Boing Boing

Deadwood fans have been teased by rumors and malarkey about a final season or a movie that would tie up the loose ends of the series, for years. Back in 2015, the whispers about a Deadwood movie going into production grew from whispers to a quiet mumble. Then, in 2017, Deadwood creator David Milch said that he'd completed a script that'd appeal to the show's followers and new viewers alike. Fast forward one more year to 2018: a whole twelve years after the last episode of season three went to air. According to The Hollywood Reporter, HBO has finally announced that production on a Deadwood movie will start this October. Tell your God to prepare for blood!If you're not familiar with the show, love blood, excellent writing, complex characters and dark humor, you need to get on it. During its three-season run, Deadwood chalked up eight Emmy Awards for its portrayal of the life and drama surrounding the citizens of Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870s. While the show's roots are rooted in the Old West, at a time when outlaws and gunfighters still held sway, the story lines covered over the series' 36 episodes are more Shakespearean in scope than Spaghetti Western. If Deadwood sounds like your thing, you're in luck: it's currently streaming on HBO Go, Amazon Prime Video, and can be bought outright on iTunes, Google Play or as a DVD or Blu-ray box set from Amazon for under $50.Image via HBO

A new twist on an old email scam making the rounds addresses its recipients by name and uses an actual password (hopefully deprecated). They attempt to blackmail victims, and it's definitely a little anxiety-inducing to see an old password written out. (more…)

Godzilla 2: King of the Monsters continues the trend of making classical music EPIC by turning Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" into a spine-tingling blast of EPICness. Here's just the track as a standalone: (more…)

Just because books are lauded today, doesn't mean they weren't, in their own time, received with anger, fear, and disdain. Some of the most valuable works of literature we have got their start amidst disgrace and outrage, though in the long run at least, they didn't seem to suffer too much for it.

This summer, I have been working as an intern at a company called Switch Science in Tokyo, Japan. I am writing about my experience here in the form of blog posts, and you can find my first post here.On Thursday last week, I was given a thermal camera to work with along with my M5Stack. My goal was to connect them together and display the thermal data in the form of a picture on the M5Stack’s screen. The thermal camera was called the MLX90640 by Melexis. After briefly reading about it, I was confident that I knew where to connect the wires and which I2C address to use, but I quickly realized that the size of the pins on the thermal camera were too small to connect to the wires’ pins. Although I could plug them into each other, the connection would only work properly half of the time. So my coworker Kazunori helped me by cutting the end of the wires and soldering them straight to the camera’s pins. It seemed to connect well, and I continued trying to figure out how to display the data from it.Then, Monday morning, the camera suddenly stopped connecting. I spent a few hours trying to figure this out on my own before I asked Kazu for help. He suggested we try to connect a different camera, but no cigar. We also tried a different Arduino sketch made by a different person, but it also didn’t work. Eventually, we tried using a different, brand new M5Stack, and it connected!But then a few minutes later it stopped connecting again.Due to this issue having already taken a full work day and being pretty inconsistent, I decided to quit the project and start something new.On Tuesday, I got to the office wondering what to work on. I opened my backpack to grab my stuff, and saw both my old M5Stack and my new one from Monday. This gave me the idea to make a game involving both M5Stacks. I decided to create a simple Rock Paper Scissors game where players would each select their option on their M5Stack and then the screen would display who won. Truth be told, I was a bit cocky and thought I could finish this project in just one work day, but this was not the case.I worked with my M5Stack and my computer’s serial port in order to simulate the other player’s M5Stack because it was easier than continuously uploading new code, unplugging the M5Stack, uploading it to the second M5Stack, unplugging that one, and then plugging them to each other. I’d rather just run it while it was still connected to my computer and then simulate the other M5Stack manually on Arduino’s serial port. Therefore, at the end of the day, when I thought my game was working great, I was a bit surprised to see that when I uploaded the code to both devices and played them against each other, it was an absolute mess.I honestly cannot describe what the error was that prevented my game from working, as I think there were many. I was overwhelmed to say the least, and the next day I was not very motivated to figure this out. I got a bit of work done, but I was tired and it went slowly. At least I got it from looking like a meme of sorts to being coherent, although still not what I wanted. Some values would persist even after the round ended and all variables were supposed to be reset, but nothing was consistent. For example, sometimes you could choose rock, paper, or scissors, and it would tell you if you won or lost without the opponent even picking their choice yet. Other times, the opponent’s status would read as “READY” from the beginning of the round (it should only turn to “READY” after the opponent makes their choice), and then when you picked your choice it would just continue saying “READY” instead of revealing the opponent’s choice.Then, this morning, I decided I was going to finish making this game before lunchtime. I did quite a bit of stuff, but by the end, the trick was to make a “value monitor” and add it to my reset function that ran before / after each round.I was finally able to see that the “oppChoice” integer (if the other player chose rock, paper, or scissors) would continue switching values between your choice and the other players choice after the first round, even when the reset function played. This was because the serial input (“mailbox[0]”) kept on reading these values off when it should not have. I was finally able to acknowledge and fix this issue (it would take another few paragraphs to explain, and I’ll save you that catastrophe) and the game finally WORKED! (See photo at top of this post.)I am not saying it is perfect, as the player must hold down their choice for a second for it to register and the results are not well centered, but I will continue to fix these issues and get my project to the best state that it can be in, even if it is just Rock Paper Scissors.I will continue to post about my internship in the near future! Thanks for sticking around.

