Anyone going to court in England and Wales will be obliged to turn in smart glasses and pick them up when they leave. The ban targets devices such as Meta's and clarifies that existing restrictions on recording devices apply to attire: "There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited," a spokesperson told The Guardian. — Read the rest

The post English courts ban Meta glasses and other spywear appeared first on Boing Boing.

A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle.  — Read the rest

The post In this 1485 manuscript, people live inside giant snail shells appeared first on Boing Boing.

Charles le Brun (1619–90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. — Read the rest

The post A Versailles painter drew people with the faces of animals appeared first on Boing Boing.

F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. — Read the rest

The post A Siamese cat co-authored a physics paper in 1975 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Undertale, an indie RPG released in 2015 after a successful Kickstarter campaign by developer Toby Fox, has become nothing short of a pop culture icon. Since its release, critics and audiences fell in love with its memorable characters, humor, illustrator Temmie Chang's art style, bullet-hell-meets-RPG gameplay, storytelling, and of course, the soundtrack. — Read the rest

The post Fans are cramming Undertale into EarthBound's Super Nintendo engine appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mario Kart 8 asks you to pick a driver, a kart body, tires, and a glider, and each category has dozens of options with their own speed, acceleration, handling, and weight. Antoine Mayerowitz's interactive guide to the Pareto frontier sorts the resulting thousands of builds with a method an economist developed over a century ago. — Read the rest

The post The best Mario Kart build is an economics problem from 1900 appeared first on Boing Boing.

About 9,000 people a year search Arizona's Superstition Mountains for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. Some have died in the search. The mine is named for Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant ("Dutchman" was the era's term for Germans) who supposedly found a rich gold vein and kept its location secret until 1891, when he confessed on his deathbed to a woman named Julia Thomas and gave her a crude map. — Read the rest

The post 9,000 people a year hunt a gold mine that geology says can't exist appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Pok Pok gives kids ages 2–8 an ad-free, low-stimulation space to explore, create, and learn—and lifetime family access is $59.99.

Most kids' apps seem designed by someone who asked, "How many flashing buttons can we fit on one screen before a parent throws the iPad into the sea?"  — Read the rest

The post Trade loud, addictive screen time for Montessori-inspired Pok Pok, just $59.99 for lifetime access appeared first on Boing Boing.

Cruelty is a growth industry, and the deportation business is booming.

Surprise! MAGA's favorite mass-deportation program has produced at least one conspicuous group of winners: the companies paid to lock people up.

America's two largest private-prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, reported a combined $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter, as the number of people held in immigration detention approached 66,000. — Read the rest

The post Trump's mass deportation machine is a $1.4 billion private-prison bonanza appeared first on Boing Boing.

This video is the most pleasant thing I've seen in a couple of days. Perhaps I should give up on the mainstream news.

Puppies being cute is one thing, but puppies playing on ice? In little figure skater outfits? With SKATES? — Read the rest

The post Dogs on Ice are beyond adorable appeared first on Boing Boing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate whose career has accumulated enough corruption allegations to require its own filing cabinet, has yet another interesting financial arrangement to explain.

The New York Times reports that Paxton co-founded a cell-tower company, Premier Vertical Properties, in 2005. — Read the rest

The post Texas' Ken Paxton somehow gets even sleazier appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander found strong "life affirmation" results in a Martian soil sample. Robert Jastrow, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said, "Short of seeing something wiggling on the end of a pin, the case for life on Mars is now as complete as the Viking experiments could make it." — Read the rest

The post Viking lander's 1976 Mars soil test may have found life after all appeared first on Boing Boing.

All the money in the world, and he still can't buy a beat. Elon Musk is dancing as if his firmware update just failed.

The Six Flags old man literally hands Elon his ass. Even Diaper Donald's double-fisted dance of glory (holes) is more cohesive. — Read the rest

The post Elon Musk has all the rhythm of an Austin Powers villain appeared first on Boing Boing.

Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup delivers everything I want from a fantasy detective story. Wonderful characters, fantastic world-building, and a mystery worth solving.

Bennett tells the story from the point of view of Din Kol, an altered human whose misshapen talents left him useless to most regular sources of employment for altered humans in the Empire. — Read the rest

The post The Tainted Cup gets the fantasy detective novel exactly right appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: SwifDoo PDF Pro lets you edit, convert, translate, sign, and run OCR on PDFs without paying a recurring subscription. A lifetime Windows license is $29.97 with code SAVE5.

