MUSK SELLS BORING FLAMETHROWERS

THERE can’t be many things less boring than a flamethrower (especially, I imagine, if you have one pointed at you), but that is, indeed, the joke.

This flamethrower is built by a company owned by Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla Motors and Space X, called The Boring Company.

Musk’s efforts to build a viable hyperloop train requires him to bore lots of tunnels underground for them to run through – which explains the company’s name.

Anyway, this week 1,000 lucky people were invited to Boring HQ to pick up the flamethrowers Musk’s team had designed.

It’s a bit charitable to call them flamethrowers – they look legit, but are closer to blowtorches in action.

Musk is raising money for the Boring Company, and believed there were enough suckers out there willing to pay $500 for a joke to make it worth it. He was right – he sold 20,000 of them and raised $10m... which also isn’t boring.

INSTAGRAM TO ALLOW LONGER VIDEOS

RUMOUR has it that Instagram is about to bring more changes to its platform that echo similar features on Snapchat.

A new video section will allow selected users to upload premium video of up to 15 minutes in length.

It doesn’t look like all users will be able to upload these long videos, and Instagram is reported to be in talks with various vloggers to bring their content to the platform.

It’s all part of a plan by Facebook, which owns Instagram, to see off any rivals, but especially Snapchat.

AMAZON MAKES ANOTHER FIRE TV – AND THIS TIME IT’S A CUBE

YOU would have thought Amazon would, by now, be a bit bored with making different-sized TV boxes.

Yet coming in to the line-up which already features the stick and the square is the Amazon Fire TV Cube.

It’s kind of a combination of the Fire TV and the Echo Dot. It streams 4K video to your TV (in the same way as the Fire TV 4K), but also features a speaker and microphones so you can talk to the built-in Alexa AI assistant to control the TV.