Miramar, Florida police arrested Matthew Crandall, 21, for allegedly breaking into Miramar High School and smashing up the place. He wore only a hat and headphones as he destroyed computers and TVs and apparently caused major flooding. The total wreckage is estimated at $100,000.

Crandall was identified from surveillance footage. According to the Associated Press, "it’s not known whether he has ties to the school."

(Thanks to our Florida bureau chief, Charles Pescovitz!) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/florida-man-spent-24-hours-van.html

A $350 USB device claiming to block 5G radio signals is just a cheap unbranded thumbdrive, report security researchers.

The makers of the “5GBioShield” claim their USB stick can block electrical waves through a “proprietary holographic nano-layer catalyst” technology. It purportedly does this by “balancing” all the existing radiations around you to create a protective bubble 8 meters in diameter, even when the USB drive is unplugged.

The website for the product goes on to make dubious references to “quantum oscillation,” “life force frequencies,” and “cardiac coherence” in an attempt to convince consumers the science behind the 5GBioShield is legit. But you’ll be pretty disappointed if you actually buy the product, according to Pen Test Partners.

The device (sold as the 5GBioShield) is aimed at people who believe conspiracy theories about 5G radio wavesa market whose credulity and susceptibility to unproven or pseudoscientific products is already guaranteed.

That it's something you can buy on Amazon for a fraction of the price[Amazon link] just shows how little work went into the wheeze.

The website selling the thumbdrives is based in the UK. Local regulators and fraud police are on the case: "We consider it to be a scam," Stephen Knight, operations director for London Trading Standards, told the BBC. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/350-usb-stick-claiming-to-blo.html

"Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. YEAH YEAH YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH"  Blue the husky.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/husky-doesnt-want-to-hear-it.html

It's easy to become inured to Trump's ceaseless depravity, which is why I'm glad I read Joe Scarborough's Op-Ed in The Washington Post about Trump's sociopathic obsession about a false story that is causing great pain to a dead woman's family.

One is a politician so obsessed with a morning cable news show that he has sought retribution by repeatedly defaming a dead woman’s memory.

The other is a soft-spoken Air Force engineer who has worked on projects for 32 years with the singular goal of protecting and defending the United States. The 6-foot-3 Florida resident is still mourning the death of a wife he lost 19 years ago. He holds on to cherished memories of Lori Klausutis as a lifelong Republican, a devoted Catholic who sang in her church choir and an avid runner so perpetually cheerful that people called her “Little Miss Mary Sunshine.” After Lori’s death, T.J. Klausutis returned alone to the home the couple had just bought in Niceville, Fla., and faced an almost immediate barrage of Internet conspiracy theories about the “murder” of his wife.

The pace of those hateful lies ebbed and flowed with the years, until they swelled recently into a slimy tsunami of bilge spewing from President Trump’s 80-million-strong Twitter feed. I have never been able to grasp Trump’s bizarre fixation with “Morning Joe,” but that sad obsession has driven him to weaponize Lori’s memory in an attempt to settle some perceived grievance against me. Or perhaps to deflect from the 100,000 Americans lost to a disease he once dismissed as “one person coming in from China.”

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/joe-scarborough-in-wapo-op-ed.html

Hunting around for an outlet or a power battery when you’re trying to charge your phone or tablet is always an annoyance. But when you’re out in the world hiking or camping or traveling, finding an outlet might be more than a minor inconvenience...it might be downright impossible.

Running low on battery power isn’t an option anybody looks forward to these days, especially if you’re out and about and may need that phone in the event of any emergency. 

Thankfully, the RAVPower 24W 3-Port Solar Charger takes advantage of the fact that the world’s most powerful battery is almost always right there overhead: the Sun.

Actually, the RAVPower is really more than a traditional charger. Unlike bulky brick-style chargers, the RAVPower is its own solar panel, half the weight of other chargers. Just unfold it from its tiny, compact carrier and aim it at the Sun as its high-efficiency solar cells start juicing up.

Converting nearly a quarter of available solar power into free energy, the RAVPower is a fast, effective, lightweight charger for use in almost any condition. In fact, you can even throw the RAVPower over the back of your pack, plug in your phone, and watch your device power up while you keep moving.

