In 2015, Amsterdam-based e-bike company VanMoof started shipping to the United States but found that a disproportionate number of them were damaged during shipping. So they started putting the bikes in fake flatscreen TV boxes. From VanMoof:

That small tweak had an outsized impact. Overnight our shipping damages dropped by 70-80%. We sell 80% of our bicycles online, which means we still print TVs on our boxes. More than 60,000 of them have now been shipped directly to our riders worldwide.

Now other bike companies do it too:

View this post on Instagram

Strength through progress - hundreds of MATE. ready and packed every week! 👉 #matebike

A post shared by MATE.BIKE (@mate.bike) on Apr 1, 2017 at 1:57pm PDT

(via Kottke) Read the rest

The best part of Dave Goetzinger's (AKA Handgun Safe Research) total ownership of the Amarey HFGS-089 gun safe is that he shows a relatively difficult exploit to open it before showing the insanely easy one: "Bolting the safe down to prevent attack with a paperclip is pointless." [via]

Amarey's handgun safe is going to get somebody killed. That's my prediction. Somebody, possibly a child, is going to take a hit with a hollow point, and aside from local newspaper coverage--a few dismal inches in a column of city news--no one will know about it.

He writes that this is the only device he's examined "vulnerable enough that a child could open it" and that the manufacturer is no longer in the business. A common target of his investigations are cheap, Chinese-made biometric models imported by local companies who stamp red-blooded American branding on them.

Here's another terrible gun safe, the GunVault SVB 500, which can be opened with a gum wrapper.

He recommends the AMSEC Heavy-Duty Pistol Safe, the Stealth Handgun Safe, and this auto model from Fort Knox [Amazon]. They're much uglier and heavier than the cheap models, but this is where I'm keeping my Beanie Babies. Read the rest

Lego makes storage containers that click together like standard bricks (Amazon), coming in a range of sizes and all the classic lego colors, from single-nodule pencil cups to four- and eight-nodule boxes.

They suggest using it to store normal lego bricks, which makes me want a range of miscroscopic legos that may be stored inside the normal ones, with these tiny ones concealing a further inner layer of quantum-scale legos.

Plastic polypropylene, pvc free Gather all your regular lego bricks in this large size storage brick and make it a more playful way of tidying up This large size LEGO storage brick also work as stackable blocks with the rest of the storage bricks Storage bricks come in classic lego colors Large size lego storage bin Storage bricks come in classic lego® colors

Read the rest

Abigail Tucker, author of "The Lion in the Living Room," explains what's going on when cats hop into boxes: imagination. "Our houses are strange places for apex predators to live 24/7. A lot of cats are just hopelessly bored."

Here's more from Cat Health.

Boxes Decrease Stress

A study was recently done on cats that were entering a Dutch animal shelter. Some of the cats were given cardboard boxes in their cages and some were not. The cats were then evaluated for stress, using the Kessler and Turner Cat Stress Score, a scientific scale for quantifying stress in cats. Stress levels in the cats that were provided with boxes was much lower than in the ones without boxes.

Watching Laura Kampf build a poplar projector box is an education in 1) excellent craftsmanship and 2) tools I must now get. The way dovetail jointing is illustrated is particularly fascinating: in 5 minutes of well-shot arty youtube cinema I feel I learned more than a dozen talky howto videos where the content is buried somewhere after a minute of intro music, five minutes of "HEY GUYS" rambling, and nine more fooling around in the shop. Don't miss the sketchbook! Read the rest

These strange wooden boxes by Paolo del Toro have whimsical designs that open at the mouths to reveal a secret compartment. Just loosen the drawstring and add whatever you'd like. Read the rest