Available as an add-on item on Amazon, this Kuru Toga pencil has a cool feature that rotates the lead incrementally every time you press it down on paper. That way, the tip stays nicely rounded. Here's a video of the spring-loaded clutch mechanism in action:https://youtu.be/VjQ68v0ZAnUThe pencil also has a metal sleeve that protects the lead, sliding into the pencil as the lead gets shorter. The sleeve retracts completely so you can lug it in a bag without having to worry about it getting bent or breaking off.I bought mine a while back and was happy to learn that Wirecutter also picked it as their favorite mechanical pencil.

A group of Facebook users who claim their personal data was misused, possibly to throw the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to Donald Trump, must wait until September to try and get more information from 'dark data' firm Cambridge Analytica. (more…)

The latest read from Alex Stamos bears an appropriately grim title. (more…)

The Nikonos-V is an underwater film camera that many older SCUBA divers learned on, and some still do. Even though it is absolutely lovely, it is a pain in the ass to use compared to digital, and has largely disappeared. Nikon let the trademark go in 2008. Appears they just renewed it.Via NikonRumors:

Burning Man message boards have been on fire all week as people report being stopped on flimsy pretexts by federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officers in the tiny town of Nixon, one of the last stops on the narrow, quiet rural roads that 60-80,000 people use to access the Black Rock Desert, home to the Burning Man festival, which opens to the public this coming Sunday. (more…)

My eight year-old nephew clicked this X-Wing fighter together in about 3 hours, and then spent two days playing with it, nonstop.This Luke-era X-Wing, with Luke and R2 minifigs, was the project of choice for my nephew. He said he loves to build LEGO, and attacked this set with gusto. Unlike my daughter's massive collection of Star Wars LEGO, which is all carefully organized on our living room shelves, nephew plays with his LEGO builds hard.It is fun to watch.LEGO Star Wars X-Wing Starfighter 75218 Building Kit (731 Piece) via Amazon

Andy Greenberg (previously) is a veteran Wired security reporter who has chronicled the frightening and chaotic world of cyberwar since its earliest days; in a forthcoming book called "Sandworm," Greenberg tells the fascinating and terrible tale of Notpetya (previously), a Russian cyberweapon (built on leaked NSA cyberweapons!) that disguised itself as criminal ransomware, but which was designed to identify and destroy key Ukrainian computer systems and networks. (more…)

German art school Bauhaus (1919-1933) had a tremendous impact on architecture, graphic design, and, yes, fashion. From Great Big Story:

They're still on the stories' own URLs, but are gone from the homepage. Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at the Times, points out: "But names of OP-ED writers still there."https://twitter.com/danfagin/status/1032251083673022464https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/1032328337069367296https://twitter.com/KarrieUrbanist/status/1032234958457380864Readers want to know who is behind a story before they commit to reading it, and this prevents it from happening. Current controversies over the Times' peaky opinion page, its chummy coverage of the far-right and its tendency to be steered by conservative anger are all becoming more personalized by obsessive readers. So it's inevitable that it will appear to be about certain individuals in some vague, paranoid way. And a bad time to toy with signifiers of credibility and transparency.The thing is, "remove bylines and metadata" is always a top priority in the click-funnelling shitfeast of modern web design. So the outcome might have had little to do with the people who are being held responsible in today's anguished and angry twitterings.

Good Old Games is a fantastic classic video game company whose products are 100% DRM-free; they are stalwart defenders of your rights to use your technology in legal ways, to protect your privacy and to experiment with the things you buy. (more…)

"He did nothing wrong," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday about the secret payments Donald Trump made to two women during the 2016 Election via his attorney, who just became a convicted felon. (more…)

Trump was asked by one of his ardent sycophants over at Fox News if he knew about the payments he made to buy the silence of women who say he had sex with him while he was married to his third wife Melania. Trump managed to squeeze in the word "campaign" 8 times in 45 seconds to prove that the hush money didn't come from campaign funds. At the end of his answer he said that even if the bribes had come from campaign funds, it wouldn't be a problem, because what-about-Obama-who-did-it-tens-times-worse.

Vtaiwan is a crowdsourcing tool for drafting legislation that kicked off in 2016; it allows citizens from different sides of thorny legislative proposals to gather and debate them in a structured forum with the goal of finding compromises that all sides can live with. (more…)

Australian actress Rose Byrne and Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, who are both in the movie Juliet, Naked, sat down to teach each other slang terms from their home countries. I like "banjaxed" (broken) and "goon bag" (cheap boxed wine).Image: Youtube screengrab

I'm not an expert in water tower demolition, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to break the support beams in a way that causes the tower to fall in your direction.