It charges up to two USB-powered devices simultaneously and can take a smartphone’s battery from zero to fully charged in the space of about 3 to 4 hours. The RAVPower uses iSmart technology to automatically adjust to your connected devices, serving up the optimal charging current evenly to everything you have plugged in in the shortest possible charging time. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/this-solar-charger-works-anywh.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/venture-kapitalist-karen-loses.html

Twitter last night hid one of President Trump's tweet behind a warning, saying that it broke the company's policy against glorifying violence. In the tweet, Trump branded protestors in Minneapolis 'THUGS' and suggested they should be shot.

....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Floyd was an unarmed black man killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Minneapolis has seen two nights of unrest as local authorities refuse to release unredacted footage of the incident or to charge Chauvin with a crime. "Thug" is a storied euphemism for black people.

The warning notice comes three days after Twitter placed a fact-check warning on another of Trump's tweets and a day after Trump signed an executive order denouncing the company.

'A riot is the language of the unheard.' —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King

UPDATE: Trump posted it again, from the official White House account, and Twitter has applied the same warning to it.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/twitter-hides-trump-tweet-call.html

There's still magic in the world, as evidenced by this fairy's-eye view of Children's Fairyland, that charming 70-year-old storybook theme park in Oakland, California.

You might remember that when I'm not blogging, I work with Fairyland. WELL... months before we were mandated to shelter in place, a local photographer, Stephen Loewinsohn, contacted our team at Fairyland. He wanted to know if he could come in and capture the park by drone. He showed us some of his work samples (um, wow) and told us he was a lifelong fan of the park. He also told us the finished product would be a gift to us, no strings attached. OF COURSE we said yes! Naturally, none of us realized at the time that it would be the first comprehensive look our community would get from inside the park for months. But that's part of what makes it extra special. We premiered the video on Thursday evening, with great success, as the "cherry on top" to our reopening fundraising announcement.

At my request, Stephen shared his inspiration and thoughts on creating this video:

I grew up in Oakland and went to Fairyland as a kid. Now I have two young kids of my own, so Fairyland is a really special place for me and my family.

I've been working as a professional photographer and filmmaker in the Bay Area for many years, and lately I've been experimenting with building and flying custom camera drones with amazing acrobatic capabilities for specialized filming applications.

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/drone-filmmaker-captures-child.html

John Waters was slated to give the New York's School of Visual Arts' commencement speech at Radio City Music Hall. Instead, he gave a different version of that keynote in front of a green screen, quarantined in his Baltimore home. Of course, it was still hilarious ("Tiger King" porno knockoff, anyone?) and still full of hard-earned wisdom.

"Artists are magicians: you can see what others can not, have a secret language, the power to make others follow... and you can change history with one ludicrous idea. While you’re still young, maybe it’s time to become a virus yourself—a good kind of virus, one fueled by the years of hard work you put in at the incubator known as the School of Visual Arts. Artists, you are the cure, too. The only people that can inspire the world to notice and then alter its destructive behavior.”

Congrats, "coronavirus class of 2020," all of you, everywhere!

screengrab via SVA/YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/john-waters-gives-an-in-quaran.html

Fires rage in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by local cop Derek Chauvin.

Though four officers were immediately fired, local prosecutor Mike Freeman said that there is 'other evidence that does not support a criminal charge' even as police refused to release unredacted footage of the incident. Video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck as he gasped for breath was taken by a bystander; Chauvin's long history of violent conduct soon surfaced.

Minnesota's Attorney General said he nonetheless "anticipated" charges against the officers who killed Floyd. Another potential avenue for justice: the FBI is investigating whether Floyd's rights were violated, though its request for "more video" was excoriated by commentator Don Lemon.

Police abandoned a precinct during clashes Thursday night, and it became the first to be destroyed during unrest in modern U.S. history.

Among those detained was a black CNN reporter and his crew, live on air.

On social media, President Trump branded those protesting "THUGS" and suggested they should be shot; Twitter hid his tweet per its policy against glorifying violence, another first.

