Boing Boing

Sarah Huckabee Sanders knows no shame.

This video of radio-controlled model trucks look like an autonomous Ford Bronco off-roading at the beach. It's actually a Traxxas TRX4 Sport radio-controlled truck that's just 21" in length. Excellent smartphone video shot on a Samsung Galaxy S9+.(Another RC Channel via Uncrate)

Windows 95, that most beautiful of operating systems, has been turned into an application. It's available to download for MacOS, Linux and, indeed, modern editions of Windows. Tom Warren writes:

As a teenager in the 1970s, hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash hacked together his own DJ mixer in his bedroom. At the time, he was attending a vocational high school in the Bronx where he had developed some electronics repair chops. Flash needed his Sony microphone mixer to have a cueing feature enabling him to preview the mix before crossfading the turntable's audio to the speakers. So he hit Radio Shack for the parts and made a new musical tool, and history.For more on the history of the DJ mixer, see this classic Cuepoint feature.(via Kottke)

Heading to Fox News for a softball interview about the alleged misuse of campaign funds on vacations, video games and other personal expenses, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Northrup Grumman) blamed his wife.The dizzying kettle logic and suddenly obvious lies are not just a Trump thing. It's some kind of bizarre shedding process the GOP is undergoing as it metamorphoses into a nakedly amoral totalitarian nightmare moth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdjbhXa-BgYMoses Lanham holds the Guinness World Record for "Fastest time to walk 20 m with feet facing backwards." He is known as "Mr. Elastic Man.""Contortionist Shows How He Can Walk Forward With His Feet Turned Completely Backwards" (Laughing Squid)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeumGImi1YQ

What would you say to someone if you were randomly connected to them by phone and had the opportunity to roleplay as their boss? A fun new app allows you to play the Michael Scott, Bill Lumbergh, or whatever boss of your dreams, and help them get stuff done too.Yesterday I sat down for lunch in San Francisco with Danielle Baskin, the app's co-founder. A mutual friend had recently introduced us in an email, using the subject line, "Rusty / Danielle - I can't believe you two DON'T know each other."Our conversation was lively and ended up being nearly three hours long. As I sat there chatting with her, I totally got why our mutual friend wanted us to meet. Danielle is a rabid creator of many weird and wonderful things, a true Happy Mutant. (You may remember her Drone Sweaters, for instance, or from her interview last month on the Cool Tools podcast.)She's got all kinds of neat irons in the fire and many of them seem to teeter on that line between art and something that is actually useful. Her latest project rides that line. It's a collaboration with programmer Max Hawkins and it started blowing up on Product Hunt this week. It's called Your Boss and she describes it as "an app that connects people working on solo projects in a call-based accountability buddy system."She writes:

I have no idea why teenage girls would be suddenly removed from certain roles at a Catholic high school in a Denver suburb. But now I'm wondering, like many others, because the school administrators removed an article about it from the school's low-circulation newspaper, suppressed publication of the newspaper itself, threatened and then removed a newspaper advisor from her post, and sent principal Matt Hauptly to go out in public and explain why this isn't technically censorship and to lecture curious reporters about proper journalism and to scream shut up SHUT UP SHUT UP. [Via Adam Steinbaugh]

In this Vox video, pinball legend Roger Sharpe explains that playing the game isn't random and shares how players can manipulate the balls to their advantage.Going into the video, I felt a little bit like, "What are things old people already knew, Alec?" but ended up learning some things. Never too old, I guess. Funny enough, I was just playing pinball last weekend (at the soon-to-be-closed Playland-Not-at-the-Beach... sniff) and totally could have used these pointers.

Crispy rice is one of those dishes you're eager to order at your favorite sushi place but terrified to try making on your own. However, that's soon to change with the Crispy Rice Cooker, which lets you make perfect crispy rice at the push of a button and without setting your kitchen on fire. It's on sale today for $69.99.The world's first rice cooker with a patented and adjustable crispy mode, the Crispy Rice Cooker guarantees perfect, crispy rice every time. Sidestepping the mess and hassle associated with the traditional cooking process, the Crispy Rice Cooker automatically switches to fry mode when your rice is cooked, serving up controlled portions faster and cleaner inside its BPA-free container.The Crispy Rice Cooker retails for $89.99, but you can get your own today for $69.99, 22% off the usual price.

