The sun is out and the birds are singing and all my neighbors are roasting flesh on the communal patio, so I've been thinking about buying a BBQ. I think I just found it: the futuristic, portable Q:

Looking like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a jet engine, the Q BBQ can be carried around like a briefcase, but opens up Transformer-style to become a stylish, stand-alone, gas-powered grill. Crafted in durable steel, the Q uses inexpensive little propane tanks that fit right inside the grill. You'll get hours of cooking time from just one tank! It also has dual gas controls with a full range of temperatures, so you can sear burgers on one side of the grill and gently toast buns on the other, just by adjusting the flame.

Link (via Gizmodo)

The Royal Mail, which currently prices shipping on weight, is petitioning to change its pricing to be based on size -- apparently, size is the most important determinant of the actual cost of shipping goods.

Royal Mail's pricing structure has been in place for decades, and was inherited from a time when mail was sorted by hand...

Mr Dales said some customers would experience price rises and other price cuts, but the vast majority -- 74% -- would be unaffected by the proposed changes.

Link

This Morse phone is the teaser for a Worth1000 photoshopping contest called "Vintage Products." Link

The Legoland theme park has depoloyed tracker bracelets for kiddees based on WiFi tracking tag from Bluesoft.

Available for rent in the Information Office, a Kidspotter ensures that parents can always find their children whenever necessary. On entering the park, the wristband is placed on the child's arm. If parents lose sight of their child, they can send an SMS message to the Kidspotter system during their entire visit. They will then automatically receive a return message stating the name of the park area and the map coordinate of their child's position in the park. On their special Kidspotter map of the park, parents can easily see where to find their child. The Kidspotter kit consists of a small wristband with a tiny sender, plus a special Kidspotter map of the park.

Link (via /.)

A Swiss/German research team have published an article in Smart Materials and Structures analyzing the feet of jumping spiders. These feet covered in nanoscale fibers depending from thicker hairs, and the overall bundle is small enough that the van de Waals force -- "an interesting form of adhesion is that, unlike many glues, the surrounding environment does not affect it" -- creates a very high degree of waterproof, grease-proof, dirt-proof stickiness.

"We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That's like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"

...The total van der Waals force on the spider's feet is very strong, but it is the sum of many very small forces on each molecule. The researchers believe the spider lifts its leg so that the setules are lifted successively, not all at once, and it does not need to be very strong to do this. All you would have to do to lift a future kind of Post-it® note is peel it off slowly.

Link

Once upon a time, there were no iPods. This online museum offers images of boomboxes from the 1970s and '80s. A look back at music technology's humble roots, "when the idea of a personal stereo experience was a bit of a novelty." Serving suggestion: Crank up the volume on your PC and listen to this totally free teaser clip of "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel while you're browsing these amazing images of old-school funk-delivery systems. Fun, baby.
Link (Thanks, asthmatic)

Boing Boing guestbar alum Todd Lappin sez: "Sort of.  This is an interesting tale of what might've been."

A long lost jukebox owned by John Lennon has revealed that, when it came to musical inspiration, even the Beatles got by with a little help from their friends.

The 15 kg [Swiss-made KB Discomatic]  portable jukebox, owned by Lennon around 40 years ago, was bought by the late Bristol music promoter John Midwinter for just £2,500 at a Christie's sale of Beatles memorabilia in 1989. He then spent years restoring it to working order and researching its 41 discs. Listed in Lennon's handwriting, they are effectively the Desert Island Discs which helped shape his musical genius.

[...]

Artists featured on the jukebox include the Animals, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson and Gene Vincent. There are no Beatles records and only one sung by a woman, Fontella Bass's 'Rescue Me'. In Lennon's rough and ready scrawl, with gaps and crossings out, The Lovin' Spoonful become 'The Lovin's Spoonfuls' and Otis Redding is 'Ottis Redding'.

Link

Earlier this month, Cory blogged one man's amazingly detailed reproduction of a Tron costume. Now, our pal Gabe ups the ante with a pointer to Jay Maynard's masterwork. Link

Update: Jay Maynard "on being an Internet phenomenon." Link (Thanks, George!)

This is the best internet video mashup evar: the Star Wars Kid (a net-icon famous for having captured his Darth Maul light-staff fights on video, thus becoming the subject of Internet mockery, which led to a really bogus lawsuit) matted extremely well into the Kill Bill trailer. I am in awe of the video effects wizardry here. 2.2MB WMV Link Alternate Link Alternate Link 2 Alternate Link 3 Alternate Link 4 (via Little Fucking Ray of Sunshine)

Writer John Shirley has some interesting things to say about a new Scientific American article called "Tyranny of Choice" (paid subscription required to read article, you can read more about the article on Alternet.)

