Over at r/cassetteculture, contributor TctclBacon shares this image of a wonderfully ridiculous homemade 8-track "walkman" they built from an old Realistic brand home deck.

"When my local makerspace reopens I plan to 3D print a housing for the back to properly store the electronics and batteries, just to make it look more streamlined and less sketchy," TctclBacon writes.

As one commenter notes, adding a cassette adapter would make the carrier a "true hipster king." Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/27/this-magnetic-media-enthusiast.html

After being stuck in the house for months, you’ve got to be thinking about planning at least one summer adventure somewhere. If that plan calls for some aquatic activities, this could be a good time to try out one of the hottest and most entertaining pieces of watersports tech around, the underwater scooter.

When you go under the waves, just grab hold of the handles and the scooter will zip you through the water, cutting down all the time and serious exertion it takes to make a long swim.

Over the past few years, Geneinno has become one of the premier names in the aqua-scooter game, powered by their Trident model ($549.99; originally $699.99). Fire up the Trident’s mighty dual propellers and this scooter has a pair of speed modes that’ll have you cutting through the water at over 4 mph, which is essentially just a touch faster than a world-class swimmer. At home in freshwater, seawater, or even in a pool, the Trident can dive up to 160 feet down and runs for up to 45 minutes on its removable, rechargeable battery. It’s even got GoPro and light mounts to capture amazing underwater footage.

If you don’t need to move quite that fast, the Geneinno S2 ($359.95; originally $399) still humps up to an impressive 2.7 mph maximum speed from its deceptively small size. With up to 60 minutes of running time, it’s got enough juice to help improve any snorkeling, diving, or swimming outing. And in case you want to keep a close eye on the training of any young swimmers, the S2 has an app control feature that lets you change and record speed, depth, distance, and battery life, all from your phone. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/27/underwater-scooters-are-a-hot.html

My first moments in Tom van den Boogaart's Bernband (Free Download), a goalless exploration game set in the mazelike city of Pff, led me to expect an empty low-fi walking sim. A drab apartment in a looming building. A window view of city lights in darkness. A spartan hallway leading to an elevator. Then something happened: the elevator's doors spilled me out into a dense crowd of sprites, dozens of people right up in my face, jostling and stumbling around the forecourt. Covid-brain kicked in and I yelped, lurched from the screen, then laughed, amazed that a game had done that to me.

Simple, stark and clear about what it wants to be, Bernband is small in absolute terms but packed with implication. It's experienced in the first person and heady in the way pixelated 3D walking sims often are. All you can do is look around and get lost in the sprawl and its weird connections. There's pubs, a subway station, a schoolroom, a child's recital, a courtyard garden, a chapel, and more, fragments of something vast.

There's a sense of the city's secret boundaries, too, places sealed off by architecture yet full of strangers coming and going (perhaps on the subway trains whose doors never open). As charming as it is, with its cute aliens and flying cars zipping by at hyperspeed, the vibe reminds me of The Bridge and Unthank. Bernband toys with a grim but playful tradition of surreal possibility hidden in impassive urban forms, where ducts and serviceways are the fairy portals offering glimpses of the labyrinth, the places waiting to be remembered. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/27/bernband-explore-a-looming-ye.html

The world seems well on pace to putting a smart assistant in every home. Just during the first three months of 2020, over 28 million smart speakers were sold, a rise of over 8 percent from 2019. 

But while users all enjoy streaming music, getting information and controlling smart home functions through speakers like the Google Home, there’s still one standout problem these speakers haven’t fixed yet. They still need to be tethered to a wall, plugged into an AC outlet. 

For those who want to make their Google Home experience a little more mobile, the LOFT Battery Base for Google Home is like taking a dog off the leash, allowing you to tote your speaker virtually anywhere in your home effortlessly.

So far, customers are responding big time to the LOFT’s ability to cut the Google Home free, giving the LOFT an impressive 4.4 out of 5 star rating on Amazon.

The LOFT’s portable base packs a 4,200mAh lithium-ion rechargeable battery, enough to keep the Google Home powered up for up to eight hours of cordless roaming. Just slide the Google Home right on to the top of the LOFT for a quick magnetic connection, unplug the unit and you’re ready to go in literally seconds. 

In fact, it’s easiest to just keep the Google Home on the LOFT base at all times. The power cord will keep your LOFT fully charged at all times while still powering the Google Home. That shouldn’t be a huge problem because the LOFT’s metal grill finish fits with virtually any room decor. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-loft-battery-base-helps-yo.html

We humans are castaways on an ocean of uncertainty. Since the beginnings of history, our ancestors sought knowledge and understanding about their lives, their relationship with the cosmos, and perhaps take a peek into their future. In such effort—long before the answers of science—earthlings developed a rich variety of divination practices and systems. Many forms of divination survive to this day, and can't be easily dismissed as irrational nonsense, or mere curiosities of a bygone age. On the contrary, divination seems to be essential to culture.