Michael Young's an industrial designer. After over six years of tinkering, he came up with this frigging masterpiece of a prototype: a framing hammer that dispenses nails. If it ever makes it to market, having mashed my digits setting up a nail to be driven into boards an untold number of times, I will be the fist in line to buy this thing.

If Amazon itself unleashed this astroturf army of Twitter personae to defend its employment practices, it goes immediately into the pantheon of corporate-brain PR disasters. If it's someone else, it's a insightful ploy targeting Amazon's reputation and the expectations of those who might assume it's real. Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch:

Back in 2011, I bought a 27” Thunderbolt Display to use with my MacBook when I was at home, working at my desk. It was huge, heavy as hell and, with a full suite of ports baked into its butt, wicked useful. This year, after being shipped across the country four times and riding around North America in a motorhome for the past three years, it finally gave up the ghost. It sucked taking it to be recycled. But, in all honesty, I’ve been feeling it was out of place for the tiny amount of space in our RV that we’ve allocated to be my work space. After a few days of working in front of my laptop at my desk, I found that, from an ergonomic standpoint, life sucked without having a massive display to stare into while I typed. I have a neck injury that is very easily tweaked. Looking down for too long? That tweaks it. I decided that I needed to invest in a laptop stand. I chose Twelve South’s HiRise for MacBook, for a number of reasons. First, I’ve used their gear in the past. It’s rock solid. The Compass iPad stand that I bought from them back in 2012 still gets a lot of regular use around the house and when I travel. Their BackPack shelf for my Thunderbolt Display was great too… although it’s not really all that useful since I trashed the monitor. Second, the stand is adjustable. I don’t like buying accessories that will only serve me in one situation. There’s no guarantee that I’ll always be working at the same table or desk. I wanted to get my hands on a laptop stand that would work for me, for years to come. I made a good choice. The HiRise, although marketed for MacBooks, would work with pretty much any laptop out there. Constructed almost entirely out of brushed metal, the HiRise is study as hell. The rubber strips on its base keep it in one place, even when we’re traveling down the road at 80 miles per hour. The platform for resting your laptop on is covered in sticky rubber as well: it provides a slight slant to the laptop’s orientation, but keeps it from sliding around or moving in a way that’ll give you the ‘no’ feeling. I like that the platform consists of two slim, metal arms as it allows for better airflow. With my aging machine often chugging away, fans going full-tilt as I work in Photoshop, I need all of the help I can to keep my laptop from melting into a pile of silicon-scented slag. Now, the bad news: the HiRise for MacBook will set you back $70. That’s a lot of money to spend on something that performs a function that a short stack of books can ape. But books are easily knocked over and I’ve owned less expensive laptop stands in the past that weren’t nearly as well made as the HiRise is. They were relegated to the recycling center, long ago.I have a feeling that this one will be around for a while.Image via Twelve South

Next year around 250 million yen will be spent to insert AI robots into 500 classrooms across Japan in an effort to improve children's English skills. An unnamed official in charge of international education gave the example of having the robots check students' pronunciation, something Japanese teachers have trouble doing.

You may remember Ace of Cups, the all-female band who once opened for Jimi Hendrix but whose musical careers got sidelined by motherhood. I wrote about the group in January after seeing a short KQED documentary about them. At that time, four out of five of the original band members, now septuagenarians, were cutting their first album. That 20+ track album, which features collaborations with Bob Weir, Peter Coyote, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Taj Mahal and others, debuts on November 9, 2018 through High Moon Records.

So much for Tesla. AK-47 not included!

Brought to you by Nail_Sunny, the Russian nail art chain behind "teeth nails," comes "feet nails."They're equally as creepy:https://www.instagram.com/p/BmtVpjInq39/?taken-by=nail_sunny(Mashable)

Use code EGKA3EHO to get this 349-piece box of rotary tools for Dremels (or my new favorite, the $15 Wen 2307). It's got everything you need to gouge, mar, and otherwise fuck-up the surface of any part you are working on.