They suggest there are two basic types of choosers, Maximizers and Satisficers. The former aim to make the best possible choice in a near obsessive way, the latter tend to settle for 'good enough'. Maximizers spend a long time shopping, can't make up their minds what to buy for a gift, channel surf like a cokehead searching through the rug for fallen powder...

Maximizers in particular are prone to unhappiness in our society--there are too many choices, just too damn much input in general, and they can't deal with it. Satisficers are having a hard time too; they tend to go to lower stress options--and those are harder to find. But they're less likely to be depressed and suicidal.

Link

The Ramones documentary, End of the Century, has won critical acclaim at every festival and screening it played at. But the two nearly bankrupt filmmakers who made it are having a hard time getting sign off from the surviving Ramones.

Even when the movie was shown at Slamdance, the filmmakers had not obtained permission to use archival concert footage and music from the Ramones and other bands. They had also never gotten the Ramones to sign releases for their interviews, which took more than three years to conduct. ... The film's release has been further complicated by the filmmakers' financial situation. By the time the film was presented at Slamdance, Mr. Gramaglia and his brother, John, a producer, had amassed a debt of about $65,000 in production expenses. They owed Chinagraph, an editing house, another $150,000 and they estimated they would have to spend several hundred thousand dollars more to secure the rights to music and concert footage.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

The nominees for the 2004 Webby Awards have been announced. I'm the "chair" of the Weird category and Mark and former guestblogger Karen Marcelo are two of the judges. Quite a few of the sites will be familiar to regular Boing Boing readers. Link

Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented Harvard talk on an experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and "Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is the daughter of John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation" hypothesis is the only one left intact by the experiment's findings.

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.

Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

After an employee of Virgin's "indy" label V2 quit last week, he sent a great poison pen open letter to a bunch of music industry types:

"So, before i got let go, we had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday. They brought in a psychic person and everyone joined hands and did a seance... I'm not kidding, even if I wasn't fired I wanted to quit on the spot."

Link (via Gawker)
Update: Boing Boing reader Don Richards-Boeff points us to a Rolling Stone article revealing that the email above is a marketing hoax. Actually though, the whole truth though is stranger than the fiction the publicity firm created. Link

These guys are overclocking the GameBoy Advance so that it can run fast enough to act as a SuperNES emulator:

When I saw loopy had released a SNES emulator I thought it was great! There were some limitations because of GBA processing speed, so we came up with a design to successfully overclock the GBA that is compatible with flash carts (so far - read on). We've already sent a prototype of our design for loopy to test with and he has had success with his Flash Advance Turbo 128, and we have successfully tested on our Flash2Advance 256. Unfortunately, though, it looks like different brands of Flash carts are reacting slightly differently to the Acceleration, so this is where we want to ask the community for their help. We want to test with all flash cart brands out there so we can finalize our design to be compatible with as many carts as possible.

Link (via /.)

Claire Chanel, the person behind the Jay-Z Construction Set, has decided to net.judo-ify the RIAA's spoof tracks, random noise disguised as top-40 singles which it promulgates on the P2P netowrks.

As a follow-up to our last project, the Jay-Z Construction Set, Scary Sherman and I decided to take a fair & balanced route by highlighting one of the positive moves made recently by music industry leaders.

The RIAA-Mix Vol.1 is a compilation of the hottest underground remixes of top40 hit tracks produced by the upcoming talent at Overpeer. These homages to 20th century noise artists and avant composers pull a frightening bait and switch on listeners veering wildly from recognizable pop hooks to jarring digital distortion.

Available at riaamix.com as downloadable mp3s, streaming flash audio, or on a compact disc, we're hoping our compilation can help support the arrival of challenging new music to mainstream exposure.

Link

Nerve.com just published a new gallery of work by Brooklyn-based erotic photographer Siege. I wrote the intro. Fleshbot says the images "combine filters and projections to stunning effect," and offers a free sneak preview, but the complete Nerve gallery requires a paid subscription. Neither are work-safe.
Link to Nerve.com gallery.

Forget Presidential blogs. The Green Party of Canada is thinking way outside the blog: it's assembling its party platform for the next fedeal election via a public wiki. Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Earlier this month, we posted Monochrom's call-for-submissions for jpegs of random punchline-text from comic strips. Now, Monochrom brings us the outcome: a web page werein a single-frame comic and a punchine are combined at random. The results are funny-esque and very weird. Reload often. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has released a new anti-DRM tool called DeDRMS, which enables unrestricted playback of iTunes Music Store tracks under Windows. Andrew is hosting a compiled binary and the source on the San Francisco State University server. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)