So much so, that perhaps our modern obsessions with predictive algorithms and numerical forecasts are best understood as a continuation of this ancient divinatory impulse. This is the provocative thesis of Alexander Boxer’s fascinating new book, A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data. 

A Scheme of Heaven

 Astrology is indeed the most historically relevant of all divination practices, its aim having been nothing short of a systematic account linking the nature of the heavens to our own human nature. Across civilizations, human beings have proven to be superb stargazers. Entranced by heavenly patterns and periodicities—through sheer naked-eye observation—our ancestors were able to crack with uncanny precision the workings of the cosmos. Exact geometric relationships and precise mathematical elegance spoke of divine design and transcendent beauty.

For a long time, astronomy and astrology were one and the same magical “enterprise.” Alexander Boxer, a data scientist, whose eclectic erudition includes a PhD. in physics from MIT and degrees in the history of science and classics writes:

“Astrology was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.”

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/a-scheme-of-heaven-is-a-deep-i.html

The first trailer to Apple TV+'s series adaption of Isaac Asimov's Foundation is certainly gorgeous eye candy. It remains a mystery how they plan to adapt such an immense and complex space opera, but... fingers (toes and tentacles) remain crossed.

On Quinn's Ideas, he offers his reaction to the trailer and discusses both this series and the forthcoming Dune film.

Here's a decent little backgrounder on Foundation.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-trailer-to-asimovs-found.html

Ruben Bolling has two new Tom the Dancing Bug books coming out.

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/four-years-of-trumpist-surreal.html

The tabloids are like President Trump in the worst possible way.

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/hollywood-hypocrites-tearing-a.html

For those versed in world cultures, the bento box is a pretty familiar item. Used for centuries in Japan and exported to countries like Taiwan and Korea, the bento is a neatly arranged organizer for on-the-go meals. For adults going to work or kids going to school, your bento holds rice or noodles, fish or meat, and vegetables, all in one easy to pack and carry box.

That’s the overarching principle behind the creation of Function 101’s BentoStack collection, an array of tech organizers built around the Bento idea for packing, storing, and transporting all your Apple devices and accessories.

And the BentoStack PowerHub 5000 is the flagship of the line, a compact organizer that seeks to handle virtually all your Apple device needs in one minimalistic, cute little package.

At less than 8 inches long, the BentoStack almost looks like a pencil case from the outside, but once you pop the lid, it’s an Apple-ready service station, including an 8-port type-C hub, a Qi-enabled wireless charger, and power battery and several compartments for storing all your cables, connectors and other accessories.

The BentoStack cover is home to the 5,000mAh power bank with its own certified Qi charging pad for wireless charge-ups of any iPhone models from the iPhone 8 to the latest iPhone 11 and XR. And in case you’re rocking an older iPhone, no worries -- this also houses a USB-A port to traditional charging of all iPhones, iPad, and even Apple Watches.

Inside, you reach the Type-C hub, including room to attach...well, Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-bentostack-powerhub-5000-s.html

After trying out a lot of different scrub brushes, I think the OXO Good Grips scrub brush is the best. I prefer this palm-style brush to brushes with a handle because I can really bear down on the pots and pans. It's comfortable to hold and the bristles hold up well to rough treatment. I wish the brush was available via Subscribe and Save, because I'd get a new one every three months. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/this-is-the-best-pot-scrubber-2.html

if you’re in michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. tell everyone

 STEPH (@streeganz) June 23, 2020

Robert Regan is a Republican candidate for a Michigan State House seat. One person who will not be voting for him is his daughter, Stephanie Regan. In a recent post to Twitter she wrote, "if you're in Michigan and 18 + please for the love of god do not vote for my dad for State Rep tell everyone." Her tweet has been retweeted over 37,000 times, and has received almost 183,000 likes.

Robert Regan, who is seeking the GOP nomination, says his daughter has become indoctrinated with radical ideas while at college.

From The Guardian:

“When they go off to college, quite frankly they get involved with these Marxist, socialist universities, and they start getting indoctrinated with things that are completely polar opposite from where you raised them,” Regan told local TV.

Regan, who describes himself on his own website as “so conservative [he] makes Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal,” says he and his daughter have disagreed on systemic racism, white privilege and Black Lives Matter.

