If you've ever wondered when you can call yourself an expert, this is the TEDx Talk for you. Business Growth Strategist, Speaker, and Stand Up Comic David Mitroff shares his story and talks about how, if you're doing the work, you can just start calling yourself an expert.

(RED) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/industry-expert-when-are-yo.html

As much as we love our gadgets, the time-honored tradition of putting actual pen against real-life paper and organizing thoughts, jotting notes, or just plain sketching will likely never fully leave us.

That’s especially true when items like the Rocketbook Fusion are regularly bringing those two worlds together.

Designed for every classroom or office, the Rocketbook Fusion is a reusable pen and paper notebook with one big difference — the Fusion instantly shoots your finished notes, big ideas, and more right from your notebook to the cloud service of your choice for safekeeping.

And yes, we said reusable — so as soon as you’ve filled your pages and filed all your results to the cloud, the synthetic pages covered in Pilot FriXion ink can be wiped clean with water and a cloth. No trees have to die for your great visions ever again.

The most notable addition to the Fusion from earlier models is a big organizational boost in the form of an increased 42 pages, featuring seven different page templates like a task list, a weekly planner, a monthly calendar, an OKR template, and an idealist. And if your thoughts are a little more free-flowing, empty pages with either dot-grid or lined page guidelines can help bring some structure to whatever you write.

From there, just use the free Rocketbook application for iOS or Android and save your handwritten notes to cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, OneNote, Slack, iCloud, email, and more.

The Fusion employs all the charm of old-school note-taking with the advantages of 2020 technology with a healthy dollop of eco-friendliness thrown in for good measure. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/the-rocketbook-fusion-is-the-r.html

Mimi and Brownie became close in 1942 while serving as World War II Army nurses. For 74 years, they remained best friends and talked on the phone every single day. Veena Rao of Pop-Up Magazine shares their incredible, and oh-so-sweet, story (get out the tissues).

(RED)

Becky and Susan, this one's for you!

screengrab via Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/the-story-of-mimi-and-brownie.html

Spike Lee's new film Da 5 Bloods tells the story of African-American vets of the Vietnam war who return to the country in the present day to find the remains of their squad leader and seek out a gold treasure they buried in the jungle. The movie—starring Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr., and Jonathan Majors—premieres on Netflix on June 12.

“The United States Armed Forces came close to being torn apart when black soldiers heard that Dr. King was assassinated,” Lee told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “They also heard that their brothers and sisters were tearing shit up in over 100 cities across America. The tipping point came very close; the black soldiers were getting ready to set it off in Vietnam—and not against the Vietcong either.”

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/watch-the-trailer-for-spike-le.html

Inspired by a tweet from March 2018, Jes'us Rold'an put together this Antidepressants or Tolkien Character? quiz, and god damn, it's a lot harder than I anticipated. The Council of Elronon was much displeased with my knowledge. Praise be to Narmacil.

Cory reported on a similar test a few years back, but Rold'an's version features a much more Middle Earthian UI, and boasts a more challenging list of off-brand medications (and their chemical makeups!) and obscure characters glimpsed briefly in The Silmarillion. Despite my poor scoring, I still learned a lot about pharmaceuticals and the glory of Gondor.

Antidepressants or Tolkien Character?

Image: Public Domain via PxHere Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/can-you-tell-the-difference-be-2.html

If you're in the market for book recommendations to fill up your stay-at-home hours, here's a short list of favorites from Bill Gates. Check out his longer list on his blog, GatesNotes blog. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/here-are-the-books-bill-gates.html

Digital media studio d'strict created "WAVE," a magnificent video art work for the humongous LED screen wrapped around the SM Town building the COEX (Convention & Exhibition Center) in Seoul, Korea. The display is 80.1 meters (263 feet) wide by 20.1 meters (66 feet) high.

