According to the account of the 1947 crash of the airliner Star Dust, the British plane left Buenos Aires for Santiago on 2 August 1947 and vanished over the Andes. Four minutes before its planned landing, the radio operator tapped out a final Morse message ending in one word: "STENDEC." — Read the rest

The post A plane vanished in 1947 after sending "stendec" in Morse Code appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to IP over Avian Carriers, the internet's standards body once published a straight-faced proposal "to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons." RFC 1149, written by David Waitzman and released on April 1, 1990, was one of several April Fools' Day standards. — Read the rest

The post In 1990, engineers wrote an internet standard for carrier pigeons appeared first on Boing Boing.

33 Thomas Street, a "550-foot-tall (170 m) windowless skyscraper" in Tribeca, has no windows at all — its walls are "entirely covered with precast concrete panels clad with flame-treated textured Swedish granite," according to Wikipedia. One observer claims it "features the tallest blank wall in the world." — Read the rest

The post This windowless NYC skyscraper is reportedly an NSA spy hub appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: A Busy, Busy Day at Washington DC's Freedom 250 Celebration

-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

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Virgin Media was fined $28m by telecom regulators in the U.K. over its tactics to prevent customers canceling their service. The method was not especially sophisticated: its agents would simply hang up on customers or put them on hold until they hung up themselves. — Read the rest

The post UK's Virgin Media fined $28m for hanging up on people calling to cancel appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Kennedy Center's argument was basically that removing Trump's name might hurt fundraising, because apparently donors were lining up to support the arts only after seeing the words "Donald J. Trump" bolted onto John F. Kennedy's memorial. The court asked for evidence. — Read the rest

The post Court rejects Trump's claim that The Kennedy Center needs his name to survive appeared first on Boing Boing.

There's nothing new about hired mourners. The practice of paying folks to pretend to care about someone's passing goes back thousands of years, crossing cultural divides, from east to west. Moirologists, wailers, keeners—call them what you will. For the vain or the superstitious, there's comfort to be found in knowing that someone will be there to witness their remains ritualistically given to the dust. — Read the rest

The post You can hire a mysterious stranger to mourn your passing appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a perfect world, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty would be honoured by every nuclear-armed nation in the world, allowing everyone to breath easy about the fact that, of all the ways we humans have sorted out how to kill one another, at least we can rule out atomic fire from beyond our planet's atmosphere (yeah, ballistic missiles get high up there, but work with me here). — Read the rest

The post Scientists working to uncover space-based nuclear weapons appeared first on Boing Boing.

I mean, you could put a window in the wall?

United Airlines tried to argue that a "window seat" does not necessarily include a window, which is the kind of corporate reasoning that makes a person check whether "airplane" still means airplane. — Read the rest

The post United argued that a window seat is just a seat near a wall appeared first on Boing Boing.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani wears a classic and relatively inexpensive Casio A1000MA-7 [casio.com]. It's typical of the company's perfectly archaic digital watches; there's little need to significantly upgrade the design as it works well and we never stopped buying them, though the "Premium Vintage" edition he wears was made in 2022. — Read the rest

The post Zohran Mamdani's retro wristwatch is a Casio classic appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains' White House has opened 25 "Freedom Fuel" gas stations around Philadelphia, selling gas below the national average, because socialism becomes freedom when you slap a flag decal on the pump.

USA TODAY reports the stations are selling gas at $3.47 a gallon, below the $3.79 national average, and that the White House promoted the launch with a video of customers thanking Trump for cheaper gas. — Read the rest

The post Trump's answer to high gas prices is socialism with patriotic branding appeared first on Boing Boing.

I have been sucked into Cabin in the Woods, a YouTube channel that presents Bigfoot videos with the tone and pacing of a serious documentary series, while frequently veering into the kind of paranormal speculation that makes me pause the video and stare at the wall. — Read the rest

The post This Bigfoot YouTube channel is entertaining woo in documentary drag appeared first on Boing Boing.

Solvej Balle's incredible story of a woman trapped in time continues in Book II of On the Calculation of Volume.

Book I introduces us to Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller who becomes trapped on November 18th. Every day she wakes up, it is once again November 18th. — Read the rest

The post I just finished "On the Calculation of Volume II" appeared first on Boing Boing.

What did the sky look like yesterday? This interactive web project called What Color Was The Sky invites visitors to revisit a moment in time through a blend of science, data, and imagination. Rather than showing a simple weather report or satellite image, the project transforms atmospheric conditions into a poetic portrait of the sky, creating a more emotional way to think about the places we inhabit. — Read the rest

The post This website turns yesterday's sky into a poetic memory appeared first on Boing Boing.

Verba Prima is a website dedicated to the opening lines of books. Its archive contains thousands of first sentences from notable literary works. It's a simple way to explore how famous authors chose to begin their stories.

You click "next chapter" to jump from one opening line to the next. — Read the rest

The post Verba Prima collects thousands of literary opening lines appeared first on Boing Boing.

Another Day is a web experiment that lines historical events up by date. It pairs a moment that still feels recent in our shared memory with an older event, and the two often sit closer together on the calendar than you'd expect. — Read the rest

The post The shootings at Kent State are now closer to the end of World War I than to today appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace described roadside bombs as "a bomb that goes on when you're driving your little around," which is not how English, bombs, cars, or presidents are supposed to work.

