The Last Museum archives 5.8 million artworks housed in the world's museums, from old masters to obscure comic books. Its one of those websites where a couple of minutes turns into a couple of hours without you even realizing how deeply lost you are in it. — Read the rest

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Flagdoku is a flag-themed puzzle game (below is embedded my solution to today's challenge) and a search engine for flags. All your favorites are there, and some you might not have seen before, such as Graham Bartram's proposed flag for Antarctica, above. — Read the rest

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Writer-director Robert Eggers (Nosferatu, The Witch) moves his moody bleak weirdness to medieval England for Werwulf, which comes to theaters this Christmas. It's not clear exactly what the story is about, but it's looks like it has a lot to do with werewolves. — Read the rest

The post Howl you know if Werwulf is worth seeing if you don't watch this trailer? appeared first on Boing Boing.

At 0°N 0°E, where the prime meridian crosses the equator, there is an island. But there is no land there to be found, and the seabed lies nearly 5,000 meters down. Roughly 600 kilometers south of West Africa, Null Island is merely a conceptual landmass, a joke that got out of hand and became a famed cartographic peculiarity. — Read the rest

The post Now space has been corrupted by capitalism, there's only one place left to escape to: Null Island appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Osmo Pocket 3, a tiny gimbaled camera with a big sensor, is a runaway success for DJI. Even movie pros use them, a fact that led it to develop a Pro edition for the series' fourth generation. It claims the new model will offer 17 stops of dynamic range, more than anything remotely similar to it and challenging high-end cinema cameras from Arri and Sony. — Read the rest

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A Georgia man killed a woman then died while trying to dispose of her remains in the Alabama woods. The bodies of Daniel Robbins, 44, and Jessica Folds, 47, were discovered on June 10 in Chambers County after a passerby reported an abandoned vehicle on County Road 86. — Read the rest

The post Killer dies of heart attack while disposing of victim's body appeared first on Boing Boing.

After Valve announced the Steam Machine, popular tech toy maker Dbrand announced the perfect accessory for it: a 3D case wrap that turns it into a Companion Cube, the mindless but beloved item from Valve's Portal series. Unfortunately, it neglected to do something important: secure Valve's permission to use the design. — Read the rest

The post The Steam Machine Companion Cube was a lie appeared first on Boing Boing.

This screen toy lets you chop wood with an ax in a realistic looking simulation. The site starts out with a section from a log of fire wood set up outdoors. Once you click on it, it will get sliced in the precise place you've clicked. — Read the rest

The post This interactive screen toy turns wood chopping into a calm, satisfying digital experience appeared first on Boing Boing.

Wiki Spy is a wonderful website that shows cut-outs of 43,815 objects from Wikipedia. Each image is pasted like a sticker against the white background. When you first enter the site, you'll see a mix of all these random objects from Wiki; right now I'm looking at a birthday cake, a frog, a jack-o-lantern, a piece of artisanal cheese, and more. — Read the rest

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This fun website called Real Image Alphabet uses images from nature to spell out your name. Simply type your name (or someone else's) and click reload. You can see various designs for the same name by reloading until you're satisfied with the results. — Read the rest

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NASA will soon embark on a first-of-its-kind rescue mission, sending a robot to save a space observatory falling to Earth.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is a space observatory that uses three telescopes to study gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows across the gamma-ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands. — Read the rest

The post NASA's robot rescue of the Swift space telescope launches June 30 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Zack Proser wrote up everything he knows about public speaking after years of giving tech talks. The most useful section is on propranolol, the beta blocker concert musicians have been using for decades. He notes there's no high or euphoria on it, and you can still feel full mental dread beforehand — he regularly does. — Read the rest

The post Propranolol doesn't kill public speaking dread — it just stops your body from becoming a shaky mess appeared first on Boing Boing.

At 3:17 a.m. on January 30, 1948, radio officer Robert Tuck aboard the Avro Tudor Star Tiger acknowledged receiving a bearing from Bermuda — and was never heard from again. The aircraft had been flying from the Azores to Bermuda through gale-force winds at just 2,000 feet, far lower than the route required. — Read the rest

The post Star Tiger sent its last radio message at 3:17 a.m. in 1948. No wreckage was ever found. appeared first on Boing Boing.

Since at least 1960, submarine personnel in Antarctic waters had been hearing a mechanical, repetitive quacking — pulses between 60 and 100 Hz arriving every 1.6 to 3.1 seconds. They named it the bio-duck. Acoustic researchers called it "one of the largest still unresolved mysteries of the Southern Ocean." — Read the rest

The post Submarine crews heard a mysterious quacking in Antarctic waters for 50 years before anyone figured out what it was appeared first on Boing Boing.

On May 18, 1935, the Maxim Gorky — the largest aircraft in the world, a Soviet eight-engine behemoth with a 63-meter wingspan roughly equal to a modern Boeing 747 — took off over Moscow alongside three smaller aircraft. The smaller planes were there to make the size difference obvious from the ground. — Read the rest

The post A stunt pilot doing loops around the Soviet propaganda megaplane crashed into it, killing 45 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The "Paul is dead" rumor spread from college gossip in 1966 to an international phenomenon by October 1969. The first published article ran September 17 in the Drake Times-Delphic student newspaper in Des Moines, Iowa. Two days later, Detroit DJ Russ Gibb spent an hour on air exploring the theory with callers. — Read the rest

The post Fred LaBour invented most of the 'Paul is dead' clues as a joke and was stunned when the world believed them appeared first on Boing Boing.

February 30 has occurred exactly once in recorded history. In 1712, the Swedish Empire — midway through a botched switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar — had already skipped a leap day in 1700, then gotten distracted by the Great Northern War and failed to skip 1704 and 1708. — Read the rest

The post February 30 happened once, in 1712 Sweden — and May 35 still happens every year in China appeared first on Boing Boing.

For almost three centuries, Scottish juries had a third verdict available to them alongside "guilty" and "not guilty." "Not proven" was an acquittal with a legal effect identical to not guilty, but it meant something different publicly. Walter Scott, sitting as sheriff in Selkirk in 1827, called it "that bastard verdict." — Read the rest

The post Scotland abolished its 300-year-old 'not proven' verdict — the one Walter Scott called 'that bastard verdict' appeared first on Boing Boing.

In March 2014, the funk band Vulfpeck released Sleepify — ten tracks of silence, each just over 30 seconds long. The band encouraged fans to stream it on a loop overnight. Every play earned about $0.007 in Spotify royalties; The Guardian estimated that seven hours of overnight streaming per device would accumulate $5.88. — Read the rest

The post Vulfpeck gamed Spotify with a silent album and funded a free concert tour appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Replace Microsoft 365 with a lifetime license for Microsoft Office, now just $19.97.

Paying $99.99 every year for Microsoft 365 starts to feel silly once you realize Office 2019 still does most of the same jobs. A lifetime license for Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus is on sale for $19.97 (reg. — Read the rest

The post Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more: yours for life for $20 appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the evening of October 19, 1970, an Air Force Academy cadet and his fiancée parked near a relative's house in Burke, Virginia. A man in a white suit with long bunny ears ran from the bushes shouting "You're on private property and I have your tag number," then threw a hatchet through the passenger window. — Read the rest

The post The Bunny Man was a real hatchet-wielder in 1970 Virginia — but the internet turned him into something else entirely appeared first on Boing Boing.

On or after October 8, 2009, Bobby and Sherilynn Jamison and their 6-year-old daughter Madyson disappeared from a remote area of Latimer County, Oklahoma. Their pickup truck was found abandoned a few days later, engine off, their malnourished dog Maisie still inside. — Read the rest

The post An Oklahoma family vanished in 2009 with $32,000 cash, a trancelike home video, and no explanation appeared first on Boing Boing.

After Apollo 11 in 1969, President Nixon had 250 commemorative plaques made, each containing about 50 milligrams of lunar dust — roughly four rice-sized particles — mounted in acrylic plastic alongside the recipient nation's flag, which had traveled to the moon and back. — Read the rest

The post Nixon gave Spain moon rocks from Apollo 11. Spain lost them. appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the 1950s, while helping invent computers, John Von Neumann was puzzling over the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing machine. Kevin Kelly has been asking the same question about civilization: what is the smallest library that could restart it — one whose contents include instructions for making a copy of itself? — Read the rest

The post Kevin Kelly's plan for the smallest library to restart civilization appeared first on Boing Boing.

A few weeks ago, an unassuming YouTube channel uploaded its first video out of nowhere with very little fanfare. Despite its low-key presentation, Saul4Democracy turned out to be something special: a web series run by Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould, who managed to get Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks to reprise their iconic roles as Saul Goodman and Mike respectively. — Read the rest

The post Soft Better Call Saul revival is a weekly series now, apparently appeared first on Boing Boing.

Filmmaker Robert Eggers has mastered two things: painstakingly accurate period horror and employing Willem Dafoe. Werwulf, the next entry in his years-spanning efforts to apparently adapt every classic folklore monster ever, looks to be a shining example of both.

Crunched aspect ratio? — Read the rest

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Cyberpunk 2077 is perhaps the only game I can think of that owes a not-insignificant part of its popularity to a really good adaptation. Don't get me wrong, it's one of my favorite games ever and I keep it installed just to wander around Night City, but it's undeniable that Studio Trigger's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners played a big role in the game's so-called 'redemption arc' after its rocky launch. — Read the rest

The post Cyberpunk: Edgerunners returns for a very meta season 2 appeared first on Boing Boing.

You've seen the political compass, I'm sure: that admirable attempt to map every viewpoint onto two axes. It's been a while since it's gotten an update, hasn't it? Don't we need a political compass for the modern era, capable of reflecting our weird age of knee-jerk, tribalism-focused politics? — Read the rest

The post This 64-question compass scores you on 'Chud vs. Woke' and more appeared first on Boing Boing.

Not content with being a writer, podcaster, comedian, science educator, and YouTuber, Hank Green released a gamified productivity app last year. Focus Friend encourages you to stop touching your phone, lest you disturb a little bean's knitting. It's adorable, by the way. — Read the rest

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Trump's Great American State Fair has moved past empty booths, busted rides, and a cow named Melania into its next phase of patriotic pageantry: people gagging through a pancake-eating contest.

Nothing could be more on brand for Trump. Promise the nation greatness, build a sad fair, fail at electricity, deploy livestock branding, then ask a few poor souls to shovel pancakes into their faces until the audience can see democracy's gag reflex. — Read the rest

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