TL;DR: Microsoft Visio Professional 2021 is now available for the amazingly low price of $14.97 (MSRP $249.99) for a lifetime license for Windows computers.

Instead of spending long meetings, brainstorming sessions, or ChatGPT conversations figuring out how to explain difficult concepts, now you can visualize them.  — Read the rest

The post Wow your clients and peers with custom diagrams for $15 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Here's a visual illusion that catches the brain in the act of making up color. Arrange a set of black spokes radiating from a center, then recolor short pieces of each spoke to red or blue, positioning them so they'd trace an invisible circle. — Read the rest

The post Your brain just made up the color you're looking at appeared first on Boing Boing.

Three men in Whittier allegedly cut through a locked gate, hauled a portable toilet into a pickup truck, and drove off into the night, proving that while crime may not pay, it does occasionally provide amenities.

Detectives are looking for three men who stole a portable toilet in Whittier, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department (LASD) announced on Thursday

…

Surveillance video showed the men cutting a lock to get through the chain link gate at the property.

— Read the rest

The post Crime may not pay, but for these three men, at least it poops appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yesterday, Disney shared their new in-park "Han Solo" who doesn't look like Han Solo. Today, we get a not-Leia.

I am not sure what Disney is going for here. Bringing the original trilogy into their Star Warsland is very smart. They represent the Star Wars that got people interested in Star Wars, while the latest, purportedly final, trilogy was mostly controversial in its not-good-ness. — Read the rest

The post Disneyland's new "Leia Organa" neither Leia nor Organa appeared first on Boing Boing.

A YouTuber claims that boiling some vinegar and water in your cast-iron pan before seasoning will improve the results. Watch for yourself:

My take on this is the bluing is mostly cosmetic, if at all functional. Cast-iron pans season easily and are pretty easy to care for. — Read the rest

The post This guy claims to have improved cast iron seasoning appeared first on Boing Boing.

On San Clemente Island, a restricted training ground run by the United States Navy has doubled as a conservation zone, helping revive a rare "butcher bird," the loggerhead shrike.

I have been scuba diving off San Clemente several times. While there, we were visited by Navy helicopters and jets. — Read the rest

The post War games, wild comeback: the bird saved by a target range appeared first on Boing Boing.

Instead of walking around with a camera on your face, how about one in each ear? A team at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School has built VueBuds, a pair of wireless earbuds with a grain-of-rice camera tucked into each shell. — Read the rest

The post These earbuds can read the label on your snack appeared first on Boing Boing.

Skip the keyboard and skip the dictation: a California startup called Sabi says it will ship a wool hat that lets you type by thinking, and it wants the first ones on heads before the year is out. The company came out of stealth this week with a pitch described in a Wired profile of its plan to build a cyborg-for-everyone wearable, backed by Khosla Ventures. — Read the rest

The post A Silicon Valley startup wants to sell you a brain-reading beanie appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ryan Bateman, a Berlin-based technologist who tinkers with oddball web projects at boat.horse, built a working clock that tells time by spelling every possible moment in English and sorting the list A to Z. He calls it The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock, and it runs in your browser with two modes to pick from. — Read the rest

The post This clock sorts the 43,200 times of day alphabetically appeared first on Boing Boing.

A Newport Beach rental company handed over four electric festival buggies to a man claiming to be part of Justin Bieber's team. The story that held together just long enough for the vehicles to make their way to Coachella, and then, very efficiently, to Tijuana, where their tracking devices mysteriously turned off. — Read the rest

The post "Justin Bieber's guy" rents Coachella buggies, drives them straight to Mexico appeared first on Boing Boing.

The man behind New York's annual SantaCon, a festive sea of red suits, public intoxication, and supposed charity, has been charged with wire fraud after prosecutors say he siphoned off more than half of the $2.7 million raised, treating a holiday fundraiser as a personal revenue piggy bank. — Read the rest

The post SantaCon organizer allegedly ran actual con appeared first on Boing Boing.

Some weird part of me has needed the forthcoming Street Fighter movie for a long time. The 1994 Hollywood movie was bad (though Raul Julia was great) and the anime was better, but this looks like just the ticket: a well-choreographed fight movie (with actual street fighting!) — Read the rest

The post Watch the deranged new trailer for the Street Fighter movie appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Stop Flock campaign takes aim at the domestic surveillance startup, whose cameras are everywhere now—even inside buildings. "Mass surveillance isn't public safety," the campaign states, "it's public control."

Flock Safety markets AI surveillance that goes far beyond reading license plates; color, bumper stickers, dents, and other features are used to build databases and identify movement patterns.

— Read the rest

The post Stop Flock campaign targets invasive surveillance network appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Kodak Slide N Scan Film & Slide Scanner digitizes old slides and negatives with a built-in 5-inch LCD display for $149.99 until April 19 (MSRP $189.99), making it easy to preserve memories at home.

There's a certain kind of box most people avoid opening. — Read the rest

The post Turn shoebox memories into digital keepsakes with this Kodak film and slide scanner for $40 off appeared first on Boing Boing.

House Speaker by the thinnest margins, Mike Johnson took a moment to explain Christianity to the Pope. Suggesting that while Pope Francis might frown on war, there's always the handy "just war" doctrine for when the teachings of Jesus become a little inconvenient. — Read the rest

The post MAGA Mike fact-checks the Pope on Jesus appeared first on Boing Boing.

