Well, this is a sweet bonus: if you own an Android foldable like a Samsung Z Series foldable, OnePlus Open or Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, you may soon have access to a customizable, virtual gamepad baked into Android 17, which is set to start rolling out to Android hardware today. — Read the rest

The post Android 17 brings a customizable virtual gamepad to foldables appeared first on Boing Boing.

Back when Shrek 5 was officially confirmed as a project that was, indeed, happening, I thought it was overdue. Now that an actual trailer has dropped, though, I think I'm officially upgrading that to "too late." Maybe my expectations were too high after spinoff Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which was a genuine masterpiece of a family movie. — Read the rest

The post Shrek 5 sure looks like another Shrek movie appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the department of Yoro, Honduras, fish turn up on the ground after large storms. The lluvia de peces — literally "rain of fish" — has been reported for over a hundred years and is said by residents to happen every year during the mid-year rainy season. — Read the rest

The post In a Honduran town, fish appear on the ground after every major rainstorm appeared first on Boing Boing.

A toast sandwich is exactly what it sounds like: a thin slice of toasted bread, placed between two slices of untoasted bread. Season with salt and pepper. The recipe appears in Isabella Beeton's 1861 Book of Household Management, in the section for invalid cookery. — Read the rest

The post The toast sandwich is a piece of toast between two slices of untoasted bread appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: A 1-year Rosetta Stone subscription is $127.20 (reg. $159) through June 28 as part of Deal Days — new users only.

Google Translate will get you through a crisis. Rosetta Stone will get you through a dinner party, a day trip, and the kind of off-menu conversation that actually makes a trip memorable. — Read the rest

The post Stop relying on Google Translate — Rosseta Stone can help you learn for real appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: The Dementia Donnie TV Room

-> 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: The Dementia Donnie Center for TV Watching appeared first on Boing Boing.

Apple added a feature called Vehicle Motion Cues in 2024 that places small dots around the edge of your screen. The dots move in sync with your car — sweeping left when you turn right, sliding forward when you brake. Your inner ear detects motion while your eyes see a static screen, and the mismatch causes nausea. — Read the rest

The post The obscure iPhone setting that eliminates car sickness appeared first on Boing Boing.

When a former prosecutor got a new case, the first thing he asked was whether the suspect talked. "Nothing lights up a prosecutor's face when he is faced with a difficult case and finds out the suspect talked," writes the Campola Law Firm. — Read the rest

The post Former prosecutor says talking to police always hurts you appeared first on Boing Boing.

The UNSW team that used ultrasound to speed up cold brew to three minutes has pushed the technique further — producing espresso-strength shots with room-temperature water. A transducer pressed against a coffee filter basket generates sound waves that create acoustic cavitation, collapsing microscopic bubbles that fracture the grounds and pull out flavor compounds far faster than cold water alone. — Read the rest

The post Cold-water espresso cuts energy use 75% and tastes identical appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains wanted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted "American flag blue," and nature responded with algae bloom green.

The newly refurbished Reflecting Pool was supposed to transform Washington's look. Success: the giant painted blue basin turned green, and crews are now reportedly fighting the bloom with hydrogen peroxide, vacuums, skimmers, and ozone nanobubbles. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains pours peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Algae Farm appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: One payment, no renewals, no subscription drama — this lifetime Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 license is just $19.97 (reg. $229) through June 28.

There is a reality where Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are fully unlocked and live permanently on your PC for less than twenty bucks. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft Office is somehow only $20 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

Connect to an open WiFi network, and a captive portal opens a shelf of banned ebooks. The access point is a smart light bulb. Rick Osgood reflashed the ESP32 chip inside with custom firmware, rewrote the partition table to carve out 2MB of the 4MB flash for storage, and built a web server that runs entirely off the bulb's power. — Read the rest

The post Screw this light bulb in and it serves banned books appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1906, a U.S. plant pathologist named Franklin Sumner Earle collected a small brown mushroom in Cuba and shipped it to the New York Botanical Garden. He called it Stropharia cubensis — later reclassified as Psilocybe cubensis — and never mentioned it again in any of his letters. — Read the rest

The post The poster child for psychedelic mushrooms is named after a country that doesn't use it appeared first on Boing Boing.

In January 2020, a Finnish Reddit user posted a photo of curtains printed with eight celebrity faces and asked for help identifying them. Seven were quickly matched — Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba, Orlando Bloom, and others prominent in the mid-2000s. The sixth face, dubbed Celebrity Number Six, resisted identification for four years. — Read the rest

The post It took Reddit four years to identify the sixth face on a set of curtains appeared first on Boing Boing.

On Sunday, July 13, 1980, around 500 children from 11 marching bands gathered at the Hollinwell Showground near Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, for a Junior Brass and Marching Band competition. At about 10:30 am, band members began to collapse. Children began "[falling] down like nine pins," according to one witness. — Read the rest

The post In 1980, 300 children collapsed at a marching band competition and no one knows why appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Turnspit Dog was a short-legged, long-bodied breed kept in English kitchens to run inside a wooden wheel connected to a roasting spit. First mentioned in 1576 as "Turnespete," the breed was also known by several names: Kitchen Dog, Cooking Dog, or Wheeling Dog. — Read the rest

The post The turnspit dog was bred to run on a wheel and roast meat, then went extinct appeared first on Boing Boing.