“She’s a big believer in that,” he told the Hill. “The only place where I really see systemic racism would be the abortion clinic, because they seem to target the African American community.”

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/daughter-of-gop-candidate-begs.html

Today Florida reported 9000 new coronavirus cases over the last 24 hours. As you can see from the chart this is a massive increase and bring the total cases to 122,960. In response, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation announced that bars will no longer be allowed to serve alcohol.

From Axios:

By the numbers: The record surpassed Florida's single-day record from this week at 5,511. Deaths in Florida increased 1.2%, reaching 3,366, the report shows.

Total hospitalizations in Florida rose 1.5%, to 13,987. More than 1.77 million people in Florida have been tested so far. The median age of new cases is from people in their mid-30s.

Here's a video of some people in Ginnie Springs, Florida enjoying themselves on Memorial Day weekend:

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/florida-reports-a-massive-surg.html

This is unbelievable.

As Trump was leaving Arizona on Tuesday after his irresponsible rally, which packed 3,000 unmasked people into an indoor venue, police fired "flash-bang grenades, pepper balls and bursts of pepper spray" at protesters. This included a pepper ball that hit a child, and a 12-year-old who was pepper sprayed.

In the video above, protesters were stepping back, as police had requested (forward to 3:30 in the video). They then began to chant, "We step back now you step back!" But the cops instead move forward. Immediately after a protester shouts, "We have kids at home! We have kids at home!" you hear the first shots fired (4:04).

Chaos ensued.

From AZ Central:

"It was just instant chaos when all that happened. ... They instantly started shooting," said Keisha Acton, who was close to the line of police with her 12-year-old son, Isaiah. "We did not instigate that, nobody instigated that. Nobody assaulted an officer. That absolutely did not happen."

"(Tuesday) was a glimpse of what we're fighting against," said Kristen "Poet" Byrd, who said he was part of the core group who organized the protest.

"We were being nonviolent, just like George Floyd was, just like Rayshard Brooks was, just like Breonna was," he said, referencing Black men and women who died this year at the hands of police.

For full details go to AZ Central. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/video-cops-fired-shots-at-pro.html

Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor.

Real Tested CBD shares the following essay by their co-founder, Richard Cowan.

It's Time for Silicon Valley To Finish Its Job of Disrupting the Racist Drug War

It Has Been Racist From The Beginning and Racism Cannot End Until It Does

By -- Richard Cowan

Mark Zuckerberg, the Icarus of the Internet, is debating his own employees about whether Facebook should be responsible for correcting the lies of certain high ranking politicians. The answer seems obvious, but are they really prepared to choose which lies require their personal attention?

Icarus was undone by trying to fly too high and to be above it all, but there is another Greek myth that is more "down to Earth" literally.

As I watch the seemingly inexhaustible torrent of prohibitionist propaganda, I am reminded of the Greek myth about Hercules and the stables of King Augeas.

The term “Augean stables” means a huge mess, because King Augeas had a vast number of cattle, which were herded into the stables every night, but no one cleaned up after them. (Governments always expect other people to do their dirty work.)

As a consequence, the stables overflowed with what the Greeks called “drug education.”

As in Hercules’ time, the government provides the fodder at one end, and the other end –the Greeks called it the “media” –  produced the inevitable product. It stank to high heaven, but it seemed impossible to do anything about it.

Most people said it was beneath their dignity even to think about it, although not thinking did not stop them from writing about it.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/its-time-for-silicon-valley.html

"Around the world, it is beginning to sink in how profoundly rotten the United States is," writes Ryan Cooper in The Week. "Unless America manages to turn things around, it will slide from the center of the international order to a peripheral, mistrusted basketcase, and it will deserve it."

Cooper goes on to explain that the reason America has become a global pariah is the government neglected to adopt an effective containment protocol early on, and because "American public health experts spent weeks on a bizarre and scientifically illiterate crusade against masks — a study years ago found that even cheap homemade masks significantly reduce droplet-based infection — but even after plenty of new evidence has come in, Trump and most Republicans keep insisting a mask is a matter of personal choice. Instead masks got sucked into the conservative grievance industrial complex, becoming another postmodern cultural signifier for right-wingers trying to own the libs."

Photo by CDC on Unsplash, US Map by By Original author User:Wapcaplet, modified by Angr - Modified from Image:Map of USA with state names.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-world-is-putting-america-i.html

The World Economic Forum interviewed 347 risk analysts about the challenges the world could face in a post-COVID world. The experts weighed in on economic, societal, geopolitical, tech, and environmental risks (basically, a STEEP analysis). The four most likely threats are prolonged global recession at 68.6%, more bankruptcies/consolidation at 56.8%, industries fail o recover at 55.9%, and high unemployment at 49.3%.