Once or twice a year, on reefs across Vanuatu, Samoa, Fiji, Timor-Leste, and other islands of the southwestern Pacific, the palolo worm tears itself in half. The front portion stays put in the coral rubble where the worm normally hides. The back end grows tiny eyes, swells with gametes — blue-green if female, orange if male — and rises toward the surface, where it ruptures, spilling its cargo into the sea. — Read the rest

The post What if your calendar ran on a worm that splits itself in half? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sterling Crispin, an artist and engineer, built a Python bot called Nothing Ever Happens that does one thing on Polymarket — it bets against every event. New prediction market opens? The bot buys "No." Automatically, around the clock, for every market it can find. — Read the rest

The post An open-source bot that only bets "no" on Polymarket is making money appeared first on Boing Boing.

With 8 billion people on Earth, mathematician Kevin Burke calculates that any one person's chances of stumbling across a century-old message in a bottle are about 1 in 8 million. The calculation takes just two steps, as Burke explains in The Conversation. — Read the rest

The post Your odds of finding a 100-year-old message in a bottle: 1 in 8 million appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ramsey Khalid Ismael, the harassment streamer who calls himself Johnny Somali, spent months on camera insisting that no Korean court would ever put him behind bars. A Seoul judge just put him behind bars.

Attorney Andrew Esquire, who has been tracking the case, reports on YouTube that Ismael was convicted on all eight charges against him: four counts of business obstruction, two under Korea's minor crimes act, and two for distributing deepfakes. — Read the rest

The post Harassment streamer Johnny Somali sentenced to six months labor in Korea appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Lifetime access to the Promova app for language learning is now only $54.97 (MSRP $299.99) until Apr. 26 at 11:59p.m. PT.

Want to learn a new language in a safe and supportive environment? Promova is a modern app that focuses on effective and enjoyable learning — get the knowledge without getting overwhelmed. — Read the rest

The post Learn a new language at your pace with Promova for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

Historian Laura Beers, who is part of the Bartz v. Anthropic class action settlement, writes in The Conversation about realizing that Claude wasn't just trained on the content of her books — it was trained on her voice. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a similar suit against Grammarly, accusing the company of using writers' identities to power an "Expert Review" tool that mimics specific authors. — Read the rest

The post Orwell predicted the AI slop novel in 1949 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The United States deploys fleet after fleet, and its leadership threatens to terrorize Iran and further hobble the glocal economy with a reciprocal blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has been busy winning the war by flooding the internet with witty AI-generated videos that turn geopolitical tension into viral content, now including a surreal clip of Donald Trump singing "Blockade." — Read the rest

The post Iran's most effective weapon might be AI karaoke appeared first on Boing Boing.

YouTuber Paul Lagier has built an e-reader barely larger than an adult thumb out of a 3D-printed shell, an ESP32 microcontroller, a small battery, and a Heltec Wireless Paper e-ink display. The whole build runs about $30 in parts, according to Android Authority, or roughly a fifth of the cheapest Kindle. — Read the rest

The post A keyfob-sized e-reader you can 3D print for about $30 appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the November 1903 issue of The Strand, a physician named David Watsu laid out a 150-foot pyramid for Hyde Park, faced in granite or terra-cotta, with catacombs for royalty, an observatory at the apex, and an octagonal central chamber built around a reproduction Druidical arch. — Read the rest

The post Someone already pitched Bezos' 10,000-year clock — in 1903 appeared first on Boing Boing.

An unidentified French businessman has been storing a 9-foot section of the Eiffel Tower's original spiral staircase for more than four decades. In May, auction house Artcurial will sell the 14-step piece, which dates to the tower's construction for the 1889 World's Fair. — Read the rest

The post A piece of the Eiffel Tower's original staircase is going to auction appeared first on Boing Boing.

A couple of years ago, serious allegations from the appropriately named podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman were backed up by Rolling Stone's deep investigation into the once-beloved author's alleged sexual harassment and grooming behaviors. It was more than enough to force Gaiman to take a big, skinny-jeaned step back from public life and, away from the production of Good Omens: the successful Amazon Prime-produced series, based on his novel, co-written by the father of the Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness, Terry Pratchett. — Read the rest

The post Why I'm avoiding Amazon's Good Omens finale appeared first on Boing Boing.

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite writers ever. His massive Discworld series is some of the most charming, engrossing, fiercely intelligently written fiction I've ever read in my life, and gave us maybe the most well-realized fantasy setting anywhere outside of Tolkien. — Read the rest

The post Despite it all, Neil Gaiman's Good Omens to get one more season appeared first on Boing Boing.

You may remember the Wikipedia gacha game we posted about a while back, which turns the Internet's biggest database into a collectible card game in an attempt to get gacha gamers to learn things.

A second Wikipedia game has now hit the Internet: Catfishing, which does not include any gambling but is much more engaging. — Read the rest

The post Catfishing is the Wikipedia guessing game I can't stop playing appeared first on Boing Boing.

The enshittification of Adobe Creative Suite may be complete. Over the years, we've lost the ability to actually purchase the Adobe software we use every day — pro users, too stuck in their ways to switch to alternatives like Affinity Photo or GIMP, are held to a monthly ransom if they want access to their workflow. — Read the rest

The post Adobe subscribers are now unpaid trainers for Firefly AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

The first teaser trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero has been released, and everyone's favorite Kaiju is heading to the Big Apple.

Godzilla Minus One was a much more serious take on the franchise than any of the other incarnations since the original. — Read the rest

The post Godzilla is heading to the Big Apple, and the teaser looks incredible appeared first on Boing Boing.