Theodore Hook is a historical figure whose eccentricity defined his period. He became known for the Berners Street Hoax of 1810—an undertaking considered arguably the greatest practical joke in history. Hook arranged for dozens of tradesmen, including the Lord Mayor and the Duke of Gloucester, to converge on a single London address for a wager. — Read the rest

The post In 1810, a prankster sent 4,000 letters to flood one London address with chimney sweeps, coffins, and the Lord Mayor appeared first on Boing Boing.

Not every phone is meant to connect two living people. At San Francisco's Sunset Dunes, a bright blue phone booth gives visitors a chance to speak the words they never got to say to someone they've lost. You can watch someone using the phone here in this sweet video. — Read the rest

The post San Francisco's wind phone lets visitors talk to lost loved ones appeared first on Boing Boing.

A video of this weird-looking phenomenon shows a person standing at the razor-thin boundary between clear skies and a rain shower. A distinct curtain of rain advances across the street while the ground around her remains completely dry. As it moves closer and closer, it looks like two worlds colliding. — Read the rest

The post Video shows a rain curtain splitting a street into two worlds appeared first on Boing Boing.

Raw Story, citing the Daily Mail, says Maxwell has formed a "highly secretive" group at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, where she allegedly whispers with three women she considers among the "finest and best educated" prisoners. The reported crew has a certain country-club-crime theme: a doctor convicted in a bogus billing case, a former CFO accused of raiding company funds, and a bookkeeper who wrote herself very generous checks. — Read the rest

The post Ghislaine Maxwell reportedly finds her mean-girls table in prison appeared first on Boing Boing.

You have to promise to pretend to be a little surprised when I tell you that Grand Theft Auto 4's Liberty City was based on real-life New York. I'm not asking for a full send, just gasp a little or something. — Read the rest

The post Exploring Grand Theft Auto 4's hidden history appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's a funny world when Breaking Bad's comic relief lawyer Saul Goodman has more integrity than the sitting President. I did not tune into Trump's UFC fight, but you better believe I sat up when Better Call Saul co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould posted a celebration of his own. — Read the rest

The post Saul Goodman returns to celebrate America's 250th appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pemba, a modified Unitree G1 humanoid robot, is on an expedition slated to culminate with a summit of Mount Everest. Unitree's robots can pull off impressive kung fu and parkour, but all bipedal robots struggle on uneven terrain. (And sometimes even on level ground.) — Read the rest

The post Robots can kung fu, but can they summit Everest? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sixty-three arrests. Four stabbings. One shooting. When New York City gets out to celebrate, they celebrate. The city's reaction to their hometown heroes winning the NBA championships has become the stuff of legends in mere days, and not for no reason. — Read the rest

The post Get uncomfortably, viscerally close to the Knicks celebration appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Snag a refurbished 11.6-inch Lenovo 300e 2-in-1 Chromebook for $79.99 (reg. $284.99)

Nobody's asking the family Chromebook to render 4K video or run Call of Duty. You want something that boots fast, juggles a dozen browser tabs without sweating, and doesn't spark a panic attack when it gets knocked off the kitchen counter. — Read the rest

The post This $79.99 refurbished Chromebook is tougher than the laptop on your desk appeared first on Boing Boing.

CrankGPT is a fully offline AI box that you power by turning a crank. There's no battery and no internet connection: just a single-board computer (Raspberry or Orange Pi) that runs speech recognition, a small language model, and text-to-speech locally. Crank, speak, and get a spoken answer back. — Read the rest

The post CrankGPT is an offline AI box for the apocalypse appeared first on Boing Boing.

A Derbyshire Constabulary officer is under criminal investigation over claims they used artificial intelligence to fabricate evidence. The BBC's Samantha Noble reports that it's thought to be the first case of its kind in Britain.

The officer is alleged to have perverted the course of justice, but no arrests have been made, police added.

— Read the rest

The post British police officer accused of using AI to fabricate evidence appeared first on Boing Boing.

When President Trump first showed reporters a model of the proposed United States Triumphal Arch, CBS News's Ed O'Keefe asked who it was for. "Me," said Trump. "It's going to be beautiful."

The arch, formally in honor of the United States' 250th anniversary, would rise 250 feet—one foot per year of independence—on Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. — Read the rest

The post Trump Arch in D.C. to be tremendously large and golden appeared first on Boing Boing.

The sprawling Monroeville Mall outside of Pittsburgh is most famous as the setting for George A. Romero's 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead: the shambling zombies return out of instict, says one character, becuase the place "was important in their lives." — Read the rest

The post Moneroeville Mall hosts final Dawn of the Dead tour appeared first on Boing Boing.

A Black woman yelled, "Oh my god," because the Knicks won, someone called the LAPD, and police reportedly responded by bursting into her apartment and killing her golden doodle.

According to Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's Threads post, the dog was wearing a Knicks jersey and ran over when police entered the apartment. — Read the rest

The post Woman cheers Knicks win, LAPD bursts in and kills her dog appeared first on Boing Boing.