TL;DR: The certified refurbished HP EliteBook 840 G8 packs a Core i5 processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro for $274.97 (reg. $899.98) during Deal Days.

The laptop industry would prefer that you replace your computer every few years. — Read the rest

The post Deal Days knocks this HP EliteBook workhorse down to $275 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace's newly renovated Reflecting Pool turned green, peeled apart, and became a national monument to contractor-grade grift, so naturally, Trump has identified the real villain: an alleged Hillary-Biden-ActBlue pool saboteur.

This is the thing Donholio does when reality is too small for him. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains pens backstory for nefarious Reflecting Pool vandal appeared first on Boing Boing.

8BitDo's Arcade Controller Pro is a Hit Box-style device that trades the arcade stick for a button-only layout. The new model tightens the cluster and adds a fifth programmable button while keeping the slim profile of last year's original. A wee LCD display is the fanciest upgrade, showing live inputs, battery level, and settings normally buried in the app. — Read the rest

The post 8BitDo's button-only arcade controller gets a tiny screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Babbel's lifetime plan gives you access to 14 languages, 10,000+ hours of lessons, AI conversation practice, and courses created by 100+ linguists—all for a one-time $134.99 payment during Deal Days.

Learning a new language is one of those goals that tends to sit on a to-do list for years. — Read the rest

The post Learn 14 languages from 100+ linguists while this Deal Days Babbel offer is still valid appeared first on Boing Boing.

Carlos Castaneda's 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan recounted his apprenticeship to a peyote-dosing Yaqui shaman named don Juan. The University of California Press published it as anthropology; it became an international bestseller and drew fans from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to George Lucas and Octavio Paz. — Read the rest

The post Carlos Castaneda faked an anthropology classic, then built a cult appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1916, a bearded Long Island showman named Louis Enricht gathered reporters on his lawn and offered them a gasoline substitute that would "sell for a penny a gallon" — wartime alchemy, with gas running short on Europe's battlefields. He had them inspect a small car's empty tank, fill a bucket with garden-hose water, then tip in two ounces of a greenish, almond-smelling fluid. — Read the rest

The post In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford appeared first on Boing Boing.

Writer John Biggs wanted no part of psychedelics, he writes in his newsletter — he pictured being "trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs and listened to techno." But he was in a bad way after his father's death: drinking, gaining weight, and stuck on the antidepressant Pristiq, which he calls "a numbing pill" that gave "painful zaps" whenever he tried to quit. — Read the rest

The post Mushrooms got him off antidepressants, so he built TripSitter appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.

This was not an unknowable mystery. Basic training is basically a respiratory virus theme park: recruits sleep close together, train close together, shower close together, and spend weeks exhausted in a giant human cough terrarium. — Read the rest

The post Whiskey Pete discovers viruses do not respect vaccine freedom speeches appeared first on Boing Boing.

The artificial intelligence revolution has reached the point where management begs employees to stop feeding PDFs into the robot so it can burp out PowerPoint decks nobody wanted in the first place.

The entire AI bubble is built on the idea that someday, somehow, customers will pay for the insane costs of using AI. — Read the rest

The post Companies discover AI is expensive when employees actually use it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yet again, the President of the United States, at an official-looking manufacturing/economy event, performed microphone goblin theater while everyone pretended this was normal governance.

This is the central mystery of late-stage Trumpism: not that he does these things, but that hundreds of adults stand around afterward and describe them using words like "remarks," "agenda," and "message." — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains visits a truck factory, makes haunted chew toy noises appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kevin Mitnick, the legendary hacker, once tried to social-engineer his way into Novell's network by phoning a network admin named Shawn Nunley late at night, posing as an employee who needed "direct inbound modem access" for a top-secret project.

Nunley smelled a rat, played along, and asked the caller to leave a voicemail — which he recorded onto a cassette recorder. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Mitnick left the man who helped jail him enough for a Porsche 911 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Please Remain Seated, Permanezca Sentados Por Favor!

A 13-year-old boy at Disneyland climbed out of his Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride vehicle before the end of the attraction and then received a brief, terrifying seminar in why Disney repeatedly, and in multiple languages, tells you to stay in your seat. — Read the rest

The post Teen exits Disneyland ride, learns why you keep your arms, legs, and body inside the boat appeared first on Boing Boing.

Radio-frequency chips — the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals — have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as CPUs and GPUs got designed by algorithm. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Princeton's Kaushik Sengupta describes teaching AI to design these RFICs from scratch, with no human templates — and the results look nothing like human work. — Read the rest

The post AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's 250th birthday celebration has reached the "FBI director's girlfriend is available" stage of event planning, which is the sort of sentence that makes the Founders look smart for dying early.

To be fair, America has always relied on volunteers in moments of crisis. — Read the rest

The post What luck, America! Kash Patel's girlfriend joins Trump's talent-fleeing Freedom 250 event appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's no secret that AI is frigging terrible for us. The experts building it scarcely understand what they've created; the technology is a threat to the environment, and if handed the reins of war machines or infrastructure like hospitals or the power grid, it could cost lives. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft CEO wants people to shut up about AI being bad for us appeared first on Boing Boing.

We need to de-normalize punching down at trans people during your comedy sets and start normalizing turning them into weird social experiments. Aaron Westberry has become one of my favorite comics for this precise reason, injecting his open mic appearances with one weird twist after another. — Read the rest

The post Comedian guilt-trips audience into laughing appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you have even the slightest interest in peering behind the curtain into the world of game design, I cannot possibly recommend /noclip enough. No, not the console command, the documentary team covering the triumphs and pitfalls and huge feats of coordination that go into bringing any project home. — Read the rest

The post What is the Jedi problem, and why does every game designer fear it? appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm truly, genuinely sorry to everyone who was looking forward to helping Gabe Newell buy a hundredth yacht, but it's just an unavoidable truth: the Steam Machine is kind of a bad deal, guys. Valve's overpriced, underpowered little cube is just the latest victim of soaring component prices driven by investment in AI, because who cares if you can't afford a computer as long as the most racist person you know can make his virtual girlfriend say a slur. — Read the rest

The post Building a better PC than the Steam Machine for cheaper: is it possible? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sporothrix brasiliensis is a fungus that gives cats oozing skin ulcers, can spread through their whole body, and jumps to the people around them. Since it emerged in Brazil in the 1990s it has sickened thousands of cats and more than 11,000 people across South America, and the CDC's Shawn Lockhart told Science News it's "just a matter of time" before it reaches the US — "We're waiting." — Read the rest

The post A cat-borne fungus infected 11,000 people; the US is next, CDC says appeared first on Boing Boing.

A standard office printer, a paper cutter, and a book binder — that's the "printing press" the FBI logged when it raided Elizabeth and Ines Soto's Texas home. That, plus their membership in a leftist reading group called the Emma Goldman book club, became part of the government's case that the couple provided "material support to terrorists." — Read the rest

The post Zine publisher sentenced to 50 years in prison for "material support to terrorists" appeared first on Boing Boing.

On Monday, the Miami Marlins hosted a "Bark at the Park" night for their game against the Texas Rangers. This and similar 'take your doggo to the ballpark' days are, by far, the very best part of Major League Baseball, in my humble opinion. — Read the rest

The post Miami Marlins searching for this sad hotdog-less doggo, to treat him to a Dream Day at the ballpark appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals, in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

-> Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it's published anywhere. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals, in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: ChatPlayground lets you compare responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and more in one interface. Lifetime access to the Unlimited Plan is $54.97 (reg. $619) through June 28 as part of Deal Days.

It didn't take long for AI power users to figure out that the best answer usually isn't hidden inside one chatbot. — Read the rest

The post ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini are all invited—and lifetime access is just $54.97 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

A manager at the Arbys in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, spat in a customers food, say police, an act that allegedly resulted in the victim contracting oral herpes. The Smoking Gun reports that Amanda Hendricks, 38, was charged with adulterating food, assault and battery. — Read the rest

The post We Have The Herpes: Arby's worker accused of infecting customer by spitting in food appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kodak's Charmera, the keychain-sized digital camera that became a minor cultural phenomenon last year, is back with a new look. Reto, the company that makes the camera and licenses the Kodak name, has launched the Charmera Millennium Edition, which trades the original's '80s styling for a Y2k take on tech: think shiny metallics, fussy gradients, and early pixel nostalgia. — Read the rest

The post Kodak's new Charmeras have Y2K vibes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Joseph McGrail-Bateup, a 58-year-old air conditioner cleaner and honorary town crier from Canberra, Australia, has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's loudest person. McGrail-Bateup yelled the word "now" at 122.4 decibels, beating the previous mark of 121.7 dB set by Northern Ireland schoolteacher Annalisa Flanagan in 1994, who shouted "quiet." — Read the rest

The post Canberra's town crier recognized as world's loudest person with 122.4dB yell appeared first on Boing Boing.

Professional cycling spent decades looking for cheating in blood, urine, and hotel mini-fridges. Then came the suspicion that the real juice was hiding in the bike.

The video follows the story from early viral accusations against Tour riders to the day scanners found a motor hidden inside a seat tube. — Read the rest

The post The cheating wasn't in the rider. It was in the bike appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows for $29.97 (reg. $219.99) during Deal Days — no subscription required.

The easiest way to lower a software budget isn't finding a cheaper subscription. It's eliminating one altogether. That's what this deal on the Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows subscription brings: one payment, then years of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more without renewal notices. — Read the rest

The post Deal Days cuts Microsoft Office Professional 2021 from $220 to $30 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains tried to tell a story about a New York police officer "please, sir"ing him and somehow ended up admiring the man's muscles as if he had wandered into a weird Conan movie.

If there were muscles, the muscles were all over the place, and so was the story. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains gets lost in a cop's muscles appeared first on Boing Boing.

Irish artist Niall de Buitléar's eight-minute found-footage piece Duplicate Content splices video art from the mid-1960s through mid-1970s together with recent social-media clips — most of them, in his words, "people alone in a room filming themselves performing for the camera." — Read the rest

The post Duplicate Content splices 1960s video art with today's TikToks appeared first on Boing Boing.