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.

A bear rescue in Rancho Sahuarita, Arizona, turned into a live-action cartoon when a tranquilized bear dropped from a tree, hit the tarp, and one of the humans went down with it.

They meant well.

The bear was tranquilized. What's the LEO's excuse? — Read the rest

The post Keystone Kops get a physics lesson from falling bear appeared first on Boing Boing.

Elon Musk hates taxes, government, regulation, and the public sector right up until the check clears.

CNN's Chris Isidore lays out the part of the Musk myth that gets buried under all the rocket smoke and Cybertruck cosplay: SpaceX needed early NASA grants and a crucial $1.6 billion contract, while Tesla leaned on a $465 million federal loan, EV tax credits, and billions from emissions-credit rules that forced other automakers to buy their way into compliance. — Read the rest

The post Man who hates paying taxes loves government handouts appeared first on Boing Boing.

Violet Jessop was born in Argentina in 1887, the eldest of nine children. She survived tuberculosis as a child, contrary to doctors' predictions. At 21, she became a stewardess for Royal Mail Line. Then she boarded three White Star ships, and all three met with disaster. — Read the rest

The post Violet Jessop survived the Titanic, the Britannic, and a collision on the Olympic appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a great interview on Frank Santopadre's podcast, "Fun for All Ages" promoting his book Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — And the World, author Jim Windolf describes how in 1966, Bob Dylan stole/parodied the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood," and then filmed himself provoking John Lennon about it (while very high on something). — Read the rest

The post Watch an inebriated Bob Dylan troll a bored John Lennon about stealing "Norwegian Wood" appeared first on Boing Boing.

After weeks of regaling us with his knowledge of great pool guys and shades of blue, The Orange Menace's taxpayer-funded vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is complete. By complete, we mean completely filled with algae.

The most likely thing to have actually happened here is that some friend or donor got paid off by this personal pool guy of the United States zero-bid contractor receiving the job. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains algae-filled improvements appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Playdate is a one-of-a-kind game console with a 2.7 inch screen, not a device on which one might expect to play an MMO.

It has everything you would expect in a TMORPG (tiny multiplayer online RPG): quests, NPCs, combat, and loot — also, chickens, cats, and dogs. — Read the rest

The post PointlessQuest puts a full MMO on Playdate's 2.7-inch screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

The public's desire for a handbag made of leather created in a lab using cells from a T. Rex was vastly overestimated by the auction house tasked with its sale.

The bag — a blue-black clutch — differs substantially from the image in the promotional photos released when the project was first announced. — Read the rest

The post T-Rex leather handbag failed to sell at auction for $500k appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kristi Noem was asked on Newsmax who America's best friend is in South America and answered with El Salvador and Costa Rica, which is a problem because maps exist.

Noem did not merely miss a trivia question at a bar. She is a former Homeland Security secretary and Trump's special envoy for "Shield of the Americas," a title that sounds like it should come with at least one laminated map. — Read the rest

The post Kristi Noem begs Yakko Warner to explain South America appeared first on Boing Boing.

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment that takes Schrödinger's cat and puts you inside the box. The setup: a device kills you based on a quantum measurement with a 50/50 chance. Under the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every possible outcome actually happens — so there's always a branch where you survive. — Read the rest

The post The thought experiment that says you can't die (from your own perspective) appeared first on Boing Boing.

I've used Roku since 2014, when a friend explained why this weird little purple box was the best way to escape cable. He was right. Now Fox is buying it.

Roku works because it is boring in the best possible way. — Read the rest

The post Fox buys the henhouse appeared first on Boing Boing.

Robert Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, was born on February 22, 1918, at a typical 8 pounds 5 ounces. By age eight, he was taller than his father. By his 1936 high school graduation, he was 8 feet 4 inches. When doctors measured him on June 27, 1940 — eighteen days before his death — he had reached 8 feet 11.1 inches and 439 pounds, making him the tallest person in recorded history. — Read the rest

The post Robert Wadlow stood 8 feet 11 inches tall and refused to be a sideshow act appeared first on Boing Boing.