If you’ve ever worked on a video project or engineered a podcast and thought you’d make your own sound effects... how'd that go for ya?  We assume it was a bigger undertaking than you’d probably bargained for.

From using stalks of celery to replicate breaking tree limbs to frying bacon to reproduce the sound of rain, foley artists are just that — artists. And it’s no small feat to properly create, record, and mix all that sound into a realistic, balanced soundscape.

Instead of going DIY, you can leave all of your sound effect worries up to the professionals with a one-year subscription to Soundsnap Stock Audio and Sounds.

Soundsnap is 0ne of the most popular sound effects library online, offering more than 280,000 separate sound clips for unlimited downloading. That’s an archive more than twice as large as almost all the other major sfx options available. With clients like Disney, HBO, CBS, Pixar, and more using Soundsnap, you can feel confident they’ll have what you’re looking for.

And these are not lukewarm, poorly recorded files recorded off YouTube. All of Soundsnap’s audio is recorded by professional sound designers and engineers, including a collection of working Hollywood pros responsible for working on films like “The Dark Knight,” “Tron Legacy,” “Baby Driver” and more. 

All it takes is a quick spin through Soundsnap’s library to understand the scope of their offerings. If your work needs a crack of thunder, they’ve got over 800 different variations to choose from. If you need the sounds of a restaurant to create ambiance in your production, there are over 650 to try. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/get-access-to-nearly-300000-p.html

I posted this on Adafruit yesterday, but I've been digging it so much, I wanted to share it here on Boing Boing, too. This is eight hours of "perpetual rain" and Vangelis' "Blade Runner Blues," taken from the soundtrack to the film.

It's gorgeous and relaxing music to work to, sleep to, or continuously wafting through the rooms and hallways of your under-quarantine hab unit.

The channel this video is from has dozens of other ambient Blade Runner offerings (“’I’ve seen things …’ – Tears in Rain ambiance (1 hour),” “The ambient sounds of the city, 2019,” “Deckard’s apartment sounds (12 hours),” and many more.)

Image: YouTube Read the rest

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Always looking to put a new spin on a cup of joe, infusing your coffee with a blast of nitrogen produces a thicker, more full-bodied, naturally creamy, frothy variation on java that has been picking up steam with fans for the past decade.

 Of course, most of us don’t have nitrogen injectors just lying around, so if we want our burst of nitro-fueled beans, we have to head over to a coffe shop and plunk down $4 or $5 a cup.

Fortunately, the Royal Brew Nitro Cold Brew Coffee Machine and Dispenser offers perfect cold brew with all the nitro effects done right from your own kitchen or office.

By injecting those nitrogen gas bubbles, the coffee takes on a smoother, sweeter, foam-like texture that many often compare to the taste of a thick beer like Guinness Stout. The Royal Brew was the original home nitro system based on dispensers used for stouts, creating a special gas blend and pressurized faucet valve to produce the iced, rich, heady brew on your own.

Just add your coffee, shake well, inject nitro cartridges, then put it back in the fridge for about 90 minutes and you’re all set -- just tap your keg and serve.

In addition to the 64 oz. keg and nitrogen holders, the whole system also comes with its own carry bag so you can take it anywhere.

Regular coffee gets diluted with water, milk, and sugar, which also cuts down on your beverage’s caffeine potency. But nitro brewing makes the coffee so tasty it eliminates the need for additives like cream or sugar. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/the-royal-brew-nitro-coffee-ma.html

"Impotus Americanus is one of the heaviest leaders in the animal kingdom, and is famously known to be an orange, ruddy color not found in nature." Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/the-lincoln-project-examines-t.html

Customer 1 at a Staples store in Hackensack New Jersey was told by Customer 2 that she should wear a mask. Apparently Customer 1 didn't like being told to wear a mask, so she grabbed Customer 2's walking cane and then threw her to the ground, breaking her leg. Customer 2 had a liver transplant 4 months ago. Now, police are on the lookout for Customer 1.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/this-staples-customer-broke-th.html

A 17-year-old boy from Tampa, Florida was arrested by the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement, who accuse the teenager of being the "mastermind" behind the Bitcoin scam Twitter hack that compromised the accounts of over a dozen famous people including Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and President Obama.