The Caucasian Ovcharka is a member of the extremely large, very willful, and demonically intelligent tree the dog family. This doggo decided silly kid shouldn't be allowed to play in the ocean without a life jacket. Canine Overlord immediately corrects the situation.A CO is a bad choice for anyone who isn't an experienced large breed dog owner. They are guard dogs first and cuddly mountains of fur second. There is no known maximum size, they are fearless and extremely aggressive when the guard genes kick in.Image via gfycat

"Michael Cohen knows information that would be of interest to the special counsel regarding both knowledge about a conspiracy to corrupt American democracy by the Russians and the failure to report that knowledge to the FBI," said Lanny Davis, the attorney representing Cohen told MSNBC. Watch the video here.Yesterday Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and bank fraud.

A sexually transmitted disease called Donovanosis has been diagnosed recently three times in the UK, according to documents turned over in a Freedom of Information request, marking what might be the first time it has appeared there. (It's usually found in tropical and subtropical regions.) “Bacteria that cause the disease, known as klebsiella granulomatis, infect the skin around the genitals, groin or anal area and causes lesions and skin disintegration as the flesh effectively consumes itself," pharmacist Shamir Patel told a reporter.From Cambridgeshire Live:

There are nine US states with legal recreational marijuana; five on the west coast and four in the east. (more…)

"County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon," wrote Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden a lawsuit declaration. "This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire's ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services." Bowden's declaration was included in a lawsuit, filed by 22 US states, to reinstate net neutrality.Bowden also said its fire department had to pay double to remove the throttling on its "unlimited" data plan: "Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan," Bowden wrote.[via Ars Technica]Image: Krista Kennell/Shutterstock

Every version of the popular Openssh program -- a critical, widely used tool for secure communications -- share a critical vulnerability that was present in the program's initial 1999 release. (more…)

It's hard to make hardware mods to an iPhone, because there's not a lot of room to add anything, and it doesn't have user friendly parts or interfaces. But Scotty Allen, a hardware hacker who lives part-time in Shenzhen, met up with a guy who designed a little circuit board that gives older iPhones the capability to charge wirelessly.

Let’s pretend we’re buddies. I’m visiting you from Japan and brought with me all kinds of fun and interesting snacks. There’s one in particular I want to introduce you to. I ask you to hold out your hand and close your eyes. We’re buddies, remember? You trust me. I then proceed to fill your palm with hard, brown and beige, oddly-sized pieces of something that isn’t exactly beef jerky.You open your eyes, examine the curious snack, sniff it, then pop one into your mouth.While you chew, I show you the package. A cute cartoonish pig is wearing an apron while standing in front of a BBQ with some nondescript meat cooking on the grill. If you’re okay with gamey, beef jerky textured, off-tasting meat, you’re quite happy with the gift. If you’re like me, however, and would rather not do unidentifiable dried flesh snacks, you’re starting to reach for your water bottle. Before you can even ask, I tell you you’ve just feasted on Yamituski Horumon, Addictive Hormones. This little package is one of the recommended snack foods currently touted in 7-11s across Japan.You raise an eyebrow. Hormones? I explain to you that it’s good to know if you’re ever traveling in Japan and see a restaurant or menu boasting horumon (hormones), it means they’re serving various animal innards. Here’s very short list of some of the yummies you might encounter: Harami = diaphragm Himo or hoso = (string, thin) small intestine (sometimes a pig’s appendix)Mino = first stomach of a cow’s four stomachs, a bit tough, not much fatHachi no su (bee hive, because that’s what it looks like) = this is cow stomach number two and thought to be the most delicious of the fourKobukuro (child bag) = uterus (almost always pork, beef uterus is too tough, they say)　Chichi kabu = nippleTeppo (rifle or gun) = rectumI immediately try to ease your mind by telling you what you’ve just eaten — the Yamitsuki Horumon treat — is none of the above, actually, it’s only dried heart and tripe that have been dipped in a delicious salty sauce. I watch your face. Are we still friends?

