“A new shipment of science, spacewalk gear and crew supplies is on its way to the International Space Station,” NASA says. Astronauts on the International Space Station will grapple an arriving Cygnus supply spacecraft this morning, with coverage starting at 5:30 a.m. EDT (0930 GMT).
...For the next hour you'll hear Bob and Ryan play music and hear a sprawling, geeky and fun conversation. Sometimes it's about Bob's record, other times it's about Metallica bootlegs, caveman sounding lyrics, favorite cereals, fasted band, how the revival of vinyl helps make better, more focused records, praying, the quietness of church, zombies, Einstürzende Neubauten, noise rock and recording/mixing/soundboards.
"Hear Ryan Adams and Bob Mould Play Music And Talk About Everything Under The Sun" (NPR's All Songs Considered)
Bob Mould "Patch The Sky" (Amazon)
Bob Mould's "Voices In My Head":
They’ve been very busy at the far corner of Universal’s Orlando theme park Islands of Adventure constructing an enormous building to house their latest attraction, Skull Island: Reign of Kong.
Those with a good memory will recall that Universal Studios, the company’s first park in Orlando, had a huge King Kong ride. In fact, it was one of the signature rides on opening day in June, 1990, along with Earthquake, Jaws, and E.T.
The Universal theme parks have been sold and resold over the years, and they finally got their act together with their latest owner, Comcast, which has been pouring money into creating new attractions at the parks, including Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Japan.
At Disney, Walt used to say it all started with a mouse, but at Universal it all really started with Harry Potter. Obtaining the rights from J.K. Rowling was the coup of the century for Universal, and gave them the momentum against Walt Disney World they’ve been looking for. Attendance has risen by 40 percent. They’ve been building new attractions at both Orlando parks almost continuously and show no signs of slowing down.
The original King Kong attraction was fun but goofy, with riders stuck in a tramway vehicle and encountering what was at that time the largest audio animatronic figure in theme park history. He had banana breath and broke down quite a bit.
Once you watch the three videos below, you will know as much as most about what’s coming this summer when the attraction opens. Read the rest
San Francisco's Office of Citizen Complaints found that the San Francisco cops who arrested public defender Jami Tillotson after she told them to stop photographing her client in a courthouse hallway were in the wrong, and that they engaged in "conduct reflecting discredit on the department." Read the rest
A new report says anti-vaxxers are responsible for the rise in two infectious diseases we'd nearly eliminated from the United States. Read the rest
Officials shut down Denver International Airport on Wednesday, canceling over 1,000 flights after a mega snowstorm temporarily knocked out power and created conditions unsafe for plane takeoffs and landings unsafe.
Georgia has become very friendly to entertainment companies looking to create media there, however the state is far less friendly to folks not identifying as heteronormative. If Georgia's Governor Nathan Deal signs a new "religious liberty" bill into law, Disney and Marvel will boycott the state.
The bill allows faith-based businesses, and religion practitioners, to reject customers who violate their "sincerely held religious beliefs."
Via Variety:
Read the restThe Walt Disney Co. and Marvel Studios indicated opposition to a Georgia religious liberty bill pending before Gov. Nathan Deal, saying that they will take their business elsewhere “should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law.”
With generous tax incentives, Georgia has become a production hub, with Marvel currently shooting “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” at Pinewood Studios outside Atlanta. “Captain America: Civil War” shot there last summer.
“Disney and Marvel are inclusive companies, and although we have had great experiences filming in Georgia, we will plan to take our business elsewhere should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law,” a Disney spokesman said on Wednesday.
For $20 I really like this new Matone dual USB battery pack! I haven't found anything better at this price.
The Matone battery is a great combo. I've tried water and damage resistant batteries, and solar charging units -- but this is the Bartles and James of outdoor USB power banks.
At 10000 mAh advertised, I can get around 1 3/4ths full charges on my iPhone 6 with this battery. It seems a bit low, but is certainly enough juice for my needs. Keeping a cellphone running Waze going on an all day motorcycle trip. Charging with the solar panel is slow as there isn't a lot of surface area. I'd consider solar to be an emergency only kinda thing, and not to rely on it for regular charging.
This'll certainly be the battery I use for this Spring's road trips.
Matone® Portable 10000mAh Solar Battery Charger Shockproof, Dual USB output via Amazon Read the rest
In a surprising turn of events, the U.S. government on Monday paused its battle with Apple over an iPhone, and what may be its greater goal of mandating “backdoors” in consumer encryption. On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department told a judge it needs a couple weeks to try 'new' ways of accessing whatever may be on the device, without Apple's help--and with an assist from unnamed experts from outside the agency.