A roadside bomb is horrifying enough without Grandpa Pudding Brains turning it into Mad Libs from the VA waiting room. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains explains roadside bombs in nightmare toddler English appeared first on Boing Boing.

Oh, Lordy, my wallet: I'm not one to invest in, or generally write about, crowdfunded hardware. I've been burned one too many times. But a decidedly old-school Personal Digital Assistant with a tactile keyboard and an e-paper display? That is entirely my jam. — Read the rest

The post PocketMage is a crowdfunded PDA with a keyboard and e-paper screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

Employees working in just about any industry that you can think of have spent the past few years being forced to train or work with Artificial Intelligence. All too often, a working relationship with a Large Language Model has led to the individual it's paired with being made redundant: why keep a human on the payroll when a machine can do the work for less money? — Read the rest

The post Adobe, Amazon, and Atlassian are telling workers: use AI less appeared first on Boing Boing.

Satirical newspaper The Onion's acquisition of infamous conspiracy-theorist "news" platform InfoWars has been a long time coming. This is, in large part, thanks to its inherent connection to previous owner Alex Jones' long legal battles, which resulted in the court order to liquidate the platform in the first place. — Read the rest

The post InfoWars is finally back, but not quite as you remember it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Wouldn't it be cool if beloved animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender got a sequel? Yes, I know we already have The Legend of Korra, but that jumped forward, like, eighty years. There's another series coming down the line too, but that'll involve an even bigger time jump right into a post-apocalypse! — Read the rest

The post Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender lands on streaming July 25th appeared first on Boing Boing.

Who do you turn to when the kaiju are bearing down on your city? The Power Rangers? Another kaiju? Superman, who pretty famously took one down in his last movie?

Freshly-announced indie game Kaiject proposes another solution: one guy with a drill and some plastic explosives. — Read the rest

The post Burrow inside a massive kaiju in this bizarre flesh-mining indie game appeared first on Boing Boing.

The PocketMage is a retro-styled e-ink PDA ("personal digital assistant," remember?) with a clamshell case, a tactile QWERTY keyboard, and a "wizard-inspired" operating system built for notes, journaling and calendars. At under 4 by 3 inches, it actually fits in a pocket, unlike similar gadgets such as the chunky PicoCalc and the tablet-sized Alpha. — Read the rest

The post PocketMage, an e-ink PDA inspired by wizards appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: 1min.AI bundles GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and a pile of other AI tools into one lifetime subscription for $59.97 (reg. $540). Offer ends 7/19.

At some point, your AI toolkit turns into its own small budget line item. One subscription for writing, another for images, maybe a third just for video, and suddenly you're paying five different companies to do things that arguably overlap. — Read the rest

The post Lifetime Bundle: GPT, Claude, and Gemini for $60 till 7/19 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pixel Skylines collects background graphics from old video games that depict city skylines. The simple, grid-like design of skyscrapers lends them to representation as pixel art (faves that age me: 1987's Double Dragon, below, and 1988's Robocop, above) so that genre naturally dominates the set. — Read the rest

The post Collection of pixel-art skylines from old arcade and video games appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Convert, edit, and unlock PDFs into Word, Excel, and more with AcePDF Converter & Editor for $23.99 (MSRP $99.99) with promo code EXTRA20 until July 19, including OCR and batch tools in a lifetime license.

Working with PDFs can get frustrating fast, especially when you just need to make a quick edit, pull text from a scan, or convert a file into something usable. — Read the rest

The post Stop PDF headaches — convert, merge, and edit files in minutes with AcePDF for a one-time $24 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Russian villagers have begun buying horses instead of cars as the country's gasoline crisis deepens, The Moscow Times reported Monday, citing claims by horse breeders there. Demand for workhorses has risen severalfold in recent weeks, sparing about 1,000 animals from slaughter. — Read the rest

The post Russians returning to 1 horsepower amid gasoline shortages appeared first on Boing Boing.

A federal judge in Florida dismissed with prejudice a copyright lawsuit brought against Taylor Swift by self-published poet Kimberly Marasco, ruling (not for the first time!) that the material Marasco claimed Swift stole is not protected by copyright at all.

Marasco alleged that more than a dozen songs from Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department lifted from poems she wrote between 2017 and 2021. — Read the rest

The post Poet's copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift tossed again appeared first on Boing Boing.

Knockoff is "Amazon, without the knockoffs": a browser extension for Chrome that filters out the gibberish factory brands that are typically favoried over quality products in the online retailer's search results. What's left, creator Josh Pigford writes, is "brands with a reputation to lose" rather than HORUSDY or PHRXXI or whatever. — Read the rest

The post "Knockoff" browser add-on filters junk brands from Amazon results appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to Bart Huges, the Dutch librarian attended medical school in Amsterdam "but was refused a degree due to his advocacy of marijuana use." In 1964 he published a scroll arguing that trepanation — drilling a hole in the skull — "could be used to enhance brain functionality by balancing the proportion of blood and cerebral spinal fluid." — Read the rest

The post In 1964, a Dutch librarian drilled a hole in his own skull to get permanently high appeared first on Boing Boing.