Chris Mills

You Don’t Need To Understand Programming to Appreciate This Awesome Rant

Linus Torvalds is a legendary software engineer and founder of the Linux kernel. He also can’t stand bad code, so sit down, grab the popcorn, and enjoy. Torvalds posted this response to some new code that popped up in Linux version 4.3. It’s quite technical, but even if you don’t grasp the nuances, the fine…

A Simple Filter Change Could Make Low-Light Photography Much Better

Good low-light photography is one of the toughest nuts to crack: to get good pictures in the dark normally requires some combination of fast lenses and big, expensive sensors. But tweaking one filter that lives inside the camera could help big time. Most cameras have a Bayer filter, which sits in front of the camera’s…

English Wikipedia Just Broke Five Million Articles

After fifteen years of providing 11th-hour copy+paste material for high schoolers, the English-language version of Wikipedia has just hit a milestone: five million articles. The article that pushed the site over the edge was this entry on persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia (at least, according to Wikipedia). It was written by Cas…

Halloween Is Way Creepier In Zero Gravity

Most ghost costumes are half-assed at best: no matter how good your mask and bedsheet might be, ghosts are meant to float. So if you’re really committed to a good costume, you should take it into zero gravity—up on the International Space Station, for example. That’s exactly what Commander Scott Kelly did to try and…

Not Even Hillary Clinton’s Secret Email Address Can Escape LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s email spam is notoriously impossible to escape: even if you’re a US Secretary of State using a secret email server, LinkedIn will hunt you down and endorse you to death. A new wave of Clinton’s emailshas just been released. Among the usual correspondence about matters of national and political importance, we have a befuddled…

PayPal’s Two-Hour Outage Could Have Cost Tens of Millions of Dollars

Despite someslightly questionablepractices, PayPal continues to be the best (or only) way for millions of online businesses to take your money. So, an outage, even just a few hours long, can cost millions. PayPal’s services were down for about two hours on Thursday evening, caused by a problem in one of PayPal’s data centres. PayPal…

Amazon and Walmart Are Joining the FAA’s Drone Registry Taskforce

The FAA seems to have suddenly realized every dad in America is getting a drone for Christmas. So, it’s setting up a ‘drone taskforce’ to try and register every drone before U.S. airspace is shut down by a million plastic quadrotors. Amazon, Google and Walmart seem to be on board. The panel working on the…

You Can Go Buy an Apple TV in Person Today

If you didn’tbuy into the new Apple TVenough to actually buy into it, good news: starting tomorrow, you can walk into an actual store and hand human beings money in return for Apple’s promised Future Of Television. Starting this morning, you can pick up an Apple TV at Best Buy and Apple retail stores tomorrow…

This Light-Up Bike Jacket is Genuinely Smart

‘Smart’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot with technology. Slap a Bluetooth-connected Arduino board into a fridge, connect it to Twitter, and you might have the new iPhone on hand, or so the theory goes. So it’s with great reluctance that I admit this Bluetooth-connected light-up jacket looks pretty damn awesome. Lumenus…

Maybe Vodka Filtered Through Meteorites Will Actually Taste OK

Outer Space Vodka doesn’t actually come from outer space. It comes from Iowa, which is about as far as you can get from space without burrowing into the Earth’s core. But there are still compelling reasons to buy this vodka: firstly, the bottle, which is ideal for scaring small children or impromptu Halloween costumes; secondly,…

Detonating Avalanches With Explosive Drones Isn’t as Dumb as It Sounds

The concept of dropping sticks of primed dynamite from drones near a ski resort is guaranteed to give any OSHA inspectors second thoughts and a dry pen. But considering the way things are currently done, armed flying robots would be a serious safety improvement. Avalanche control—which, for the most part, means using explosives to safely…

Google’s Internet Balloons Are Floating Over to Indonesia

Google’s Project Loon is a grandoise project to bring internet to the third world via large party balloons. Last time we’d checked in, it was flying 20 balloons over Australia; now, it wants to put 20,000 over remote parts of Indonesia. In an announcement today, Google confirmed that it’s teaming up with three of Indonesia’s…

GoPro’s Experimental Drone Footage Looks Pretty Damn Good

GoPro is developing a drone. That much we know; what we don’t is how much it will cost or what it’s like to fly. What we do know, however, is that the footage looks pretty darn great. In a YouTube video, GoPro has shown off some demo video from its prototype quadrotor. The emphasis is…

Drone Crash Kills Power to Hundreds of LA Residents

Drones: beloved by amateur photographers, scourge of air traffic controllers and firefighters nationwide. Now, you can add power companies to that list. According to the LA Times, a drone crashed into wires lining Larrabee Street and Sunset Boulevard about 1:15 Tuesday afternoon, knocking one of the wires to the ground and cutting power to nearly…

If you ordered a Nexus 6P, and it hasn’t shown up, good news: per Phandroid, Google knows some shipments are delayed, and it’s giving $25 refunds to dry your gadget tears. [Phandroid]

The Library of Congress’s New DRM Rules Are a Victory For Digital Freedom

Copyright law (and therefore DRM, the software companies can use to lock down their products) is controlled by the Library of Congress. Every three years, the Librarian makes decisions on certain critical exemptions. This time around, it looks like they’ve got things right. The rules specifically cover Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,…

The Wayback Machine Is Getting a Search Engine

The Wayback Machine is knowledge storage on a colossal scale: maintained by the Internet Archive, it’s a repository of how everything looked on the internet in the past. But the biggest libraries are the hardest to organize, which is why $2 million is being spent to give the Wayback Machine its very own Google. The…

A Clever Hack Kinda-Sorta Brings 3D Touch to Android

Apple’s neat 3D Touch tricks rely on a touchscreen that has integrated pressure sensors to determine between a ‘peek’ and a ‘pop’. But give a cunning Android hacker a waterproof phone and a barometer, and you can get a similar sort of effect. https://gizmodo.com/iphone-6s-review-a-3d-touch-playground-but-not-much-e-1734182375 In a proof-of-concept video posted to YouTube, developer Marco Chiappetta shows…

The Polaroid Snap, a quirky digital camera with an integrated printer, is finally on sale. $100 gets you your choice of white, black, or blue; the 32GB microSD card and 80s hipster fashion are optional extras. [Amazon]

Chase’s Dumb New Mobile Payments System is Destined to Fail 

Mobile payments are all the rage right now! There’s the contactless magic of Apple and Android Pay, Samsung’s awesomely cool magnetic thing, and Chase’s system that lets you use a Chase card in a Chase-approved store, by simple scanning a QR code. Wait, what? Chase Pay is another digital wallet that Chase is hoping you…