Last night my eight-year-old daughter and I enjoyed Pee-wee's Big Holiday. This is a fantastic return for Pee-wee Herman, and Paul Reubens has done a masterful job. Pee-wee's charm, innocence, and awesome moral compass are still keeping him out of trouble, despite a cast of delightfully troublesome characters that pop up along the way.
The 2016 Car Hacker's Handbook expands on the hugely successful 2014 edition, in which the Open Garages movement boiled down all they'd learned running makerspaces for people interested in understanding, improving, penetration testing and security-hardening modern cars, which are computers encrusted in tons of metal that you strap your body into.
No Starch Press has taken on the task of turning The Car Hacker's Handbook into a beautifully produced, professional book, in a new edition that builds on the original, vastly expanding the material while simultaneously improving the organization and updating it to encompass the otherwise-bewildering array of new developments in car automation and hacking.
Author Craig Smith founded Open Garages and now has years of experience with community development of tools and practices for investigating how manufacturers are adding computers to cars, the mistakes they're making, and the opportunities they're creating.
The Handbook is an excellent mix of general background on how to do threat-modelling, penetration testing, reverse engineering, etc, and highly specific code examples, model numbers, recipes and advice on how to put a car up on a bench, figure out how it works, figure out how to make it do cool things the manufacturer never intended, and figure out how to understand the risks you face from people doing the same thing without your best interests at heart.
A lot of the advice is theoretical, but there are a bunch of highly practical projects, from improving and customizing your in-car satnav and entertainment system to tuning your engine performance. Read the rest
[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer than he cares to remember. As part of his job, he must read all the weekly tabloids. For the past couple of years, he's been posting terrific weekly tabloid recaps on Facebook and has graciously given us permission to run them on Boing Boing. Enjoy! - Mark]
If Werner Heisenberg were still alive, at 114 years old, by now the German physicist would surely have developed his celebrity uncertainty principle.
Put simply, a celebrity cannot be observed and accurately reported simultaneously. The act of observing a celebrity makes accuracy impossible, and conversely getting to the truth of a celebrity makes observation impossible, most likely because they’re locked behind closed doors.
This week's peer-reviewed scientific journals known as the supermarket tabloids and celebrity magazines ably demonstrate Heisenberg’s celebrity uncertainty principle in action. The stars are just like us, proclaims Us magazine: they ride bikes, go shopping and eat snacks at L.A. Clipper games (though I can’t remember the last time I had courtside seats, to be honest.). But the act of observation has changed these celebrities: they have dressed with care, brushed their hair, and take each step in public knowing that they may be stalked by paparazzi. Actress Minka Kelly, seen walking her dogs in Us mag, has donned her tightest body-hugging leggings and hidden her eyes behind sunglasses knowing that photographers lurk.
When Taylor Swift tells Us mag “25 things you don’t know about me” spread over two vacuous pages, revealing that she kept hermit crabs as childhood pets, has double-jointed elbows and can’t spin cartwheels, she exposes nothing of herself, aware that she is under observation. Read the rest
While the railroad at Disneyland in Anaheim, California is out of service for a year and a half while the route is being changed and “The Star Wars Experience” is being built, I thought it might be fun to take you for a ride on The Western River Railroad at Tokyo Disneyland, which remains exactly the same as it was on park opening in 1983.
While the railroads at Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris run around the perimeter of the parks and are a both a method of transportation as well as an attraction (the latter at some parks more than others), the railroad at Tokyo Disneyland is something else entirely.
Because of burdensome government regulations regarding railroad operation which would have prevented a typical Disney-style railroad that circled the park with multiple stations, the executives at The Oriental Land Company (a consortium of well-known Japanese corporations formed specifically to build and operate the Tokyo Disney park) and Walt Disney Imagineering cleverly decided to do something different.
Called “The Western River Railroad,” the attraction has four steam powered trains: The Colorado, The Mississippi, The Missouri, and The Rio Grande. There is only one station, which sits atop the entrance to The Jungle Cruise in Adventureland. It functions solely as an attraction, and so there’s a lot more to see (particularly after the subsequent construction of some major attractions after the park opened).
From the station, the train runs around the perimeter of the Jungle Cruise and then past a small scenic station called Stillwater Junction. Read the rest
Author and former CIA officer Barry Eisler spoke at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers opposite ex-CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden on Monday. In front of about a hundred former CIA, FBI, and NSA operatives, Eisler talked about bulk surveillance, whistleblowing, and why intelligence professionals need to take especially great care not to let propaganda pervert their intelligence.
The ad-subsidized Web is at a crossroads: faced with pressure from social media platform, publishers are accepting ever-more-intrusive ads, which combine with the mounting public concern over privacy and tracking to encourage ad-blocking, which, in turn, makes publishers more desperate and more biddable to the darkest surveillance and pop-up desires of advertisers. Read the rest