Photo: Hungryogrephotos (Public Domain)

CORRECTION: CNN's reporter was detained Friday morning, not Thursday night. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/minneapolis-ablaze-after-prose.html

Astronaut David Scott re-created, in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission, Galileo's "falling bodies" experiment by dropping a hammer and feather on the moon at the same time. Simply, both fell at the same rate because there was no air resistance.

screengrab via Wonders of Physics/YouTube

(Digg) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/astronaut-shows-what-happens-w.html

A 46-year old black man named George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis on Monday, May 25, 2020. A police officer named Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck, after vaguely accusing him of forgery and/or public intoxication. He pressed his knee down so hard — and kept it there — that it cut off the air to Floyd's lungs, suffocating him. Three police officers stood around and watched as Floyd used his last breaths to cry for help; several bystanders filmed the scene, and tried to get the cops to stop, but to no avail.

Those 4 police officers were fired shortly after the video was released (by their official account, Floyd had been "resisting arrest," something which is a physically impossible to do while also dying under restraint). That sounds like good news on the surface — but thanks to Police Union rules, bad cops who get fired for misconduct usually just get re-hired in a nearby precinct. Their past behavior — even repeated, established patterns of violent misconduct — are left off their permanent record, or otherwise ignored.

And that's exactly how the police officer who killed George Floyd was in the position to do so in the first place. As Insider reports, Derek Chauvin had a long and ugly history of police brutality, long before he killed George Floyd:

[Chauvin] was involved in violent incidents before, including three police shootings. And he has been the subject of 10 complaints filed to the city's Civilian Review Authority and the Office of Police Conduct.

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/the-cop-who-killed-george-floy.html

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever” – Mahatma Gandhi

Of all the skills you feel like you should probably know, yet likely don’t, coding might be one of the most intimidating. From the varied programming languages to the range of platforms to the sheer discomfort of trying to decipher all that seemingly incomprehensible text, doing your own coding can feel like a learning curve that goes straight up.

But like anything else, how you learn a skill can make all the difference in the world. Learnable is an e-learning platform that strives to help students retain the most information possible in the shortest possible time.  

With its highly curated curriculum, Learnable offers courses in all of the most important programming languages and functions, depending on your learning goals. From core disciplines like Java, PHP, and SQL to more specialized training in C#, C++, Python, Swift, and more, you’ll always find a carefully designed program ready to build your knowledge.

Whether you want to dig in from your desktop browser or via iOS or Android, you’ll find interactive lessons aimed at demystifying programming and pointing the way toward coding mastery.

As you work your way through each skill, you’ll earn progress points, level up, and earn badges as you go. In fact, learning to build apps, websites and other important projects with Learnable doesn’t feel like learning as much as it often feels like playing a game. But rather than beating a friend or notching a high score, a win here means a bankable skill recognized worldwide as a vital 21st-century talent. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/with-learnable-learning-to-co.html

Two men hired to break into their client's house, menace him with machetes, tie him up, then tickle him with a broom, have been acquitted of armed break-in after hitting the wrong address. The unsuspecting victim awoke to find the men looming over his bed armed with the knives.

The role play was arranged over Facebook by a man near Griffith, New South Wales, who provided his address to the hired pair.

"He was willing to pay A$5,000 if it was 'really good'," the judge said. However, the client moved to another address 50km (30 miles) away without updating the two men. They then entered a home on the street of the original address. ... When they realised their error, one of the pair said "Sorry, mate" and shook the resident's hand, according to local reports.

Could happen to anyone. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/men-hired-to-tie-up-and-tickle.html

Even though it feels like Amazon is a singular retail juggernaut crushing everybody else, you might be surprised to learn that half of Amazon’s $280 billion in revenue last year came from third-party sellers.

According to numbers compiled by JungleScout, 86 percent of Amazon’s Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) sellers were profitable last year, more than doubling the profitability rate for all small businesses in general in 2019. On top of that, two-thirds of FBA sellers said they were profitable in their first year.

And that was before our new pandemic-tinged economy shifted even more toward online retail outlets. If you want to start a business and make sure you’re among those happy etailers, then training like that found in The Complete 2020 Fulfillment By Amazon Mastery Bundle can help make sure you end up in that profit-rich group.

The bundle includes four courses, all dedicated to helping you get a thriving, revenue-generating business off the ground utilizing all the resources of Amazon’s FBA program.