I too flap my ears whenever Clair de Lune is performed for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCk8dyU7zUMRather than attempt to describe this, I'll just quote the artist verbatim:

One of my favorite things about learning Japanese and living here for over half my life is discovering all the words and phrases that have no exact equivalent in English. It’s an incredible feeling when you learn to describe an emotion, situation, or predicament that you never even realized you hadn’t previously been able to articulate.It wasn’t too long ago that the Japanese words kintsugi (repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold) and tsundoku (the act of piling up reading material, but not quite getting around to reading it) made the rounds. It dawned on me that maybe other people like discovering these little treasures, as well. Today I give you one of my favorite Japanese phrases: mushaburui. This one’s an oldie but a goodie. Let me explain: Musha in Japanese means warrior or samurai. While the character for burui is a different pronunciation of furu, to shiver, quiver, or shake. Thus, I give you the “shivering samurai”. But what it means is even better than that. When I was first taught this phrase, I was told to imagine the evening before a large battle. A samurai warrior is quietly making his preparations. He’s nervous, frightened, excited. Yet, despite this mix of emotions, there is a calmness and resignation at facing what might be a great victory or his inevitable death. He doesn’t know why, but as he reaches for his sword he’s trembling. It is an older Japanese term used to describe a feeling I think we’ve all had at sometime in our lives. Maybe we weren’t standing at the jaws of war. Maybe we were simply just about to do something out of our comfort zone, something we were terrified to do, but knew we had to do it. Going for an interview at our dream job. Telling our best friend that we’ve been in love with them all this time. Maybe we were submitting an article to BoingBoing. These situations, too, are mushaburui.

In 1893, Grover Cleveland discovered a cancerous tumor on the roof of his mouth. It was feared that public knowledge of the president's illness might set off a financial panic, so Cleveland suggested a daring plan: a secret surgery aboard a moving yacht. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the president's gamble -- and the courageous reporter who threatened to expose it.We'll also audit some wallabies and puzzle over some welcome neo-Nazis.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Data is worth more than gold these days, which is why companies, hackers, and governments alike are all eager to scoop up the browsing information of everyday users. For those of us not keen on disclosing our online movements, VPNs are a must-have, but many are not quite what they seem, offering lackluster encryption and even keeping logs of their users' browsing movements. Nord VPN maintains absolutely zero browsing logs and keeps its users anonymous with double the encryption.Earning an extremely rare "Outstanding" rating from PC Mag, NordVPN eliminates privacy threats by routing all of its users' traffic through double-encrypted tunnels. Users can access 3,521 worldwide server locations in 61 countries and enjoy high speed connections for streaming video and content access while staying completely under the radar. NordVPN even goes as far as shutting down your browsing in the event you lose connection, so no data is revealed.NordVPN 3-year subscriptions are on sale today for $99, more than 75% off the usual price.

In Trump's first statement since his former lawyer pleaded guilty to eight crimes, explicitly implicating the president in at least one of them, he recommends not hiring the man."If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!" he wrote at his page on the popular microblogging service "Twitter".This is a trivialize everything as kayfabe strategy and it's the best one he's got. But he'll break it in minutes and start ranting anyway.

Today was a good day. A package from San Francisco artist Doctor Popular arrived in the mail. Inside were eight tiny publications, what he calls the Mini-Comics Mixtape. He writes, "All 8 comics were drawn in under 24 hours with no planning in advance, so the stories can get a little out there." They're so good -- funny, offbeat and engaging! Plus, he used a Risograph to print the comic books in two colors, which makes them look extra neat.He's selling the set for $12 over at Etsy or through his site DoctorPopular.com.Doc Pop previously on BB

Have you ever woken up one morning and bemoaned how much time you waste everyday preparing and eating meals? You have to rifle through your refrigerator to dig up ingredients, prepare them in some mildly pleasing and palatable way, before finally consuming them. Even if you’re the type of person who prefers eating out, there’s the choosing a restaurant, deciding what to order, paying, and, again, actually sitting down to eat the meal. This isn’t even addressing the time spent trying not to think about what insidious strain of salmonella or E. coli might be lurking under that leaf of Romaine lettuce. Time. Money. Dangerous vegetables. Well, in Japan the company Peyoung might have an answer to your prayers. Especially if your prayers included: How do I get an entire day's worth of calories into one sitting?A little while ago I was stopped dead in my tracks at my local 7-11 when I saw this package (above). Let me read that for you. It says Cho-Cho-Cho Omori Gigamax Yakisoba (Super, Super, Super Large Serving Gigamax Cup Fried Noodles). You'll notice the 2,142 calories is written nice and boldly, too. Below that is a friendly request to limit your consumption of this yummy and enormous meal to only once a day, because you could possibly exceed your daily calorie intake, and that would be bad. But isn't that the dream? One delicious meal, prepared in a mere three minutes, and all those pesky calories garnered in one fell swoop?