For years, I’ve kept a tomahawk on hand. It accompanies me into the bush, lives next to my side of the bed when we’re staying in sketchy areas for protection, and has traveled with me to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Spain, across Canada and the United States. As I live in a 40-foot RV, I consider it to be as vital a piece of safety gear as the fire extinguishers we keep in the front and rear of the vehicle. A good tomahawk can be used to quickly breach walls, doors or windows – an important ability to have, if we ever find ourselves trapped in our rig in a way that keeps us from its only door and two escape windows. I tell anyone who asks me about it to keep one in their emergency preparedness kit or buyout bag: during Hurricane Harvey, some folks were only able to avoid flood waters by getting to their roof through a hole cut in it with an axe. Others weren’t so lucky. What I’m getting at is while a tomahawk or axe is often seen as a weapon – some are, by design – they can also be used as a safety tool which, once you have one, you’ll find countless uses for. So, today for show and tell, I want to talk about my new tomahawk. Last month, Daniel Winkler of Winkler Knives gifted me a Medic Axe—one of the new designs that he’s recently churned out. It’s a simple piece of cutlery, but damned if it isn’t a piece of art. First, let me get this out of the way. There is no way I could afford to buy one of Daniel’s tomahawks or axes. Each one is crafted by hand and takes a few weeks to make. They’re priced accordingly. Winkler Knives sells the Medic Axe for $650. I would be skinned alive for spending that much money on a tool in the life that I have now. 20 years ago? Different story. But the quality of the tool that you get for the asking price is exceptional. I’ve owned a lot of blades, axes and tomahawks over the years. Some were lost. Some were left behind. A number of them broke while being used. This tomahawk has a different feel and heft than anything I’ve ever handled. It smells different than anything else I’ve ever used. While there’ll be hundreds of other Medic Axes made in the coming years, there’s something very fine in the knowledge that this one was made just for me. Being as the goods I use are seldom bespoke, I don’t know if this is a typical reaction to owning such an object. If you’ve got thoughts on this let me know.The Medic Axe has a 6" head length with a blade thickness of 3/8". Overall, it’s 13-3/4" long. It’d be a heavy carry, were it not for the fact that its full tang is both tapered and Skeletonzied: a design choice that maintains strength while reducing the tool’s weight. The end of the handle comes with a ‘can opener,’ designed for punching holes in materials and manhandling them into bigger holes. Just underneath its head, the handle is wrapped in paracord. It’s a smart design decision in that, when you’re chopping away at a door, wall, tree or whatever, there’s a chance that the area underneath the head is going to see some wear and tear. Should the paracord section of the handle get messed up, the tool isn’t ruined – you just swap the old paracord out for some new stuff. The paracord and the contours of the tang underneath it make holding the Medic Axe just underneath its head comfortable to do. This makes doing fine cutting work a whole lot easier, especially if you’re using a tomahawk in place of a knife. As for the rest of the handle, there’s a number of different scale materials that you could go with. Mine came with Maple scales. The wood’s smooth, but not so smooth that it’ll slip out of your hand while using it. When I asked Daniel about how he finds a balance between functionality and aesthetics when he’s designing something like the Medic Axe, he told me, “over the past 30 or so years I have found that if you follow function, form will easily follow. Also unnecessary embellishment that effects functionality can distract from the overall design flow.” It’s a philosophy that oozes through the axe’s design. I’ve had the opportunity to use it out in the bush a number of times since it came to me. Nothing dramatic: firewood collection, bushwhacking and the like. It hangs on my belt next to my bear spray. When I need it, the quick draw sheath (although it took some working in, initially) makes it easy to ready it for use. I’ll be taking it with me on a very sketchy trip later this year (more on that once the details are firmed up), where I hope it won’t find much use. Even if all I end up doing is rubbing gun oil on its 80CrV2 steel to keep it from rusting, for the rest of my life, I’m so pleased to own this thing.

A whistleblower inside the Columbus, Ohio Police Department forwarded a series of smoking-gun emails between high-ranking Columbus police detectives and vice officers that reveal Stormy Daniels arrest for allowing undercover vice squad members to touch her in a strip club was premeditated. (more…)

https://youtu.be/9_X6ebPIzE0From Fresno to all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, three women have been sauntering into Lululemon stores, stuffing large tote bags with as much clothing as they can, and taking off with up to $17,000 worth of merch. And they do this right in front of the store's employees and customers, including kids.It's not clear whether the thieves in Fresno are the same people who are stealing in Berkeley (at least 3 times at the same store), Stanford, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, and other locations, but in all cases they've made it out of the store without a hitch. Why so easy? One reason is because at Lululemon, "Employees are not allowed to confront or chase thieves due to a company policy," according to CNN.So far no one has been arrested.Via CNN and San Francisco Chronicle

Oksana Shachko (right in photo) the 31 year old Ukrainian co-founder of a feminist Putin protest movement was found dead her Paris apartment. She and other members of her group, Femen, often protested against Putin by appearing nude in public. A suicide note was found next to her body, but foul play can't yet be ruled out, given the history of incidents in which she's been harassed and threatened by pro-Putin groups.From The Guardian:

Facebook's stock price dropped 20% in after hours trading today after it reported disappointing revenue and user growth numbers for the second-quarter. The rest of the year looks gloomy, too. "We expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high single digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4," said Facebook CFO David Wehner."It turns out there is indeed a direct correlation between data privacy scandals and daily active users on Facebook," Venkat Ramasamy, chief operating officer of FileCloud, told US News and World Report.The question is, will Facebook's newly announced policy to embrace Holocaust deniers on its platform boost user acquisition?

After three months and 33 deaths, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been declared by the World Health Organization to have come to an end. The loss of 33 lives to the disease is absolutely tragic, but comes close to a miracle when you stop to consider the fact that the last time Ebola broke in West Africa, more than 11,000 people died. The high number of deaths in that instance was due to the fact that The WHO (not the one with Roger Daltrey,) was slow to react to the epidemic last time around, moving slowly to deploy medical resources to the regions that needed it the most. Additionally, no vaccine designed to fight the Ebola virus was put into play until near the end of the outbreak. That wasn’t the case this time.After being tongue lashed for dragging their ass during the last outbreak, The WHO sent specialists to Congo as soon as a handful of cases of Ebola were confirmed, back in May. From the New York Times:

This excellent pizza cutter is not as clumsy or random as our old one.What can I say? We needed a new pizza cutter. This one is modeled on the iconic Darth Vader lightsaber.Underground Toys Star Wars Home Kitchen Pizza Cutter Lightsaber via Amazon

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If you're a dominant near-monopolist like Facebook, your first preference is to have no regulation at all -- but your close second choice is to have lots of regulation that you can afford, but that potential competitors can't, sparing you the tedious exercise of buying and killing any company that might grow up to compete with you some day. (more…)

https://youtu.be/62nDLA_A8gsMIT's How to Win at Texas Hold 'Em is a CC-licensed open course taught by Will Ma in 2016 and now free to watch online; the game is the perfect combination of psych and stats, and learning to play is a great way to improve your basic reasoning skills. (via Kottke)

Matt Webb (previously) is a "weeknoter." That means that once a week, he sits down and sums up all the things he's seen, done, learned and taken note of in the previous week, and makes the result public. (more…)

It's been a year since Equifax doxed the nation of America through carelessness, deception and greed, lying about it and stalling while the problem got worse and worse. (more…)

In a hearing on Capitol Hill today, Former CIA director and Trump's replacement Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Trump remains upbeat about the prospect of North Korea denuclearization, and that the United States will not recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea. (more…)

Patagonia has long given its employees election day off, but now they're calling on other employers to follow suit. The good eggs at Adafruit heard the message: they're giving all their employees a day off to go and vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSJ7du-EC9wElin Ersson is a 21 year old Swedish social work student who boarded a plane at Gothenburg airport yesterday and refused to sit down until an Afghan asylum-seeker who was to be deported that day was offloaded and allowed to remain in Sweden. (more…)

It's illegal to discriminate based on "protected classes," including "men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps" but from the earliest days of its self-serve ad platform, Facebook gave advertisers the ability to exclude people from ads for jobs, financial products, housing and other necessities based on these categories. (more…)

The fine folks at MTG Manager have one of the favorite apps for fans of the game. Now they are toying around with an AR option that could display information about each card and possibly animate the images. This concept video of what it might look like live is pretty neat! (more…)

Convicted rapist Brock Turner is seeking to have his rape conviction overturned, claiming he only wanted "outercourse" and didn't intend to rape his victim.It is amazing what rich parents will pay for.Via HuffPo:

Conservationist, entomologist, and photographer Phil Torres recorded this enchanting slow-motion video of hummingbirds in the cloud forest of Sumaco, Ecuador. He used Moment lenseson his Phone X set at 240fps with a fantastic result.More at PetaPixel.

Ola Selsjord does some seriously crazy stuff on this waterslide before he dons a 360 helmet cam and gets some seriously trippy footage. The 360 part starts at 7:10. (more…)

Japan's Wakino Ad Company is selling ad space on women's underarms for rates starting at 10,000 yen/hour. Their first paid campaign comes from Seishin Biyo Clinic for its armpit hair removal process. From Straits Times:

NASA scientists listen to the low-frequency pulsing hum of the Sun to gain insight into the star's atmosphere over time. The raw data comes from the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) launched back in 1995. Researchers from Stanford Experimental Physics Lab then process and filter the data and speed it up "a factor 42,000 to bring it into the audible human-hearing range."From NASA:

The hilarious running commentary really adds to this idiot's attempt to rip off a store right before asking about working there. (more…)

Bring a bit of Overlook Hotel chic to your family room with an area rug duplicating the iconic carpet design by David Hicks. The 240cm x 170cm rug costs $3275 and it's also available as a runner or by the square meter to ensure you have enough to reach room 237. Also available from Film and Furniture are the likes of Deckard's cocktail glass from Blade Runner, the George Nelson Action Office Desk from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many other items you'll recognize from the big screen."Checkmate! The story behind Kubrick’s carpet in The Shining revealed" (Film and Furniture via Kottke)

Here's some refreshing news: the pending reform to South African copyright is really excellent, with a fair use definition that futureproofs itself with the key phrase "such as" -- so naturally, giant entertainment companies are doing everything they can to kill it.

At around 3:30am on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, a fellow opened a guitar case, removed a pickaxe and destroyed Donald Trump's star. The Hollywood Reporter's Ryan Parker tweeted the photo above and reports that "a man had been taken into custody concerning the incident. He was described as a 25-year-old man. As of 6 a.m., he was being processed at the LAPD Hollywood division and booked on felony vandalism."(Hollywood Reporter)

This was not created in Photoshop. This is a real photo of a real corn maze in Northwest Indiana. Using special GPS-guided tractors, the folks at Exploration Acres planted the seeds for this 20-acre Stranger Things-themed corn maze earlier this year. Tim Fitzgerald, president and CEO of the farm, told WTHR, "This year, new technology allowed us to plant the maze design like an inkjet printer, dropping seeds into the precise design we imagined."The team at Exploration Acres create a massive maize maze every year on their Lafayette (no, it's not in Hawkins, that's a fictional place) property and Fitzgerald says they were inspired to create a Stranger Things one after binge-watching the series.The maze is open September 14 through October 28, 2018.(Mashable)image via Exploration Acres by Mark Seest

The Weird Of Wendy PiniVoices from another world spoke with sublime otherness, helping an indie cartoonist face down prudes, pain and the patriarchy. By Rob BeschizzaIt’s night and the trees are whispering. Wendy Pini approaches a young oak, its branches bare in winter. The artist behind the long-running fantasy series Elfquest, she took me here to understand something of our relationship to art.Though Wendy’s work flows from the line of beauty, a sinuous aesthetic defined by William Hogarth, the tree is angular, wandering and weird. It embodies nature’s indifference to our romance of its forms. The artist Eyvind Earle, she says, beautified this paradox.The oak’s fingers trace gentle circles, pointing to the night sky. (more…)

Lockheed Martin just made the largest 3D printed part they've ever ever built for space. The titanium domes used to take a couple of years to make from scratch, but this was completed in about three months. (more…)

A team of researchers examined 2,101 commercial experiments facilitated by A/B splitting tools like Google Optimize, Mixpanel, Monetate and Optimizely and used regression analysis to detect whether p-hacking (previously), a statistical cheating technique that makes it look like you've found a valid cause-and-effect relationship when you haven't, had taken place. (more…)

Max Roucheau barely avoids getting his tow line caught in his spokes as he barrels through a field and jumps over a residential street. (more…)

Dylan Beattie created the (functional, but a) joke programming language "Rockstar" so that recruiters would be forced to end the odious practice of referring to people as "rockstar programmers." (more…)

Brazil escaped the clutches of a military dictatorship three decades ago. But fascism is really hot right now, so the nation may be about to get back on its bullshit once more.From The New York Times:

As more companies go digital and move their operations to the Cloud, the need for qualified IT professionals grows—as well as their compensation. However, demand alone isn't quite enough to get your foot in the door, as employers look for applicants who can validate their skills with the appropriate certifications. The Complete 2018 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle can help bolster your resume with the industry's top credentials, and it's on sale at a new price drop.Across 12 courses and more than 140 hours of training, this collection is curated with content to prepare you to ace a number of certifications exams from CompTIA, one of the industry's premier certification providers. From networking to cloud computing and even security, this training boasts a diverse curriculum that can prepare you for several specializations in the IT field and earn the appropriate certifications to boot.The Complete 2018 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle was on sale for $59, but it's available at a new price drop this week for $49, more than 90% off the usual price.

Photographer Barry Kusuma shares this beautiful and relaxing footage of his visit to Thailand's Lake Nong Han, nicknamed the Red Lotus Sea. (more…)

It sucks to be ghosted. Last year, I was dating a guy for a few months and it was going well (or so I thought). But, after I got back from Burning Man, he had vanished. He was no longer answering my texts. Poof! He just suddenly ended contact without explanation.It hurt at first but then I felt a sense of, "Good riddance." I mean, ultimately, who wants to be with someone who does that? (Not me!)Now, USA Today is reporting that ghosting is happening at the workplace too. People are not only ghosting scheduled job interviews but are also not showing up to positions they've already accepted offers on:

Unlike most airports, London's Heathrow is privately owned, so it's a great case study for how airports make money. Wendover Productions explains. (more…)

Apparently, for some people, snapping into a Slim Jim could result in snapping in a much more serious manner.According to Gizmodo, while looking for connections between food-borne infections and mental illness, researchers accidentally discovered that a correlation between the routine noshing of cured meats and symptoms of mania, depression, arousal and hyper excitement began popping up in individuals in the scientist’s test subjects far more often than those who refrained from eating the snacks. The same issues were not noted as being consequential to eating any other foods.From Gizmodo:

YouTuber DaveHax had some gallium lying around, so he wanted to see the chemical reaction when it was applied to an aluminum tennis racket. (more…)

Through a mix of archival and current footage, this lovely documentary puts Milton Glaser's iconic I ❤ NY logo in historical context. (more…)

This video churned out by the BBC in 2017, offers a number of frank, intelligent conversations about the microdosing of LSD and magic mushrooms. Those interviewed seem sincere in how the practice has improved their everyday lives in a manner that's medicinal, not recreational. As a guy who's traditionally limited his drug use to booze and coffee, I was fascinated by what they had to say.

Fly Geyser was accidentally created in 1964 by well drilling for geothermal energy. In the ensuing half century, the continuously-spouting geyser has accumulated quite a mound of travertine terraces from dissolved minerals. (more…)

Yes, a PR video and yes, the music is kind of terrible. But man, I learned so much watching this video churned out by the folks at Victorinox. Given the ubiquitous nature of the Swiss Army knife, I'm surprised by how much of the tool's production is still done with human intervention. Being as the video was only produced two years ago, I have to assume that they're still making their knives in the same manner. If anyone knows different, I'd love to hear about it.If you've ever owned a Swiss Army Knife or want to understand more about how an iconic piece of hardware is created, taking in this 13-minute film is time well-spent.

As reported here earlier this week, Apple's newest MacBook Pro laptops had been reported to be having issues with heat throttling with the highest end i9 processors installed. (more…)

Donald Trump can be heard on an audiotape released by CNN tonight talking with his former fixer/attorney Michael Cohen about how to purchase the rights to a Playboy model's story about an affair she says she had with Trump years earlier. (more…)