It all starts with The Complete Amazon FBA Masterclass, a practical training session that promises to help you get your own FBA business up and running in a matter of hours. The beginner-friendly training covers all the basics for working in the FBA system, from choosing the right products to setting up your supply chain to branding and marketing. You’ll also get access to all the secret hacks FBA vets use to drive traffic to your storefront and goose sales.

In case settling on the product you want to sell is a problem, the Amazon FBA and eBay: 33 Hot Product Sourcing Strategies course can help. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/learn-how-to-utilize-amazons.html

Paper Mate introduced the Flair felt tip pen in the 1960s. I liked them when I was a kid because the lines were so clean and you could vary the line width. I kind of forgot about them until I was at Maker Faire and my toy inventor friend, Bob Knetzger, said he uses them to produce his wonderful sketches. They are also cheap! You can buy a dozen black Flair pens or a set of 12 colored ones. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/the-wonderful-flair-felt-tip-p-2.html

Thought you were smarter than a queue? Enjoy the shame!

The video does not show the circumstances that led up to this situation, in which a driver is backing up from oncoming traffic on a narrow mountain road. In any case, she does not seem to be pleased about it.

Image: Imgur Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/driver-does-a-back-up-of-shame.html

Wow. This is a thing of great beauty. A giant 3D topographic wood map of Westeros, the world of Game of Thrones, by IMGURian @ARUNK55. It's 60"x35".

The maker, @ArunK55, explains:

I am a maker/engineer/cartographer with a passion for maps and woodworking. With my laser cutter in my garage, I have been making wood maps over the last year. Each map is custom made and tells a story. Here i am going though my process of making these maps. These maps are made from three layers of Birch Wood with a layer of Maple as Backing. They are wood burnt with a LASER and hand assembled.

If you want something unique on your wall, that tells a story, or just reminds you of some place then please check out my Kickstarter, and help bring these maps to life.

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/giant-3d-topographical-wood-ma.html

Valerie Hammond was cooking a roast in her KitchenAid toaster oven when she smelled something burning, reports CBC. She discovered that the toaster oven had caught fire, causing smoke and fire damage to her kitchen. Whirlpool, which owns KitchenAid, replaced the unit, but when Hammond asked for $600 to fix the kitchen, Whirlpool told her she'd have to take it up with the company in China that manufactured the toaster oven.

The 68-year-old called and emailed Whirlpool dozens of times over more than six months but got nowhere on her claim for the damage.

Her oven was "not a Whirlpool product," a company representative told her via email, so Whirlpool wasn't liable for the damage. She was referred to Elec-Tech International.

Hammond says she tried contacting the company in China using the phone number Whirlpool provided. Her calls would ring through but no one would ever pick up. Her emails also went unanswered.

Out of frustration, Hammond contacted the media, and a reporter brought the matter up with Whirlpool. The company suddenly had a change of heart and ended up paying Hammond $5,000, six times the original amount she asked for.

Image: Valerie Hammond Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/womans-toaster-oven-caught-o.html

Amidst all the deadly serious concern and fallout from our global battle against COVID-19, you’ve likely been forced to confront more than a few moments that you never expected to face.

And you likely never felt sillier during this scary time than when you were racing all over town hoping desperately that some store had finally received a toilet paper shipment. Hoarders cleared off store shelves in early March, leaving 70 percent of stores without stock and causing a shortage that still isn’t completely under control.

Americans use 3 million tons of TP every year. And between the supply issue and the startling fact that we require 54 million trees to fall to feed our bathroom need...well, it’s no surprise the bidet option has seen renewed popularity the past several weeks.

Of course, replacing your entire bathroom throne is no small — or inexpensive — task. However, the Aim to Wash bidet attachment is a perfect middle-ground for those tired of TP hunts and looking for a better way.

The Aim to Wash easily attaches to your existing toilet set in about 10 minutes and doesn’t require any power to operate. Once you’re connected, the unit sports an adjustable nozzle head that angles into a position to apply a cleansing wash that puts “the wipe” to shame.

The attachment has easy to use dial knobs to adjust your cleaning to just the right level — and the nozzle even has its own self-cleaning regimen to keep the whole thing sterling clean before and after each use. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/still-thinking-about-a-bidet.html