Below is Samsung's video about the Smart LED screen, installed in 2018: Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/massive-video-illusion-crashi.html

Der (Schw)Einsatz war kein Zufall: Wie dieses Observationsvideo zeigt, waren die borstigen Vierbeiner schon vorher ins Visier unserer Fahnder und Fahnderinnen geraten. pic.twitter.com/nS0jv3HhII

 Polizei Berlin (@polizeiberlin) May 17, 2020

Yesterday in Berlin police blocked a road in the Zehlendorf district for nearly two dozen wild boar to pass.

"Sometimes the wilderness is right on our doorstep," police stated.

Especially now.

(UPI) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/berlin-police-block-a-road-to.html

From the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum on Facebook:

Quarantine has caused everyone to go a little stir-crazy, even the residents of the Kansas City Zoo. So several of the penguins decided to go on a field trip to the Nelson-Atkins, which is still closed, to get a little culture.

This isn't the only group of zoo penguins to enjoy an extra-special social excursion while the rest of us are quarantined. But they're certainly the first penguins to prefer the work of Caravaggio to Monet.

The Kansas City Zoo also has a penguin cam so you can keep on eye on your favorite tuxedo'd friend when they're not enjoying an afternoon of high culture. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/penguins-tour-an-art-museum-in.html

South Korean football club apologizes for filling stands with 'sex dolls.’ By Jack Guy and me. #SouthKorea @cnnsport https://t.co/XMkLrxJZut

 Sophie Jeong (@sophieyjeong) May 18, 2020

In South Korea, the soccer team FC Seoul filled out its empty arena with sex dolls posed as fans. The game was closed to the public due to COVID-19 restrictions. After real fans watching the match online spotted the curious figures, FC Seoul issued an apology and claimed it was an honest mistake and that they hadn't noticed the figures holding up signs with the name of a sex toy company. From CNN:

"The female mannequin dressed in a white short sleeve t-shirt, the breast excessively stood out, and the nipples were protruding, but you didn't know they were an adult product?" wrote another fan on Instagram. "You are kidding me."

FC Seoul explained that although the dolls were made to look like real people, rather than conventional mannequins, it had checked they were "not at all related to adult products" before agreeing to install them, and had been told they would be mannequins of the kind commonly used to model clothes.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/soccer-team-apologizes-for-fil.html

Two men wearing watermelons over their heads robbed a Sheetz convenience store in Louisa, Virginia. After asking for community help, police posted they arrested at least one of the melonheads. From the Louisa Police Department Facebook:

On May 6, 2020, at 2135 hours, two subjects arrived at the Sheetz in a LIFTED 2006 Black Toyota Tacoma wearing hollowed-out watermelon rinds with holes cut out for the eyes into the store where they proceeded to commit a larceny.

UPDATE: an arrest has been made, thank you to the community for all your assistance.Larceny InvestigationThe Town of...

Posted by Louisa Police Department- Virginia on Saturday, May 16, 2020

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/melonhead-men-rob-convenience.html

For the last 18 years Bruce Sterling has been writing an unpaid blog called "Beyond the Beyond" for Wired. But now, writes Cory Doctorow, "Beyond the Beyond is done. Wired publisher Conde Nast is in such deep financial trouble that they're realizing minuscule savings like those to be gleaned from shutting down an unpaid blog."

Bruce just posted his farewell column at Wired.com:

I’m even proud and happy that I managed to spare the readers so much of my own mental compost in this blog. The chosen, curated material that made it on to this blog was maybe one percent of the vast heaps of rubbish I was overturning. I could have stuffed this blog with two hundred times as much “content,” and if I’d lived for two hundred years, I would never have lost interest in my sky-blackening sandstorm of off-the-wall topics. Every day was a gift, and full of grist for the mill.

In conclusion, people may wonder “what next” — well, I’m still active, or even hyperactive, on Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, Medium and Ello. But those platforms are not my “weblogs” — they’re social media, or image-sharing sites. I find them cozy mostly because I’m indolent, and they’re not as much work as a weblog. It’s easier to quip about the same-old same-old than it is to explore the frontiers.

