosted CNN reporter Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill, and livestreamed the encounter through Periscope, which Twitter owns. (more…)

If you like neon yellow-green (I do!) this is a good deal on a Nintendo Switch case ($5.35) from the generally excellent line of Amazon Basics products. Besides keeping your Switch clean and safe, the case also has ten slots for cartridges, and a mesh pocket for cables and extra controllers.

Well, this is a big old red flag. And an anti-science lie. (more…)

Burt Reynolds, the onetime jock from Florida who became an American screen icon, has died. (more…)

gocivici made this amazing mechanical clock with a 3D printer and generously shared the plans on Instructables.[via Evil Mad Scientist]

The NYPD's secretive Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center uses software from IBM in its video analytics system, which allows cops to automatically scan surveillance footage for machine-generated labels that identify clothing and other identifying classifiers. (more…)

A general ban on people sleeping in public places, allowing the San Francisco Police to arrest homeless people for having no place else to go, has been ruled cruel and unusual punishment by the US 9th Circuit Court.KRON4: