People keep waiting for a groundbreaking reinvention of the e-reader, but Kindle already does it pretty well.

The e-reader line has been refreshed. New Basic, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft versions are available, along with Signature editions for the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The shape has changed somewhat. — Read the rest

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Potter & Potter Auctions just closed its "Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos" auction, and it is fun to browse through the catalog and see what was offered and how much money people paid. Items included books on pseudoscience, human skulls, wooden boxes full of glass eyes, quack medical devices, apothecary jars, pickled medical specimens, death masks, exotic weapons, the Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat, binders of mugshot photos, and more. — Read the rest

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The Orange Menace has lost his multiple bids to slap his failure-associated name on a revered institution and has been ordered not to tear it down on a whim, so he is selling off the parts.

Movers have been photographed hauling out the Steinways, which AlterNet reports are being sold because the Center is closed. — Read the rest

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New U.S. passports are coming, and first-time applicants can apply online. Digital selfies will also be allowed, making the process easier than ever. Passports are currently mailed in paper envelopes. New ones will come in a white box with the golden seal. — Read the rest

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After about 10 minutes of officer testimony, it took about 35 seconds of dashcam video to see the charges dropped.

Chavez Morgan was issued a citation for an illegal lane change that caused a minor mirror-clip incident on the highway. He told the officer he had dashcam footage and explained what happened, but the officer still judged him the culprit. — Read the rest

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A social media ad for "nutritionally complete" meal replacement shakes was banned by the UK's advertising watchdog over a suggestion the shakes can replace conventional food. Huel's ad, which ran on Instagram and YouTube, showed celebrity entrepreneur Spencer Matthews talking to Huel Founder Julian Hearn about a race-winning athlete who "only eats Huel." — Read the rest

The post Ad for Huel meal replacement shakes banned in UK appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mandelnaut is the ultimate 1990s poster shop spinner, generating beautiful images of fractals with a huge array of options and settings and outputting images at custom dimensions.

Making fractal wallpapers: rendering escape-time fractals, finding beautiful views, and teaching models to judge them

There are Mandelbrots, Multibrots, Julias, and Phoenixes to explore and zoom around, 13 rendering modes, and hundreds of color schemes organized by hue and various pallette cycling knobs and dials on top. — Read the rest

The post Mandelnaut: an atlas of beautiful fractals appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get $150 in travel data credit, usable in 200+ countries, for just $69.99 (reg. $150) with aloSIM.

The last thing anyone wants to do after landing in their travel destination is wander around looking for the best and most affordable network carriers. — Read the rest

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Christopher Paul is running unopposed to become the chief of police in Elizabeth, Louisiana, a village of 417 people. Paul, however, was recently charged with raping two 13-year-old girls twenty years ago, creating a dilemma for locals who might not want someone suspected of serious crimes to be their only full-time police officer. — Read the rest

The post Man charged with child rape set to become Louisiana police chief appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kenjiro Tsuda, an actor famed in Japan for his lustrous baritone, sued TikTok over an account that used an AI-generated replica of his voice in more than 180 videos. Tokyo District Court ruled this week that a persons' voice can be protected under Japan's publicity rights law. — Read the rest

The post Japan court rules actors have right to their own voices appeared first on Boing Boing.

Fujifilm's ever-growing Instax range trends toward both high-end retro and pocketable fun (consider the runaway success of Kodak's Charmera), with both to be found in the Instax Pal 2. Shorn of its printer and only 1.4 x 1.6 x 3.6 inches (37 x 42 x 92mm), it's completely unlike the bloblike original in style. — Read the rest

The post Instax Pal 2: fun but pricey pocket toy camera appeared first on Boing Boing.

Executives from Samsung and Micron, two of the world's top sellers of random access memory, warned this week that the RAM shortage would continue through 2028. AI companies take it all for their datacenters, and what's left for everyone else will continue to command premium prices. — Read the rest

The post RAM shortage to last two more years, say top manufacturers appeared first on Boing Boing.

Florida recently ordered law enforcement agencies to remove Flock cameras installed on the state's roads: the intrusive technology and regular misuse by police officers has led to a national backlash against the company and surveillance cameras in general. Most are already gone, but there's a problem: there are Flock cameras in St. — Read the rest

The post 11 mystery Flock cameras identified in Florida county appeared first on Boing Boing.

Book of Shapes [via] is a collection of minimalist generative SVG patterns created by Nikolaj Sokolowski. Beautiful and elaborate, yet each defined by a few lines of code, they can be customized for use on the web or in print. — Read the rest

The post Book of Shapes: customizable SVG patterns for print and web appeared first on Boing Boing.

In an attempt to shame the Texas senatorial candidate, who is not accused of bribery or securities fraud, Dementia Donnie keeps calling the omnivorous James Talarico a "vagan."

The number one way we know James Talarico isn't a "vagan" is because he isn't constantly telling us how ethical he is for being one. — Read the rest

The post Trump keeps trying to label Texas' meat-eating Talarico a "vagan" appeared first on Boing Boing.