Here's the press release from Andrew H Warren, in the Office of the State Attorney 13th judicial circuit:

Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office tapped to prosecute worldwide “Bit-Con” hack of prominent Twitter users

Tampa, FL (July 31, 2020) — Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren has filed 30 felony charges against a Tampa resident for scamming people across America, perpetrating the “Bit-Con” hack of prominent Twitter accounts including Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Elon Musk on July 15, 2020.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice conducted a complex nationwide investigation, locating and apprehending the suspect in Hillsborough County.

“These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they’re not the primary victims here. This ‘Bit-Con’ was designed to steal money from regular Americans from all over the country, including here in Florida. This massive fraud was orchestrated right here in our backyard, and we will not stand for that,” State Attorney Warren said.

The investigation revealed REDACTED, 17, was the mastermind of the recent hack of Twitter. He was arrested in Tampa early on July 31. REDACTED’s scheme to defraud stole the identities of prominent people, posted messages in their names directing victims to send Bitcoin to accounts associated with REDACTED, and reaped more than $100,000 in Bitcoin in just one day.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/a-17-year-old-was-arrested-for.html

Three years ago, Ian Davis was diagnosed with a cancer that weakens the bones. Shortly after, the engineer had an accident in his machine shop that resulted in physicians amputating four fingers on his dominant hand.

“When I was still in the hospital I started designing a prosthetic hand," Davis told KOBI News last year. "It was kind of my day job. That’s what I used to maintain my sanity.”

Davis's work-in-progress is an elegant feat of engineering. Coincidentally though, this isn't new maker territory for him. Long before he lost his fingers; he built a prosthetic arm as a high school science project.

You can follow the project's development on Davis's YouTube channel and Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

Out in the wild, figuring out different hand gestures.

A post shared by Ian Davis (@acmeworksfab) on Jul 23, 2020 at 9:52pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

After many weeks of designing and prototyping, I finally have the splay feature pretty well dialed! There were points during this process that I was getting concerned I was chasing a frivolous function, but after using it for half a day so far, I have no doubt that it was completely worth the time and effort.

A post shared by Ian Davis (@acmeworksfab) on Jul 1, 2020 at 10:52am PDT

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/man-with-no-fingers-is-making.html

One of the greatest struggles of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the fact that the entire world has to watch the normal scientific process happen in realtime. Scientists don't have the space to hypothesize, experiment, and discover new things before it all goes public. Everyone wants certainty; they want immediate answers. But that's not how science works.

This new feature from the UCSF Magazine offers the most comprehensive, detailed, and surprisingly accessible breakdown of the virus so far, including that whole process of discovery — what we knew when, why that led to certain conclusions that were correct, and so on.

In late January, when hospitals in the United States confirmed the presence of the novel coronavirus, health workers knew to watch for precisely three symptoms: fever, cough, and shortness of breath. But as the number of infections climbed, the symptom list began to grow. Some patients lost their sense of smell and taste. Some had nausea or diarrhea. Some had arrhythmias or even heart attacks. Some had damaged kidneys or livers. Some had headaches, blood clots, rashes, swelling, or strokes. Many had no symptoms at all.

By June, clinicians were swapping journal papers, news stories, and tweets describing more than three dozen ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, appears to manifest itself.

This includes a succinct explanation of how it works as a vascular (as opposed to respiratory) virus, and why that was such a jarring realization:

The novel coronavirus, an RNA virus named SARS-CoV-2, has become notorious for its skill at breaking and entering human cells.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/the-most-comprehensive-and-acc.html

The entertaining and delightful host of Technology Connections convinced me that impact lawn sprinklers are a lot cooler than I had previously imagined. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/why-impact-lawn-sprinklers-are.html

America's colossal mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic means US Passport holders have limited options when it comes to international travel. According to this CNN infographic, countries that remain open without restrictions include:

Albania Dominican Republic Kosovo Maldives Mexico North Macedonia Serbia Tunisia Turkey

Twenty-three other countries are open with restrictions, such as having a negative COVID-19 test result, going into quarantine once you arrive, or paying a cash deposit.

