If you're one of the millions of (disproportionately black and brown) people who have been put behind bars in America, there's a good chance you use Jpay (previously) to communicate with your family.

Carol Dillin of Oklahoma City and her family haven't been getting much sleep due to a mysterious flying creature that keeps banging on their back porch door every night. Video below. Dillin has kept all the lights off, posted a skeleton scarecrow on her porch, installed two owl statues to frighten off the interloper, applied bug spray, and even blocked her door with a cabinet and pillows. — Read the rest

Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest

Typogram's Coding Font has you find your favorite monospace typeface by picking winners, round-by-round, in a tournament-style matchup.

As software engineers, we spend a lot of time skimming, reading, making changes to code. The coding font that we spend 8 hours a day staring at has a lot to do with our productivity and comfort.

Jolyon Ralph created a guide to the rocks and minerals of Minecraft: "Have you ever wondered how similar the Minecraft resources are to rocks and minerals in the real world? Let's find out!"

"Wait," I hear you shout, "Dirt isn't a rock!"

Jails around the country are replacing in-person visits with "video visitations," which means kids, parents,  and spouses of inmates won't be able to see each other in real life, only through a small video monitor. This depressing photo is from GTL, who provides video-visitation services to prisons.

Last August, Florida's prison system announced that it was switching digital music providers and would be wiping out the $11.2 million worth of music that it had sold inmates — music they'd paid for at $1.70/track, nearly double the going rate for music when not purchased from prison-system profiteers.

American prisoners are being forced — on pain of losing access to the prison phone system — to provide training data for a voice-print recognition algorithm that private contractors are building for biometric surveillance system that listens in on prisoners' calls.

For seven years, Florida state inmates could buy a $100 MP3 player from Access Corrections, the prisons' exclusive provider, and stock it with MP3s that cost $1.70 — nearly double the going rate in the free world.

The City of New York has declared that all calls from its city jails will henceforth be free; meaning the city will forego the $5,000,000 it took from prisoners and their families every year.

Spoiler alert: to steal from prisoners and their families.

Jpay, a service for sending messages to prisoners with a literal captive market, no longer claims copyright in messages sent to and from prisoners.

Companies like Jpay lobby hard to be the exclusive conduit for remittances from prisoners' families to the inmates, taking a huge rake off the top of funds sent to pay for essentials like warm clothes, medical care and food.

Dave sez, "I'm an American who blogs about life in New Delhi. I recently published an essay about 'jugaad': the semi-untranslatable practice and philosophy of jerry-rigging that is one of the prides of India. Once you look for jugaad in India, you see it everywhere: water pumps converted into cars, wrappers converted into rope, and so on. — Read the rest