Adobe Acrobat isn't the only way to wrangle PDFs anymore. SwifDoo PDF Pro covers editing, conversion, OCR, and document signing for a one-time fee of $29.97 (reg. — Read the rest

The post SwifDoo PDF Pro handles your PDF headaches for $30 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

Victoria Gordon, operator of a cleaning service, found a 35-year-old Mars Bar while plowing through a hoarder's house in Scunthorpe, England. Shocked by its enormity, she posed it with a contemporary bar and took a photo. The old bar, from 1991, was 62.5g, while a 2026 model is just 40g. — Read the rest

The post 1991 Mars Bar highlights shrinkflation and inflation alike appeared first on Boing Boing.

Britain's Minstry of Justice has so far spent £85,300 removing a mural painted on a wall at the Royal Courts of Justice in London by Banksy, just one of several similarly costly removals.

The spending was disclosed to the BBC through Freedom of Information requests and is likely to reignite debate over whether Banksy's work is vandalism or valuable public art.

— Read the rest

The post UK government spent £85,300 removing a Banksy mural appeared first on Boing Boing.

We're big fans of the classic Blackwing pencil (here's a 24-year-old post by Mark Frauenfelder from the depths of the Blackwing Dark Age), and its makers recently posted a video showing how they are made.

Now you know how Blackwing pencils are made. — Read the rest

The post How Blackwing pencils (and Hagamoro Fulltouch chalk) are made appeared first on Boing Boing.

Nearest Pint is an interactive map of Britain showing pub density by parliamentary constituency, with each color-coded according to the number of pubs per 10,000 drinkers, which is to say, the population. At the top of the chart is Liverpool Riverside, with 23.73 pubs for every 10,000 people, closely followed by the Cities of London and Westminster, with 21.7 pubs per 10,000 people, and Manchester (21.6), then Bristol, Edinburgh and Brighton, about 21 per 10k. — Read the rest

The post UK pub density map appeared first on Boing Boing.

On February 10, 1355, two Oxford students named Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield complained about the wine at the Swindlestock Tavern. The vintner, John de Croydon, dismissed the complaint. One of the students threw his drink in de Croydon's face, and by one account beat him with the quart pot. — Read the rest

The post A complaint about bad wine left 93 dead and Oxford paying for 470 years appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1860s San Francisco, the city routinely poisoned or trapped stray dogs. The city exempted Bummer and Lazarus by name. Bummer was a black-and-white Newfoundland who lived on the sidewalk outside Frederick Martin's saloon on Montgomery Street, and he was an exceptional rat-killer. — Read the rest

The post San Francisco exempted two stray dogs from its own laws appeared first on Boing Boing.

Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. — Read the rest

The post A Japanese lord spent 20 years drawing snowflakes under a microscope appeared first on Boing Boing.

1999 A.D. is a short film the appliance maker Philco-Ford made in 1967 to show what family life would look like at the end of the century. It opens with a boy named Jamie, who builds a sandcastle version of his family's house on a Southern California beach. — Read the rest

The post This 1967 short film got video chat and online banking right appeared first on Boing Boing.

Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." — Read the rest

The post One hobbyist named cirrus, cumulus, and stratus back in 1803 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Microsoft Visio Professional 2024 helps turn workflows, networks, floor plans, and other complicated ideas into polished diagrams. Get a lifetime Windows license for $44.97 (reg. $579.99).

Some ideas are much easier to understand once you stop trying to explain them in a wall of text.  — Read the rest

The post Turn complicated ideas into clear diagrams with Microsoft Visio 2024 for $45 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Ask questions about PDFs, generate summaries, edit documents, and convert files without juggling multiple apps. PDNob Pro is $49.99 for life (reg. $349.95).

AI has finally made its way into one of the internet's least cooperative file formats: PDFs. PDNob Pro PDF Editor can summarize, translate, and answer questions about your documents while handling all the editing tools you'd expect, and right now, you can get lifetime access for $49.99 (reg. — Read the rest

The post This AI PDF editor can answer questions about your documents for $50 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Save big on tools you'll actually use with this Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for Windows license, now only $19.97 (MSRP $229).

From building a budget to crafting the perfect presentation to get your point across and drafting documents, it's pretty rare to find a suite of apps that can help you tackle a full workday. — Read the rest

The post From Word to Excel, score seven Microsoft Office apps for just $20 (MSRP $229) appeared first on Boing Boing.

A metal that has never been recorded before turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay. Writing in Science Advances, Luca Bindi, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Mario Wannier, and Teresa Salvatici report the discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast, sealed inside a glassy bead that formed during the airburst of 6 August 1945. — Read the rest

The post A new alloy turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay appeared first on Boing Boing.

A medevac flight that should have taken half an hour ended on the side of a mountain in New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Jeff Wise reports for Wired that a military GPS jamming exercise 100 miles away is part of the reason. — Read the rest

The post Four died after a military exercise took GPS away over New Mexico appeared first on Boing Boing.

The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. — Read the rest

The post The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling appeared first on Boing Boing.