After 98 years the Boy Scouts ends its vaj ban. Gays and atheists still need not apply.

Swanksigns collects public safety and information signs from around the world. This one is creepy. It shows what can happen to you if you get into an elevator with a trash can and neglect to pull the can all the way into the elevator car. Most other signs on the site are funnier and less nightmarish.

For those who want something more objective than the cupped hand method, here’s a meter that indicates how stanky your breath is. This all fine and good, but I think we can all agree that a more useful device would measure swamp-ass at a distance. Values:

1. None
2. Light
3. Moderate
4. Gamer
5. Feugi

Every year there’s a hacker conference, called DefCon, that allows black hats and white hats to come together to out-impress each other. It just let out this weekend and there’s usually a good flow of interesting news. Here’s a bit.

While trying to get hotel pr0n without paying for it, this guy discovered some interesting vulnerabilities in the TV-remote-based system that most hotels use. Here are some of the things that can be done:

• Get free smut (gotta start with that one)
• Unlock the minibar
• View and alter the bills of other guests
• Read another guest’s email

So the next time you’re at a conference with an annoying colleague, just throw 20 nips of Smirnoff and a showing Kookoo for Cocoa Cocks on her bill.

An IMAX cinematographer must have decided that his life is too tame because he built this Death Race 2000-esque vehicle for the purpose of driving into a tornado. Take luck.

Not as much as bacon or boobs, but I love trebuchets. Not sure why. Maybe because it’s feat of engineering as a large-scale application of mechanical advantage. Maybe it’s because it’ll fuck you up from afar. It was always the first thing made whenever I got a new building toy set whether it was Legos, Erector, whatever. Many Weebles were lost to an overly-powerful Tinker-Toy siege engine.

Getting on with it…
Here’s a Flash game that lets you tweak a bunch of variables on your trebuchet as you’re tested for distance, accuracy, and power.

I put up a FAQ page. Check it out in the sidebar.

Most new US driver licenses have two-dimensional barcodes like this:

Someone found an interesting way to decode that barcode and find out what information is hidden within. You scan or take a digital photo of your license and upload the image. I’d be interested to see the results, but ‘taint likely that I’ll give that kind of personal information to unproven website x.