Freckle is a small, square smartphone aimed at youngsters aged 7-13, designed to give them "independence" without providing features that encourage prolonged or repetetive use.

The $199 device has a 3.1", 720 × 720 touchscreen and runs a proprietary operating system, ClayOS, with no app store, web browser or social media apps—and definitely no YouTube. — Read the rest

The post Freckle is a kid's phone that sends them on real-world quests appeared first on Boing Boing.

Back in the day, when writing on the Internet was new and cool, I wanted a keyboard that had specialized keys for useful tasks such as multiple copy/paste, blockquote wrapping, and the all-important Curators' Code symbols. In essence, a Bloomberg Terminal for blogging. — Read the rest

The post Bloomberg Terminals in repose appeared first on Boing Boing.

Last month's flooding in Carmel, Indiana, saw the White River burst its banks and destroy a number of homes—and caused a highway overpass to collapse. Eleven inches of rain fell in two days, raising the river to a record 24.6 feet crest. — Read the rest

The post Wild footage of Indiana's White River flooding a massive quarry appeared first on Boing Boing.

A movie featuring the SCP Foundation mythos proved controversial after the studio paying for the production, A24, implied in marketing that it would own the material. The problem is that the SCP Foundation is a sprawling collaborate project of unclear origins. — Read the rest

The post Rival SCP Foundation movie will have Creative Commons license appeared first on Boing Boing.

Contractors working for the city of Sheffield, England, have repainted the street sign for Pool Square at least eight times since being awarded a highway maintenance contract there, reports The Star. It's more likely than not they will do so on any given year. — Read the rest

The post Pool Square street sign regularly painted over to read Poo Square appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Design and analyze 3D building models with a one-year Autodesk Revit subscription for $399 (reg. $3,005).

Designing a building usually means managing separate files for the architecture, the structure, and the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Autodesk Revit is a 3D building design tool that keeps all of those models on one platform, and a one-year subscription is on sale for $399 right now (reg. — Read the rest

The post One 3D design tool can model your whole building, and it's on sale for $399 (reg. $3,005) appeared first on Boing Boing.

The $500 Dyson CameraJet toothbrush (previously at Boing Boing) takes 28 images of your mouth per second to better direct its flossing jet at your dirty choppers. The tiny, low-resolution sensor is fit for that purpose, but All The Gear, No Skill on Instagram decided to put it to use on the street: "I never would have thought a vacuum cleaner would create the most fun camera of 2026." — Read the rest

The post Street photography with Dyson's CameraJet toothbrush appeared first on Boing Boing.

Chat Pile definitely isn't easy listening. The Oklahoma City sludge and noise rock band tackles lyrical topics as heavy as they get: families falling apart, homelessness, and, on their latest album, the climate crisis. This year Chat Pile released their third full-length album, Who Loves the Sun, to wide acclaim from fans (myself included) and critics like Anthony Fantano, who gave it a rare 9/10. — Read the rest

The post Chat Pile's songs are bleak, but their live show is a blast appeared first on Boing Boing.

Michael Spicer mocks a distinctive formula of television out of the United Kingdom, one fans of The Great British Bake Off will immediately recognize.

"For as long as I can remember," he says, kicking off Most TV is Just This Now, "I've loved nature." — Read the rest

The post Every British TV show appeared first on Boing Boing.

There's no reason to make a USB-C cable that looks like an orange or green extension cable, which is all the more reason to want it.

The creator, Matty Benedetto, emailed me to let me know about his latest creation. — Read the rest

The post These USB-C cables look like orange and green extension cords appeared first on Boing Boing.

An Italian entrepreneur by the name of Vittorio Martire has designed an ultra-high-end luxury fire extinguisher for superyacht owners who bristle at the sight of a red fire extinguisher.

Called the Incroyable, it debuted at the Monaco Yacht Show in 2026. — Read the rest

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Pavel Gurov created this cool theremin that you can control by waving your hands in front of your webcam. You spread your hands apart to increase the volume, raise them for the pitch, move your hands back to soften the tone, and put your palms together for silence. — Read the rest

The post Play this theremin by waving your hands in front of your webcam appeared first on Boing Boing.

Noctua, known for making the fans inside computers, has an interesting new design to show off: a camera, made with Prusa, itself better-known for 3D Printers. The CAIM1 is an E-Mount interchangeable-lens with a Micro Four-Thirds sensor and a compact if chunky look. — Read the rest

The post PC cooling company Noctua now a fan of cameras too appeared first on Boing Boing.

Gen Alpha's slang makes it clear what kids think of so-called artificial intelligence. As reported by the Guardian, the most savage burn a young person can hurl at you is "That's AI" or "That's so AI."

The kids – gen Alpha – have noticed that certain qualities of AI-generated slop, such as the way it's superficially convincing but ultimately cheap and of dubious value, can be found in lots of other things: knock-off merchandise, exaggerated claims, excuses your parents make.

— Read the rest

The post "That's so AI" is the new insult, and it means bullshit appeared first on Boing Boing.

PacBench is an unusual benchmark for AI models: "Create a Pac-Man game in a single html page." Each entry shows the platform, the model, how long it took, how many tokens it used, and the cost. And unlike the pelican, we can play the results. — Read the rest

The post AI models benchmarked with Pac Man appeared first on Boing Boing.