If I was a young person, and starting over today, I would not experiment with a weblog supported by a West Coast US technology magazine. Instead, I would try something more youthful in spirit, less conventional, more beyond-the-beyond.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/wired-just-canceled-bruce-ster.html

On Sunday, Elon Musk tweeted about taking the Red Pill, which Ivanka Trump enthusiastically retweeted as "Taken!"

The Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski offered the perfect response to this:

Fuck both of you

 Lilly Wachowski (@lilly_wachowski) May 17, 2020

On Monday morning, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt tried to explain the origins of the red pill meme, which has been hijacked by the alt-right despite being created by two trans women.

You could take the Blue Pill if you wanted to go back home or you wanted the story to end. You could take the Red Pill if you wanted to continue on to Wonderland.

Between the Death Star and this Wonderland gaffe — does ANYONE in the Trump administration have any knowledge of Pop Culture?

I guess their lack of humanities education could explain some things.pic.twitter.com/sU4bO3W0xP

 Quaranteenage Dirtbag, Baby (@thomdunn) May 18, 2020

To be fair: in The Matrix, Morpheus does say, "You take the blue pill...the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill...you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Because the character is speaking metaphorically to Neo about the fact that the world we know is a digital simulation and we're all just factory farmed batteries to feed evil robots.

It's not clear if Ainsley Earhardt understands this distinction. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/fox-friends-host-explains-th.html

Spoken Word with Electronics is an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds

Hello, everyone: Welcome back to the show. A lot of lightning in the air as we proceeded with recording this episode, so in full bomb prepper mode, we pulled out an MRE for dinner and got down to recording via battery power. This was made possible by a Six Channel Sony MX-650 Microphone Mixer, which not only runs on batteries, but was meant for commercial broadcasts on the field for radio and TV.

Vintage SONY gear is often as good as it gets. To provide someone like Walter Cronkite the opportunity to complete an entire segment in his news van, it supports six concurrent turntable connections, has six wonderful microphone pre-amps (with and without attenuation for signal), line connections in both 1/4" jack and RCA phono plug, and LOVELY switchable A,B,AB stereo routing. Pretty sturdy tank. You can still get them at a reasonable price and if the original owner never ran them off line power (meaning ran power through the batteries and they didn't let the batteries leak) there's a chance it still sounds great. This week we discuss cancelling Jules Verne (let's all do this!) and explore alcohol as a dead but valued friend in my life. Also some good jokes on Potatoes and Oystercatchers. Let's roll the tape:

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #10: Fun Facts, Reptile Republican Audio, and Jules Verne Was a Copycat

The backing track on Side A is an organ piece intended for a segment on Anne Sexton, which will be posted a few broadcasts from now. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/swwe-broadcast-10-jules-ve.html

In the latest edition of The Margins newsletter, Ranjan Roy tells the story of his friend who owns a pizzeria. He charges $24 for a deluxe pizza but, for one reason or another, Doordash lists the pizza for $16. As an experiment, he ordered 10 pizzas from his own pizzeria and had them delivered to a friend's house. Sure enough, a Doordash driver came to his pizzeria and paid $240 for the pizzas.

Trade 1

We went over the actual costs. Each pizza cost him approximately $7 ($6.50 in ingredients, $0.50 for the box). So if he paid $160 out of pocket plus $70 in expenses to net $240 from Doordash, he just made $10 in pure arbitrage profit. For all that trouble, it wasn't really worth it, but that first experiment did work.

My mind, as a combination trader and startup person, instantly had the thought - just run this arbitrage over and over. You could massively even grow your top-line revenue while netting riskless profit, and maybe even get acquired at an inflated valuation :) He told me to chill out. Maybe this is why he runs an "actual business" while I trade options while doing brand consulting and writing newsletters.

But we did realize, if you removed the food costs this could get more interesting.

Trade 2

The order was put in for another 10 pizzas. But this time, he just put in the dough with no toppings (he indicated at the time dough was essentially costless at that scale, though pandemic baking may have changed things).