AI detection is a difficult job, made worse for everyone by it being such a delicious ingredient in academic snake oil. But one service has clearly outperformed the others in tests: Pangram. It went beyond obvious characteristics of LLM output such as perplexity and ngram distance, training its own classifiers on large collections of human text and generative imitations. — Read the rest

The post France discovers the dubious pleasures of AI detection appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2006, The BBC reviewed predictions about robotics and AI made in the 1980s. Now, another 20 years later, we can reappraise its appraisal. When Will Intelligent Machines Take Over?

The segment features Sir Clive Sinclair, icon of early home computing, who plainly claims that the endgame of computing technology is AI. — Read the rest

The post Sir Clive Sinclair on AI, from 2006 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Give your PC a software upgrade with this $50 Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus lifetime license for Windows.

For some reason, software expenses always come up at the worst time. But this Boing Boing-exclusive Flash Sale is an easy way to get ahead of those unexpected costs. — Read the rest

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In yet another moment of "this guy is not competent to be President of the United States" moment, Donald Trump demonstrated how pilots used to use "little steering-wheels" to control airplanes. The plane he was discussing, the Boeing 737 MAX, certainly still has yokes. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains demonstrates the little "steering-wheels" airplanes "used to have" appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's most boring sycophant, JD Vance, was mercilessly heckled at a rally for Byron Donalds and Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), and he created some interesting backstories for them.

While good ol' Just Dance, Vance didn't know the protesters' names, where they were from, or what brought them to a place where heckling a credibilityless, self-professed liar seemed like a good use of time—he was willing to imagine political positions and opinions for them. — Read the rest

The post Fox cuts away while JD Vance argues with hecklers and the positions he assigned them appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kurt Andersen, co-founder of the late great Spy magazine, announced that the 40th anniversary of the magazine will be celebrated on Substack, where "we'll start publishing starting next Monday the 5th, a limited series of daily excerpts and links from the magazine's archive, with bits of new commentary and context. — Read the rest

The post Spy magazine turns 40 with daily posts about a certain short-fingered vulgarian appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Merrimack Valley Collection is a legendary comic book collection in which someone bought comics off the rack and stored them in a cardboard box for almost 80 years. Heritage Auctions sold many of these comics in a couple of auctions in Dallas last week. — Read the rest

The post Captain America No. 1 kept in a cardboard box for 80 years sells for $716,750 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Following his meeting with top AI executives yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that artificial intelligence will henceforth be known as "super intelligence." The order, which applies to federal government, follows a call he made last week during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. — Read the rest

The post Trump "super intelligence" rebrand leads to land rush for .si domains appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the latest issue of Why Is This Interesting, Mark Slavonia writes about the annual parallel parking championship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where people compete to see who can parallel park.

The rules are that the clock starts ticking when the referee sees your reverse lights go on. — Read the rest

The post In Pittsburgh, people compete to see who can parallel park fastest and closest to the curb appeared first on Boing Boing.

A REACH medical evacuation helicopter crashed into the Pacific while departing Catalina Island. Of the five people aboard, two have died; two were taken to hospitals, and the patient is missing.

Catalina Island is a beautiful and remote place to live. — Read the rest

The post Catalina medevac crashes into the sea after picking up a patient for a flight to the mainland appeared first on Boing Boing.

A young rabbit was having a terrible time attempting a flyout at the local skatepark. Stuck in the bowl and unable to escape, the cottontail made a new friend.

This kind, patient skater pulled off an amazing tailgrab and eventually helped his new bunny buddy escape. — Read the rest

The post Watch a skater befriend a rabbit at the skatepark appeared first on Boing Boing.

"I wish it was AI. It's in my backyard, and it's scary," said a man who used AI to create an image of a venomous Gaboon viper and had teams of police and reptile hunters searching for the dangerous creature.

Santa Ana Police called in experts to help them find a four- to five-foot-long Gaboon viper after a gentleman shared photos of one in his neighbor's yard. — Read the rest

The post Officers search Santa Ana for a deadly but AI-generated African viper appeared first on Boing Boing.

France's Académie Goncourt has withdrawn Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) from consideration for its top literary prize. The book shows signs of being written by AI, reports The Guardian.

A lyrical first-person account of how a history and geography teacher flees a home country mired in gang violence… Published in France by Grasset in August, it has sold about 35,000 copies and won the Prix du roman Fnac, with translation rights sold to more than 20 countries.

— Read the rest

The post Novel withdrawn from running for France's top literary prize after AI claims appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get unlimited website hosting, unlimited NVMe SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 54 free lifetime domains with this Hostdeal Unlimited Plan lifetime subscription for just $149.99 (reg. $1,800).

If you're already hosting multiple websites for clients, small businesses, or your side projects, you'll know how costly things can get. — Read the rest

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Newly-installed traffic lights at a busy corner in Stretford, England, keep failing and leaving motorists fightened and confused. Part of a £17.6m (about $24m) redevelopment of the town center, the new lights have gone out three times, reports the Manchester Evening News, a pattern one local councillor described as "very odd." — Read the rest

The post Slugs blamed for broken traffic lights appeared first on Boing Boing.