A fire tore so quickly through a McDonald's restaurant in Lebanon, Missouri, that diners were still walking in as it filled with smoke—and had to flee as the fire quickly got out of control. KY3 News's Ciara Folkerts describes a terrifying meal out for 11-year-old Ansley Tidwell:

"It was scary, like, the walls and the ceiling, they all just fell down and stuff on the corner," Tidwell recalled.

— Read the rest

The post Diners flee McDonalds restaurant as blaze consumes it appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Pay $99.99 once for lifetime access to 1min.AI's Advanced Business Plan, including 4 million monthly credits, flagship AI models, and its full collection of AI features.

There are now enough AI tools to give your browser tab bar an existential crisis. — Read the rest

The post Put ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini to Work From One $100 Lifetime AI Platform appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Hollingsworth Hound points to the cause of the armaggeddon that destroyed Earth!

-ANNOUNCING The Tom the Dancing Bug Community Saves America Drive! For every Tom the Dancing Bug book(s) order through the end of September, $20 will be donated to Spread the Vote to help voters VOTE. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: What was the cause of the global armaggeddon? appeared first on Boing Boing.

An AI-generated image of a crocodile, depicted lurking in a reservoir popular with joggers and boaters, may land its creator in jail.

Ye Lin, 30, from Burma, was charged in Singapore with transmitting a false message after allegedly using Google's Gemini service to create the image, depicting a saltwater crocodile at Pandan Reservoir. — Read the rest

The post AI-generated crocodile lands its creator in court appeared first on Boing Boing.

Cocaine worth more than $10m was stored as evidence at a courthouse in Fiji, but at some point in the long-running drug trial was replaced by flour. Authorities admit that about 87 pounds of cocaine is "effectively missing;" ABC News in Australia describes it as "yet another apparent example of internal corruption that has plagued Fiji's authorities." — Read the rest

The post $10m worth of cocaine in evidence turns out to be flour appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Enjoy lifetime access to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for only $29.97 (MSRP $219.99) until Oct. 11 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

If you want the essential Microsoft Office programs including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, you don't have to pay for Microsoft 365. — Read the rest

The post Pay once, use it forever — Microsoft Office Pro 2021 is just $30 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the latest issue of Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing newsletter, there's a description of a game called Kim's Game, which was originally described in a Rudyard Kipling novel. Rob came across it in a short story called "Kim's Game," by Sadia Shepard, published in The New Yorker earlier this year. — Read the rest

The post A memory game from a Rudyard Kipling novel appeared first on Boing Boing.

One of my favorite newsletters is called Why Is This Interesting? It comes out every day, and they typically interview an interesting person to talk about their media diet or special interest.

In today's issue, they spoke to Todd Osborn, a US Air Force weapons systems veteran who is building a flight school. — Read the rest

The post Streaky vinyl records are the Dum Dums mystery flavor of the music world appeared first on Boing Boing.

The post Netflix is remaking the Stanford Prison Experiment as a reality show appeared first on Boing Boing.

As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to ask the public market for an extraordinary amount of money, times two, their core products have begun to sound like Skynet is here. We are only now realizing that Terminator was a cautionary tale.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus warns that its models could resist shutdown, conceal information, and behave in ways the mafia would recognize as blackmail. — Read the rest

The post Anthropic says its AI could kill us. OpenAI's is too unsafe to release. Please enjoy the IPOs appeared first on Boing Boing.

They brought back Clippy! Not Microsoft, sadly, but Definitely Not Windows, creator of Windows 11½, a web-based replica of the healthiest operating system.

It's a parody of the real thing, hitting the user with advertising, dark patterns, recurring and annoying notifications, and broken pop-ups. — Read the rest

The post Safely enjoy the hellish experience of Windows 11½ appeared first on Boing Boing.

More than 500,000 faces were scanned by the live facial recognition systems set up in London's railway stations by the British Transport Police. At a cost of £320,786 (about $423,000) the numbers are in: the system scored "one false match against a watchlist of suspects" and notched up zero arrests over the course of a six-month trial. — Read the rest

The post London's live facial recognition trial ends in one false positive, no arrests, and a £320k bill appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Edit PDF files like a pro with a lifetime subscription to PDNob Pro PDF Editor for $49.99 (MSRP $349.95).

PDF files can be edited as easily as Word documents if you've got the right tools. PDNob Pro PDF Editor uses AI technology to help you edit, summarize, convert, sign, and translate PDF files for $49.99 for life. — Read the rest

The post Manipulate PDFs with ease for less than $50 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R—Iowa) is in his tenth decade of life and is displeased at the prospect of a Democratic governor appointing his replacement should he die in office.

"At 93 years of age, I don't know how many more groups of Republicans like this I'm going to have a chance to talk to," Grassley said Friday at the GOP's annual Reagan Dinner. — Read the rest

The post Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, 93, doesn't want his replacement chosen by a Democratic governor appeared first on Boing Boing.

Page Rage and Destroy Any Website let you ruin any website with a little pixel-art character controlled in classic WASD fashion. The styling is retro and the weapons are futuristic and extremely destructive.

"Destroying pages is all the rage today," wrote Page Rage creator Alex Reardon to Destroy Any Website creator Hugo Duprez after the similar toys popped up within a few days of one another. — Read the rest

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