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here.Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.—RESIST!! The temptation to not join Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE!More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

There is no such thing as an inexpensive Apple laptop. The least painful entry into MacOS, save buying a refurb or hunting down a used MacBook online, is the MacBook Air. They're great! Well, they're great so long as you need to crunch numbers, do some VERY light gaming or type for a living. I've owned two of them. If the first hadn't been destroyed falling off the back of a motorcycle and the second hadn't been futzed up by Costa Rica's crazy temperatures, I'd still be using them. That said, the line is getting a bit long in the tooth. The MacBook Air's design is woefully dated – its wide display bezels make it feel like you're typing on a computer minted in 2010, which, I guess you are. Its design really hasn't changed since back then. Then there's the display. It's a low-resolution nightmare that guarantees eyestrain if you stare at it for more than a couple of hours at a time. Fortunately, all of this could soon change.From Bloomberg:

I lost my spring break to the original Diablo back in the mid-1990s. I spent the whole damn week in my underwear, wrapped in a blanket, playing it from dusk until dawn, surviving on pizza and Pepsi. It wasn’t my proudest moment. When Diablo II came along, I was a little older and much wiser. I knew what to expect. I promised myself that I’d play responsibly: No more losing sleep in the pursuit of better gear. I’d wear clothes. I’d force myself out into the daylight on a regular basis.I would break every one of these promises as the game held me in thrall.By the time that Diablo III rolled around, I was mature enough to know that playing too many games meant not making enough money. I was able to boot it up on my laptop and then, after a reasonable amount of time, turn it off so that I could get some work done. I bought it for my PS3, so that I could play it with my friends. When I upgraded to a PS4, I repurchased the game so I could play it there too. This fall, Diablo III is coming to the Nintendo Switch. Junkie that I am, I will exchange money for a copy of it to play on my handheld. I will do so, giddily. When the title comes to the Switch, it’ll include the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Rise of the Necromancer. I never got to play either before surrendering my PlayStation during a cash crunch, a few years back. There’ll be a whack of content that’s exclusive to Nintendo, too. That I can play it with four other people is icing on the cake. Living in the middle of nowhere and traveling constantly as I do can be isolating. It’ll be nice to goof off with some far-flung friends. The game’s already up for pre-order online. But I’m not into pre-ordering digital goods. It feels goofy to me. It’s not like they’re going to run out of downloads. But maybe you feel different than I do about it. If so, here’s a link to get you going. I’m absolutely loving the Switch for its new games and ports of old school titles I never got enough of back in the day. Here’s hoping devs will continue to feel that the system’s worth their while.Artwork via Nintendo and Blizzard

Facebook announced today they are taking down 652 pages, groups and fake accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." (more…)

Tuberculosis was a disease that Doc Holliday died from; in old-timey novels, it’s often called consumption: a disease that sees those afflicted with it coughing delicately into hankies and later dying peacefully in bed. The truth is, the disease doesn’t afford a peaceful death, nor is it a relic of centuries past. In 2016, 1.6 million people died after contracting tuberculosis – a disease that causes the cells of an infected individual to burst. It can take hold of multiple sites in your body, but most often it affects the lungs. As the cells in an infected individual's lungs burst, the walls of the lungs destabilize, replacing the space where air’s supposed to go. As the victim’s lungs slowly collapse, the body believes itself to be drowning, because it is. As a result, the infected individual hacks and coughs, trying to clear the obstruction and, in the process, coughing up wee bits of flesh, blood and particles small enough to go airborne in a sneeze or cough. When someone else breathes those airborne particles in? They get infected. It’s scary shit, but it’s also treatable shit. To handle the symptoms that come with a case of tuberculosis, it’s necessary to take medication on a daily basis. Doing so isn’t just necessary for someone infected with tuberculosis to live a relatively normal life: given how infectious the disease is, it’s also vital for keeping everyone around them safe from contracting the illness themselves. Because of this, those undergoing treatment for TB are closely monitored by healthcare professionals, to ensure that they’re taking their pills as required. Patients are typically required to take their meds in the presence of a healthcare worker, to ensure that the dosage was actually ingested. This works well in a clinical situation, but not everyone lives near a clinic. Additionally, transient individuals may not be able to check into the same clinic on a daily basis, making treatment of their tuberculosis difficult. Happily, researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Diego have come up with the means to monitor patients as they take their daily doses, even when they’re far from a clinical setting. As with so many other things, these days, it involves a smartphone. In this case, those being treated for TB are asked to take their medication in front of their smartphone camera, using an app called SureAdhere.From Stat News:

There's a rumor that Trump will pardon Paul Manafort tonight at one of his sweaty rallies. If he does, it could come back to haunt him. Vox interviewed 10 legal experts who are largely in agreement that pardoning Manafort would actually help prosecutors nail him to the wall that much faster.A few highlights from the article:"If the president issues a pardon in order to influence a witness and impede the investigation, that would also be a further act of obstruction." -- Lisa Kern Griffin, law professor, Duke University“If the president pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.” —Julie O’Sullivan, Georgetown University“The threat of state prosecution is enough to force Kushner, Flynn, Manafort, etc. to become cooperating witnesses, regardless of whether Trump secretly promises to pardon them.” —Jed Shugerman, Fordham UniversityIf President Trump pardons subjects of Mueller's investigation, they will be unable to claim their Fifth Amendment rights if they are asked to testify under oath. -- Asha Rangappa, associate dean, Yale Law SchoolWith each abnormal, unbecoming, or dishonorable act, President Trump makes it harder for his appointees to defend him, harder for traditional Republicans to maintain their uneasy power alliance with him, and easier for Democrats to take the moral high ground and secure political advantage. President Trump is in danger of snuffing out his candle in the first year of his presidency. -- Andy Wright, law professor, Savannah Law SchoolImage: Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

The Santa Clara County Fire Department had its Verizon wireless access throttled to 0.5% of normal, in the midst of its fight against the California wildfires; Verizon said that the firefighters had been using too much bandwidth while they risked their lives racing to save the county from being engulfed in flames. (more…)

Actually, it's about ethics in purchasing videogames with campaign funds. (more…)

Top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow hosted at his home the publisher of a website that serves as a platform for white supremacy and anti-immigrant hate. (more…)

In 1980, David Bowie did a series of Japanese TV commercials for Crystal Jun Rock, a Japanese liquor. See below. “The money is a useful thing,” Bowie later said about doing the ads.The soundtrack was the gorgeous track "Crystal Japan" that Bowie released first on a couple 7-inch singles and then as a bonus track on the CD reissue of "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)." Bowie fan Nacho Video recut the three TV commercials into the lovely music video above for "Crystal Japan."(via /r/ObscureMedia)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VkVowfxU1U

Angel Nene created this montage showing how the Rolling Stones' faces and music evolved over the years. I got sad about one minute in (1969) when Brian Jones died.Below, my favorite of Nene's morphing animations of aging rock stars, "The Beatles Aging Together (1960-2017):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ewWzlx_bV8(via Laughing Squid)

Oxford Business School researcher Bent Flyvbjerg's 2014 paper on "megaprojects" is a minor classic of the project-management genre (but I hadn't heard of it until this morning, and, having read it, I can see why). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD6A_tvbKT0LEDs are diodes (that's what the D stands for) and diodes are sensitive to voltage drops: when you blow on an LED, you make it ever so slightly cooler, and that causes an infinitesimal, but detectable voltage drop. (more…)

Since 1946, the Clown Egg Register has collected blown eggshells that clowns hand-paint with their distinctive makeup, in order to claim that particular makeup as belonging to them; by custom, clowns do not copy each others' faces. (more…)

President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen surrendered to the FBI today, and admitted to violating campaign finance laws in relation to payments made to porn performer Stormy Daniels on Donald Trump's orders. (more…)

In the trial of U.S. vs. Paul Manafort, a jury has found Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on 8 counts. He faces a maximum of 80 years in prison. Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on 10 counts for which the jury couldn't reach consensus. (more…)

As the Cohen and Manafort news blows up, we've got Jackhammer Jill watching the Orange Menace's twitter feed like a hawk! As the blowhard begins to melt down, we'll post the tweets and analysis here:

These 8oz insulated thermos-like bottles will be going to school with my daughter. (more…)

Anti-vaccine shenanigans have lowered Europe's average vaccination rate below the threshold to adequately provide for herd immunity. Following the decade's lowest year of measles cases in 2016, the rate of measles cases in Europe in 2018 is already headed for the stars. (more…)