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/doordash-charges-16-for-a-24.html

iRaspian is a Linux OS for the Raspberry Pi that looks a lot like the Mac OS X operating system. It also comes with Mac OS 9.2 and Windows 95 emulators. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/raspberry-pi-operating-system.html

A woman who called herself Shelley Lewis acted rude and arrogant toward Gelson's supermarket employees when they refused to let her into the store without a face mask. She claimed to have a health condition that prevented her from wearing a mask, and told the Gelson's manager that she was being discriminated against. It's perfect that this took place in the affluent town of Dana Point, California.

Karen gets upset that a store won't let her shop without a protective facemask. She then tried to pretend like she's the victim, despite the store giving her options. This is pure arrogance. https://t.co/qgFLhKjgxd #COVIDIDIOTS #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/OXV4EQLOgD

 Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) May 17, 2020

From Heavy:

After posting the video, Lewis received backlash online and the video started trending on Twitter. Since the video became viral, Lewis deleted the video off her Facebook page and deactivated her account.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/karen-who-cant-believe-she-h.html

Gizmodo's George Dvorsky compiled a gallery of the weirdest images ever taken on mars and I immediately clicked through to ensure that the squirrel was included. The squirrel (above) was included. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/gallery-of-weird-images-ta.html

In a remarkably short time, drones have infiltrated every facet of life. Even now, in the age of COVID-19, drones are being employed by engaged groups to help enforce social distancing guidelines and help stop the spread of the virus.

From business delivery to mapping to videography to pure-and-simple enjoyment flights, drones are everywhere, with over 1.5 million crafts registered with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. And more than two-thirds are recreational drones, just helping enthusiasts take to the skies and enjoy the freedom of flight.

Unlike other drones that can require a steep learning curve before you master the stick, the Shift Red Drone is billed as the drone you can fly solo...as in, one-handed, with your thumb serving as your primary flight tool. 

With the Shift’s unique and intuitive flight controller, you don’t need to use two hands. You just slip your fist around the ergonomically comfortable controller, position your thumb atop the video-game-style joystick and bring the Shift to life. The sensor fusion technology precisely recognizes the drone’s 3D locations and speeds for responsive and dynamic, yet stable flight control.

Pilots are even protected with an Emergency Stop function that kicks in once the craft gets out of range, putting the Shift into an automatic hovering mode until it re-connects with the controller.

Users can toggle through eight different auto-pilot modes, which make it a lot easier to shoot high definition video or conduct clear and stable real-time streaming video feeds. The Shift’s internal tracking technology keeps the camera focused on your subject as it recognizes movement with gimbal features to smooth out blur when pivoting or tilting.  Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/17/heres-an-hd-video-streaming.html

If you’re like many Americans, you’ve probably learned a little something about yourself during our new quarantine lifestyle. One takeaway from our decidedly unusual times probably won’t come as a huge shock...but it turns out that despite all the problems and hassles of our new normal, thousands of people really enjoy the freedom of working from home.

That’s fine if you’re got an employer who’s good with it, but if you’re unemployed or looking for a career change at the moment, you might find working from home still isn’t simple. For the most part, finding great remote flexible jobs can be tough and takes a lot of time that you should be working.

To alleviate that headache, FlexJobs is an employment service that works to boil down all the best freelance and remote job opportunities out there down to the ones that work best for you. 

Founded in 2007, FlexJobs has access to more than 30,000 remote, freelance, part-time, and flexible jobs in over 50 career categories, each hand-screened and vetted by FlexJobs’ trained researchers. When a job is added to the site, it’s also accompanied by staff-written job summaries, company descriptions, and other useful information about the business itself. 

Unlike those shady businesses that require an investment before you get paid or are only trying to find direct sales affiliates, FlexJobs has the 411 on over 40,000 legitimate organizations who hire for remote, freelance, part-time, and flexible schedule positions without the fear of getting scammed.

Being a FlexJobs member has other privileges as well, including access to job search checklists, award-winning career content, 1-on-1 career coaching, resum'e reviews, expert skills tests, video introductions, and more. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/17/want-to-join-the-gig-economy.html