Image: CNN Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/here-are-the-places-you-can-tr.html

Cool Tools · 237: Steven Dubner

On my Cool Tools podcast, which I co-host with Kevin Kelly, we interviewed Stephen Dubner. Stephen’s an award-winning author, journalist, and TV and radio personality. He’s co-author of the Freakonomics books, which have sold millions of copies in 40 languages, and he’s host of Freakonomics Radio, which gets 8 million global monthly downloads and is heard by millions more on N.P.R. stations and other radio outlets around the world. Here are the show notes. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/i-interviewed-freakonomics-s.html

Astoria Bowl is a something of landmark in the Queens borough of New York City, a struggling business inside a massive building where time has seemingly stopped. Turtle Down Films created this lovely short documentary (shot before COVID-19) about this "anachronism, a vestige of the sport's mid-century heyday era... an oasis in the truest sense of the word, a place of pure recreation and levity in a city where life tends to be serious and weighty."

This is A Place To Bowl.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/this-queens-bowling-alley-is-a.html

The Tiny Sorter is a device you can make from an Arduino, a remote control servo, and some cardboard to sort marshmallow bits from a box of breakfast cereal. It's a clever mechanism that uses a laptop webcam and Google's machine learning software to learn the difference between marshmallow bits and cereal bits. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/make-a-cute-little-device-that.html

Cartoonist R. Sikoryak's talent for mimicking other cartoonists, from Krazy Kat's George Herriman to Nancy's Ernie Bushmiiler, is uncanny. He has a new book out, called Constitution Illustrated, published by Drawn & Quarterly and I have been marveling at the illustrations. The publisher kindly gave me permission to run some samples so you can see the versatility of Sikoryak's work.

A gifted pastiche and parody artist as well as a New Yorker cartoonist, R. Sikoryak’s perhaps best known for his widely lauded graphic novel adaptation of the iTunes Terms and Conditions agreement, where each page referenced a different classic comic. It is a triumph of cartooning, one that demonstrated the power of the comics medium to make the unreadable into a text the average reader could engage with. While the Constitution is hardly so dense, Sikoryak transforms it by interpreting it within 100 years of American pop culture icons, all dressed in period attire, naturally!

The 13th Amendment is brought to life by Billy Graham’s classic 1973 comic book cover for Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, drawn by one of the few Black cartoonists in the Marvel bullpen. The Boondocks explain the Fourth Amendment preventing seizure. Earlier on, Cathy reminds us that money drawn from the treasury must be appropriately accounted for publically. And it’s pretty satisfying to see the cast of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For assemble in Section 4, as the Constitution lays out what meetings of Congress look like.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/r-sikoryaks-latest-project.html

In this essay titled "How I Read Two Books a Week," Anthony Draper offers "surprising and practical steps you can take now to read more." My favorite tip is using the downtime feature on your iPhone’s screen time settings.

I’ve also adjusted some of my daily habits to further encourage reading. I turned on the downtime feature on my iPhone’s screen time settings so that all of my apps lock after 10 p.m. — with the exception of the Books app, Wildfulness (nature noises), and the clock (to set my alarm for the morning).

Usually, I’d spend around 30 minutes (or more) watching YouTube in bed before I went to sleep. I saw that as an easy area to convert to reading time. The downtime feature prevents me from just pulling down on the home screen and accessing my Siri suggested apps (my iPhone knows I use YouTube every night, so it’s always right there) because once the downtime schedule hits, YouTube no longer shows up on that menu.

I often get stuck scrolling Flipboard for an hour or longer before falling asleep at night. I'm might try the downtime feature to limit my phone to WaniKani and the Kindle App.