The website Visual Capitalist created an infographic that shows all of the risks that the analysts considered along with the likelihood that they will occur. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/347-risk-analysts-asked-wha.html

Right-wing sourpuss Ben Shapiro's website The Daily Wire is the seventh-ranked publisher on Facebook, according to Popular Information. "On a per article basis," it reports, "The Daily Wire receives more distribution than any other major publisher." Here's how much better The Daily Wire performs than other well-know publishers:

The secret to The Daily Wire's success? It's learned how to "convert bigotry and fear into shares and likes."

Popular Information has discovered a network of large Facebook pages — each built by exploiting racial bias, religious bigotry, and violence — that systematically promote content from The Daily Wire. These pages, some of which have over 2 million followers, do not disclose a business relationship with The Daily Wire. But they all post content from The Daily Wire ten or more times each day. Moreover, these pages post the exact same content from The Daily Wire at the exact same time.

The undisclosed relationship not only helps explain The Daily Wire's unlikely success on Facebook but also appears to violate Facebook's rules.

The network of large Facebook pages promoting The Daily Wire are all run by Corey and Christy Pepple, who are best known as the creators of Mad World News. Facebook pages controlled by the Pepples include Mad World News (2,176,003 followers), The New Resistance (2,857,876 followers), Right Stuff (610,809 followers), America First (577,753 followers), and American Patriot (447,799 followers).

The reach of these pages is massive. Content posted to these five pages has generated more than 31 million engagements on Facebook over the last three months, according to CrowdTangle, an analytics service owned by Facebook.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/how-ben-shapiro-exploits-faceb.html

What better way to escape from today's madness than to watch a film about an entirely different kind of disaster: a humanity-destroying comet? If we were living in the pre-pandemic olden days of last summer, Greenland would already be in theaters (originally scheduled for release June 12th), surely marketed as a blockbuster. Starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin, the big budget movie was rescheduled for July 31 due to, of course, the Covid-19 shutdowns. Then it was again rescheduled for its current theater release date of August 14th... for now. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/watch-nothing-like-a-good-ol.html

My dad used to enjoy combing the beach (and his backyard) with a metal detector, but unfortunately he never dug up anything like this 2,000-year-old Roman ingot that metal detector hobbyist (metal detective? metal detectorist!) Rob Jones found in a field in Rossett, Wales, UK. The lead object is approximately one-half meter long and weighs 63 kilograms. The Wrexham County Borough Museum & Archives purchased the artifact for an undisclosed price and will put it on display. Once COVID-19 mandates permit, the museum and the University of Chester plan to conduct archaeological research in the area. From the Shropshire Star:

The rare find is particularly significant for archaeologists and historians because of its potentially early date, the location of the find spot, and because of its unique inscription.

"We don’t yet know where this ingot has come from and we will probably never know where it was going to," [said local Finds Officer Susie White.] "However given the find spots of other ingots from Britain of similar date, it may have been destined for continental Europe, perhaps even Rome itself. The object could tell us a great deal about this important period of our past, a period which is still poorly understood in this area of the country.”

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/man-with-metal-detector-turns.html

Synesthesia is the fascinating neurological phenomenon whereby stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another sensory pathway. A synesthete might taste sounds or hear colors. Now, computer scientist Jas Brooks and colleagues from the University of Chicago are creating a kind of digital synesthesia by using odors to trick your brain into experiencing different temperatures in virtual reality. For example, capsaicin, the chemical in hot peppers, triggers a warm feeling while eucalyptol elicits a cool sensation. Evan Ackerman explains in IEEE Spectrum:

The trigeminal nerve [in your nose] connects your brain to most of your face, and it carries a bunch of sensory information, including both smell and temperature. The actual temperature-sensing mechanism comes from transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channels, and while we can skip over exactly how these work, the important thing to understand is that some of these TRP channels can get triggered by either skin temperature or certain kinds of aerosolized chemicals. You’ve almost certainly experienced this for yourself: When you smell peppermint, it feels cold, because the menthol in the peppermint is triggering a receptor in your trigeminal nerve called TRPM8 that responds to both the menthol and temperatures under 25 °C. On the other end of things, capsaicin (which you can find in hot peppers) triggers the TRPV1 receptor, which also responds to temperatures above 42 °C. That’s the key: One receptor that can be triggered by temperature or a chemical, but sends the same temperature sensory message to your brain. The researchers describe this as “a perceptual duality,” and if you aerosolize one of these chemicals and puff it up your nose, you’ll feel a temperature change.[...]

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/digital-synesthesia-tricking.html