“There's information about political advertising—including the choices about how to target ads to you instead of someone else—that's not in Facebook's Ad Archive,” says ProPublica's Jeremy Merrill. “It can only be exposed if you participate in this project with ProPublica, ABC and our other awesome partners.” (more…)

For many of us, the Cliven Bundy story started when a fringey rancher got a bunch of his militia pals to flex their white privilege by threatening to shoot federal law enforcement officers who'd demanded that Bundy stop stealing public land and grazing; then Bundy's loathsome offspring led a terrorist takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon. (more…)

Hurricane Lane is the greatest weather threat to Hawaii in decades, say storm experts. (more…)

The British government, veering toward a "no deal" exit from the European Union, has published "practical and proportionate" advice for citizens in the event of this taking place. The BBC posted excerpts.

Mozilla's annual fellowships fund 10-12 months' of work by people who "put individuals in control of their personal data," "help connect the unconnected," "keep artificial intelligence accountable," and "make scientific research more open." This year's fellows are a particularly impressive lot. (via Four Short Links)

From a DW News Story (with the help of Google Translate): "The general manager of a food company in Zhangpu County, Fujian Province, put cooked potatoes in a urinal, stirred them up, and ordered the staff to eat them. She said that every 25 years, the supervisors will be trained in the public toilets, and everyone should eat together."Image: YouTube screengrab

Oh, brands. Will you never learn. P&G is trying to give itself a Millennial Cool makeover by grabbing the intellectual property rights to the internet-origin expression 'WTF.' The only possible response to this, of course, is: WTF? (more…)

Denish Kishorchandra Parekh (24) may have been inebriated when he urinated on a 50-year-old Japanese passenger while they were on a flight from Chicago to Tokyo. According to Newsweek, the gentleman is alleged to have consumed "at least" four glasses of champagne and a cup of sake before getting up to evacuate the contents of his distended bladder on his fellow passenger seated two row behind him. Parekh, who was arrested when the plane landed at Narita International Airport, now says he doesn't remember a thing, which is something people who do bad things often say as a way to avoid taking responsibility.Image: Yamaguchi Yoshiaki/Wikipedia / Shutterstock/oleskalashnik

Fans of Minecraft who found that it had already gotten too fancy and complicated by 2010 should check out Craft, a clone by Michael Fogleman. It's pared down to the very basics, written in fast-as-hell C, has online multiplayer, and is available free of charge on Windows and Mac. It's the perfect computer Lego set. Now, if he'd *fzz* just add *boom*

Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, who have starred in four movies together, have teamed up again to star in Destination Wedding, which opens in theatres tomorrow. In this ET interview the pair can't stop talking about their "raging" mutual crush on one another.Image: YouTube screengrab

Gnat sent in a tip about The Hit Points, who use "bluegrass instruments used to make beautiful music from classic video games (Street Fighter, Legend of Zelda, Mario Brothers, etc.)" I'm inordinately fond of their cover of Super Mario's "Athletic Theme" (compare withe the Mario and Zelda Big Band version)

Wickr, a private, secure messaging company, has teamed up with Psiphon (previously), a spinout from Citizen Lab (previously) to allow its users to communicate even when they are behind national firewalls. (more…)

This $30 AnvFlik wireless Nintendo Switch controller has improved my game play experience. (more…)

David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer and a 'friend' of Donald Trump, has been granted immunity from prosecution. The Wall Street Journal:

Zeynep Tufekci (previously) leads Tech Review's politics issue with the best overview of the forces that have combined to make the internet so hospitable to totalitarians and racist pigs. (more…)

Last night Carla and I attended a screening for an upcoming National Geographic documentary called Science Fair, about the International Science and Engineering Fair. It's a terrific movie about smart young scientists from around the world. One thing I learned watching it is that students in Germany pay almost nothing to attend college. Here in the US, students graduate with a debt load that will hurt the quality of their life for decades. What is the US Department of Education doing about it? Actively making it worse, thanks to Betsy DeVos, who oversees the department.The Trump swamp is a veritable legion of cartoonishly evil supervillians, but the mustache-twirling cackler Betsy DeVos operates on a level that would make a 4chan troll blush. Married to the former CEO of Amway (which paid $56 million to settle a class action for "alleged fraud, racketeering, and operating as an illegal pyramid scheme," she is also sister of Erik Prince, founder of the murderous Blackwater mercenary firm.This billionaire griefer -- with fleets of private jets and yachts at her command -- has no teaching experience and refuses to visit troubled schools. Instead, she spends her time coming up with outrageous ways to make students' lives financially miserable and fraught with danger. And like the best robot, she doesn't crack a smile when her victims suffer.DeVos's latest lulz generator is a plan to get around a law that Congress passed in March that forbids federal funds from being used to buy guns for teachers. But DeVos is the kind who doesn't let the law get in her way, especially if it would spoil her plans to fill schools with deadly weapons. According to the New York Times, she's discovered a potential loophole:

The public myth of Steve Jobs' bullying arrogance concealed a private reality of cruelty, coldness and spite. His daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, exposes the "damning details" in her forthcoming book, Small Fry [Amazon]. But in a New York Times profile written by Nellie Bowles, Brennan-Jobs hopes all the same that others choose not to damn him.

Tony Hawk, amazingly nice guy and skateboard legend, discusses aging and kicks some ass. (more…)

Onavo (previously) was an Israeli startup that Facebook bought; the company has made a series of apps that masqueraded as utility software while gathering competitive intelligence that Facebook used to target its rivals by monitoring users' behavior. (more…)

California voting officials have certified an open source vote-counting package for use in the upcoming LA elections, in the first of a series of planned improvements to the County's voting system (other plans include improved absentee voting ballots). (more…)

For the past 8 years, Hong Kong has received the dubious honor of having the least affordable housing market in the world. The average house price is 20 times the median household income (Los Angeles and London are about 10 and New York is about 6). As a result, many families live in very tiny apartments (75 to 140 square feet). Those who can't afford a parking lot sized apartment can live in a cage inside a room filled with stacked cages.In this video, Johnny from Vox visits with cage dwellers and finds out how they live.Image: Vox screenshot

"We are in a Constitutional malestrom. Literally a crisis that we haven't seen since Watergate. We are in a Watergate moment. The White House increasingly is looking like a criminal enterprise." said US Senator Richard Blumenthal.In the video above, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) explains that President Trump can be indited, or even impeached, over his crimes. The Senator also discusses pending legislation to protect the special counsel's investigation.

Machines come to life and start killing people. Stephen King's cocaine fueled 1986 thriller Maximum Overdrive is still wonderful fun today. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvtxWSJbjGQSculptor Jud Turner (previously) has created a giant shiny metal firefly with the tail-light from a 1959 Cadillac, wired up to a clapper-style switch. It's called "MerKaBot" and it was created for Firefly Aerospace. (more…)

Dril has a book out collecting their tweets, drawings and other elements of the essential twitter experience.

When Verizon's life-threatening price-gouging was introduced in a sworn statement from the Santa Clara County Fire Department as part of 22 states' lawsuits against the FCC over its dismantling of Net Neutrality rules, Verizon's crisis communications team leapt into action. (more…)

Pudding's data-driven analysis of women's jeans pockets compares 32" waist jeans for men and women from a variety of brands and uses various common cellphones as a benchmark; the conclusion will not surprise you. (more…)

Former Air Force language specialist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner has been sentenced to 63 months in prison. (more…)

Simon Stålenhag's famous for his atmospheric paintings depicting alien technology lurking in the mists of Scandinavia. He's just put out an album of lo-fi ambient music, C:\Music\for\DOS, made with cheap vintage keyboards and legendary 1990s music-making app Impulse Tracker. That's a picture of his "studio" up top: "Oh, the computer to the right was just for playing Doom."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn7sdC8rKqM&feature=youtu.be&list=OLAK5uy_lWUHfM87_5svYbCsqeO-uxtc-6lTxWGFA

"Titties" is a stupid word. It's so stupid and gross that some millennials are replacing it with even more ridiculous words like "tiddies" or "titays." Brilliantly funny MEL Magazine editor Alana Hope Levinson explores how "The Extremely Online are destroying language — one tiddy (or tity) at a time." From MEL:

As a wise man once said, "It's funny cause it's true."(r/funny)

Last week, Aretha Franklin died at the age of 76 in her hometown of Detroit. On Tuesday, during a pregame moment of silence at Detroit's Comerica Park dedicated to her memory, a full rainbow appeared. https://twitter.com/tigers/status/1032041080760541184