Image: Jumpstory / CC0 Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/read-more-books-by-using-the-d.html

It’s Sunday. You wake up after a very pleasant sleep. You feel good. You decide to check your email. You have one new email in your inbox; and what d’you know, it’s from Elon Musk! It contains clear evidence that your entire universe is a simulation; and the words ‘Don’t show this to anyone’.

Your whole reality is simulated – everything you know, everyone you love, and even yourself are all an intricate collection of ones and zeros! What now?

In this entertaining essay in Philosophy Now, Harry Whitnall provides a "survival guide to life in the simulation." His first piece of advice: "[T]o maximize your chances of survival, perhaps you should not show anyone the simulation proof, while frequently considering the possibility of one day telling everyone.

[via The Browser] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/a-survival-guide-for-living-in.html

BetterBook is a notebook/sketchbook designed to match widescreen displays. The idea is you can take photos of it on your phone and it will do a better job of fitting on a screen. It comes in one of three types of paper -- dotted grid, standard grid, or blank. The notebook had a successful run on Indiegogo and is now available for pre-order. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/this-notebook-has-pages-propor.html

EndeavorRx is a first-person racing videogame designed to help children with ADHD and this summer, the FDA approved it as a "prescription treatment." Meanwhile, other researchers are developing videogames that can help lift depression and reduce anxiety by interrupting the feedback loops of negativity and fear.

“It’s a well-known fact that so many mobile games use all sorts of psychological tricks to get people to give them money,” Harvard psychology postdoc Chelsey Wilks told IEEE Spectrum. “So we wanted to use the same exact psychological tricks, but to trick [users] into doing something that’s good for them.”

From IEEE Spectrum:

Boston-based Akili Interactive Labs, maker of [EndeavorRx], says its racer was originally licensed from the lab of Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. The company touts four peer-reviewed studies (in PLOS One, The Lancet Digital Health, The Journal of Autism, and Developmental Disorders) as well as one paper in process as support for its claims that EndeavorRx significantly improves clinical markers of attention in patients with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

“EndeavorRx looks and feels like a traditional game, but it’s very different,” says Matt Omernick, Akili cofounder and the company’s chief creative officer. “EndeavorRx uses a video-game experience to present specific sensory stimuli and simultaneous motor challenges designed to target and activate the prefrontal cortex of the brain.... As a child progresses in game play, the technology is continuously measuring their performance and using adaptive algorithms to adjust the difficulty and personalize the treatment experience for each individual.”

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/videogame-to-treat-adhd-availa.html

Over at Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban goes behind the scenes of the Trump administration's abject failure at coordinating mass testing for coronavirus — and perhaps unsurprisingly, in all connects back to Jared Kushner empowering all his trustfund baby friends, and Donald Trump's precious ego crushing every opportunity just to make some political gains:

The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.

And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”

[…]

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House.

[…]

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/a-frustrating-look-inside-the.html

Earlier this year, the Pentagon confirmed that Tom Delonge had actually leaked some legit UFO videos; and just last week, The New York Times buried even more UFO revelations on the 17th page of the print edition.

It's definitely weird that the former lead singer of Blink-182 emerged from a paranoid painkiller addiction to become a legitimate UFOlogist, in communication with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton. It's even weirder that his colleagues in the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences include a former Defense Department employee who may be lying about his involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; the former head of the CIA's "men who stare at goats" program, who also claimed to scientifically "confirm" that Russian magician Uri Geller had actual psychokinetic abilities, even though Geller himself admitted it was a trick; and a scion of the Gulf Oil fortune who also worked for the DOD and involved in a UFO interest group with the co-author of the NYT articles about the Pentagon's UFO program. Or that TTA purchased supposedly "alien" metals from the billionaire owner of Budget Suites for America.

But what's even more ridiculous is that the Canadian government has had most of their UFO information easily available for decades. The info they have is no more damning or exciting than that blurry Pentagon footage of a pill-shaped aerial vehicle that's probably just an unmanned drone or satellite. But the truth, as they say, is out there, nonetheless. From Toronto Star:

The Canadian government hosts a publicly searchable archive of government records about UFOs dating back to the 1950s.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/the-pentagon-has-made-more-ufo.html