I've been using a reMarkable Tablet, for years now. It's great for taking notes at my day job. I waste no paper when I jot down meeting minutes, annotate stories and starting off new pieces of writing in long hand. I dig how easy it is to organize my notes on the tablet and that I can back them up to the cloud—including, recently, to Dropbox and Google Drive. — Read the rest

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!"

At Slate, Dan Kois offers a brief history of Segway, the ingenious but too-hyped and too-dorky electric ride that became a joke upon its release. Twenty years on the current owner of the brand is a Chinese go kart company that used to sell cheap knockoffs (you can now buy their Segways from Amazon for about $500, lopping at least a zero off the price of an original) and now uses the name for all sorts of scooters. — Read the rest

Lucas Vieira was anointed Patrol Officer of the Month in the July 2021 issue of the Houston Police Officers' Union newsletter, sharing the award with Thomas Serrano after a successful drug bust.

Also this July, Lucas Viera was charged with aggravated assault after telling another cop to shoot someone running from a traffic stop, beating the man, and tearing off his pants. — Read the rest

Boing Boing contributor Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch, Strange Frequencies) is one of my favorite articulators of the roleplaying game experience and how it ties into popular culture, theater, art, ritual, storytelling, and enchantment. His latest book is Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons, from the fine folks at Strange Attractor Press. — Read the rest

As the Trump Administration draws to a close, Trump Bites animates a second series of real audio clips of The Donald.

Image: YouTube / Trump Bites

For the Black Friday lovers out there, we understand this year is going to be hard for you. All the old rules about scouting doorbuster deals, camping out, and planning your post-Thanksgiving shopping tactics are no more this year. 

But don't worry – just because there's no physical doorbusting going on this year doesn't mean you can't be digitally doorbusting with the same gusto. — Read the rest

What's filthier than having restrooms named after you? Not much! And it makes perfect sense that the honoree is filth elder John Waters. The "Pope of Trash" has bequeathed his 375 pieces from his personal art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) with the agreement that its "East Lobby" restrooms be named after him. — Read the rest

There are many time-lapse security cam clips around of spiders building webs but this one is particularly striking to me because of the angle, lighting, and sound. It feels like an avant-garde art film from the 1960s or an industrial band's music video from the 1980s. — Read the rest

Japanese firm SkyDrive released a video demonstration of their prototype flying car. It's an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle that operates similarly to an oversized quadcopter drone, although the SD-03 flying car has eight motors and propellers. According to SkyDrive, the SD-03 flew at an altitude of ten feet and stayed aloft for four minutes. — Read the rest

If you and your business aren't keeping up with the times, your customers know it. Google found digitally advanced small businesses made twice the revenue per employee as their counterparts and saw four times the revenue growth.

Of course, it's usually not that most small businesses don't want to reach out digitally. — Read the rest

This unusual chicken enjoys joining their human for a relaxing bike ride.

There's been a lot of news lately about taking down monuments to terrible people, or renaming buildings that were christened after them.

In related news, there's still a statue of Oliver Cromwell outside of the UK House of Commons in Westminster. — Read the rest

Whether you're dedicated to practicing with an instrument or just want to learn to play for the first time, diving into music can be daunting. One of the steepest learning curves for budding musicians is reading and understanding sheet music, the backbone of virtually any musical performance. — Read the rest

Boston's got a bad reputation when it comes to race. And unfortunately, much of it's deserved. Of course, there are people who are trying to fight and make a positive difference despite the segregation that's left the predominantly black neighborhoods behind in schooling and socializing. — Read the rest

New Zealand is one of the Five Eyes countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) who collaborate on mass surveillance, and it has a notoriously off-leash, invasive surveillance apparatus that has been caught spying on NZ Greenpeace, the NZ Green Party, the Mana Movements and anti-TPP activists; the state was also caught giving private corporate spies access to its national surveillance data to help them hunt down and neutralize activists; unsurprisingly, the NZ police also abused these records, accessing them without a warrant on thousands of occasions (NZ also recruited the NSA to spy on kiwi activists).

Donald Trump has wrung many concessions out of Justin Trudeau on the NAFTA renegotiation, but none is more nonsensical and potentially damaging than a 20 year copyright term extension that will bring copyright in line with the US's extreme copyright system, where copyright endures for the life of the author plus 70 years, meaning that nearly every work created in US history will disappear due to commercial irrelevance, rather than being made available for scholars and other users by libraries and other nonprofits.

One of the most repugnant features of international trade agreements, from TPP to TTIP to CETA, is the "Investor State Dispute Settlement" (ISDS) clause, which gives corporations the power to sue governments to repeal health, safety, and environmental laws if they interfere with the company's profits.

Derek Yach, president of The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, sent a letter to 344 public health researchers and groups inviting them to bid for grants from a $1b fund set up by tobacco giant — the list was a roster of Yach's former colleagues from his stint at the World Health Organization.

NAFTA 2.0, the return of the TPP, mobile phone surveillance, copyright term extension, class actions targeting movie downloads: Canadians' digital liberties have never been under more pressure than they are today. Digital liberties matter to Canadians. CIPPIC, Canada's public interest tech law clinic, stands on guard for Canadians' digital liberties.