North Korea's Red Star Linux OS ships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. — Read the rest

The post North Korea's operating system watermarks every file you touch appeared first on Boing Boing.

The British Transport Police announced it would start using facial recognition cameras in a London Underground station. The Victoria Underground station was the first to be equipped with cameras.

The cameras scan the faces of everyone who walks past them and compare each face to a watchlist of people the police or the courts want to find. — Read the rest

The post Police are now scanning faces at a London Underground station appeared first on Boing Boing.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table. 

Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest

The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: UPDF packs editing, OCR, conversion, forms, signatures, batch processing, and cloud syncing into one cross-platform PDF toolkit, now $69.99 for life.

PDFs are already stubborn enough without your editing software demanding a specific operating system. UPDF works across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android and packs editing, conversion, OCR, signing, and more into one lifetime subscription for $69.99 (reg. — Read the rest

The post This $70 PDF editor doesn't care which operating system you use appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1941 the National Park Service hired Ansel Adams to make a photo mural of the national parks for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. Adams took the pictures between 1941 and 1942, and then the project stopped. — Read the rest

The post Ansel Adams shot 226 park photos for a mural that never got made appeared first on Boing Boing.

How Buildings Learn is a six-part BBC television series from 1997 about what happens to a building after the builders leave. Stewart Brand wrote and presented it, and Brian Eno wrote the music.

Brand made the series from his illustrated book of the same name. — Read the rest

The post Stewart Brand put his 1997 BBC architecture series online for free appeared first on Boing Boing.

The world's southernmost ATM is at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, at 77°51′ south. It is the only cash machine on the continent.

Atlas Obscura says the machine works the same way as an ATM in the United States, and it gives out U.S. — Read the rest

The post The only ATM in Antarctica has a second ATM for spare parts appeared first on Boing Boing.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist in London who writes about heavy metal and about Jewish communities. His ninth book, The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live, came out in June 2026. He types on a Wobkey Rainy 75 mechanical keyboard, which he replaced the stock switches on with Gateron Oil Kings. — Read the rest

The post A mechanical keyboard, plain yoghurt, and a 7am start appeared first on Boing Boing.

Jonathan Weber has written a history of San Francisco's rise as a global technology capital and the crises that came with it. City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco opens in the early 1990s, when San Francisco had not recovered from the AIDS epidemic and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. — Read the rest

The post How San Francisco became a tech capital, then nearly lost itself appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: AskAnyModel is a new platform that gives you access to 50+ popular AI models, and it's only $39.99 for life.

Most of the good AI models cost about $20 per month. For one, that's not too bad, but no single model is good at everything. — Read the rest

The post Get 50+ AI models for life, including GPT, Claude, and Gemini, for just $40 appeared first on Boing Boing.

I thought Ghost of Tsushima was areally good game, what with all its razor-sharp samurai action and breathtaking Japanese vistas. I thought its sequel Ghost of Yōtei was pretty damn good too… weird as it was to see local comedian Erika Ishii, a person I have seen get their head shaved live on stage for a few measly improv comedy points, gruffly deliver stone-cold badass lines about revenge. — Read the rest

The post Slick samurai simulator Ghost of Yōtei finally getting some DLC appeared first on Boing Boing.

Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. — Read the rest

The post A museum curator wrote the first T. rex novel on his daily commute appeared first on Boing Boing.

What could possibly be worse than being sick with explosive diarrhea? Being sick with explosive, spicy diarrhea. Unfortunately, it sounds like the latter has been unleashed on America, as everyone's favorite source of cyclospora, Taylor Farms, has issued a recall of its products containing jalapeños. — Read the rest

The post Taylor Farms recalls jalapeño products in 26 states over salmonella appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ten years after Star Wars joined Marvel at Disney, and just in time for the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, the two franchises will get their first-ever crossover, in comic form.

Kevin Smith, who made us consider the fates of the independent contractors on the second Death Star, has been tasked with writing the five-issue series. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Smith writes first Star Wars/Marvel comic crossover appeared first on Boing Boing.

Everyone's been so busy worrying and squawking about Flock that we completely missed the police discovering Meta's shifty-as-hell AI Smart glasses. However, thanks to Florida's Sunshine laws—which demand that everything the cops do on the record down there is available to the public—at least two law enforcement agencies in the state have started issuing the pervy peepers to police. — Read the rest

The post Florida police are using Meta's creepy smart glasses appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Internxt gives you 10TB of encrypted cloud storage for a one-time $359.99 payment (reg. $2,900), with end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge privacy, and no recurring storage bill.

Cloud storage is useful. Paying rent on your own files forever is less charming. — Read the rest

The post A giant cloud storage upgrade works out to $36 per TB appeared first on Boing Boing.

A programmer named Fogus came across a GitHub argument about chess engine development and wrote about why hobby coding communities are hostile toward large language models. Hobbyists say is working code isn't the goal. They like to build operating systems, programming languages, and console emulators, or try to fit a working program into as few characters as possible. — Read the rest

The post Why hobby coders treat AI-written code as missing the point appeared first on Boing Boing.

The TAC-2 was a famous joystick offered for Commodore's C64, the 8-bit personal computer first sold in 1982, and compatible with the Atari and other systems using the classic 9-pin plug. And now you can buy it again. There are upgrades such as a stronger steel shaft (the original was just a tire valve, according to the press release, which would be typical of the old Commodore) but its otherwise high-fidelity, including the connector (no USB!) — Read the rest

The post TAC-2 is back: the new Commodore reissues an old joystick appeared first on Boing Boing.

Dima Kogan hiked in the San Gabriel Mountains, and a friend wondered which point in the range sits farthest from any road or trail. Kogan went home and computed it, and his notes on the poles of inaccessibility above Los Angeles put the answer at 4,343 meters, or about 2.7 miles, from the nearest one. — Read the rest

The post The farthest you can get from a road in the San Gabriels is 2.7 miles appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Bureau of Reclamation is resorting to moving water between reservoirs so that Glen Canyon Dam can continue to generate electricity. Darren Orf reported in Popular Mechanics on August 10, 2026, that a long drought has pulled Lake Powell and Lake Mead so low that Hoover Dam's output this year will fall by 40 percent from its full-capacity output. — Read the rest

The post Hoover Dam is set to lose 40% of its maximum power this year appeared first on Boing Boing.