Chris Mills

Sony’s Upcoming Z5 Flagship (Probably) Gets Shown Off On Video

Sony’s new flagship smartphone isn’t meant to make its debut until later this week, but that hasn’t stopped someone leaking a two-minute video showing off some of the phone’s better features. The video looks like an interview between a journalist from French site Clubic, and a Sony media rep, who spends the video running through…

I’m Getting Completely Lost in Discovery’s Beautiful VR Projects

The Discovery Channel, home of sharks and professional pyromaniacs, has a lot of cool stuff to show off. So it makes complete sense to cherry-pick some of the best moments, and package them into bite-size VR experiences. At the moment, there’s nine videos on the Discovery VR site you can view: a couple Mythbusters clips…

New Orleans’ Marshes are Still Recovering From Katrina

Hurricane Katrina’s damage wasn’t all to man-made objects: the storm also hit the marshes and swamps surrounding New Orleans. The city has done a good job of regrowing over the last decade, but the landscape is still showing scars. NASA has published a three images captured by its Landsat satellites. The first shows the marsh…

Apple Pay will now work with PayAnywhere, a card reader that attaches to mobile devices to accept NFC and magnetic stripe payments. That means Apple’s contactless payment solution will now work in 300,000 more places in the US, and we’re one step closer to the walletless utopia. [9to5Mac] Contact the author at [email protected].

Logitech’s New Gaming Headphones Might Actually Sound Good

Most gaming headphones I’ve ever used have sacrificed actual sound quality for aggressive styling that lets everyone else know you call your computer desk a battlestation. Logitech’s latest headphones for gamers aren’t exactly discreet, but the company is promising sound quality that lives up to the visual hype. There’s two new pairs: the G633, and…

This Map Shows the Worst Roads for Drinking and Driving

Driving under the influence isn’t a good idea on any stretch of road, but if you’re heading off to drive the I-90 in Montana after a few shots, better make sure your will is up to date. The map was assembled by Avvo, using data from the NHTSA’s Fatal Accident Reporting System — specifically, road…

This Charging Station Might Help My Cable Nightmares

Tangled cables are an unfortunate staple of my life, thanks to the five different devices I have to juice up every night. Until good wireless charging is a thing, I suspect that will never change; but this USB hub with its neat cable-management system might stave off insanity a little longer. The Fishbone, currently just…

Here’s What Microsoft’s Next Big Phones Might Look Like

Windows Phone enthusiasts have been waiting years — in mobile phone time, decades — for the launch of a new flagship device that can go toe-to-toe with the iPhones and Galaxies of the world. Well, thanks to the @evleaks Twitter account, we’ve got a good look at the two new Lumias Microsoft is supposedly announcing…

VMware Updates to Support Windows 10

Want to bring the (surprisingly good) power of Cortana to your MacBook? Well, there’s now two options. https://gizmodo.com/parallels-11-can-put-microsofts-cortana-on-your-mac-1724883769 Parallels and VMware have long been the two options for running Windows programs on OS X, and that isn’t going to change one bit for Windows 10. Parallels announced an updated version for Microsoft’s new OS last…

Study Finds 20 Percent of Ground Meat Isn’t What It Says On the Label

Once it’s been processed and pulped, most red meat looks more or less the same. This seems to be helping unscrupulous meat suppliers: according to a new survey, 20% of ground meat contains more than what’s just on the label. Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that ground beef was one of…

FAA Approves In-Flight Internet That Might Not Suck

Slow internet is the worst possible kind of internet, as anyone who’s sold kidneys to use in-flight Wi-Fi can probably attest. GoGo, the biggest player in the airborne Wi-Fi game, has been promising faster speeds since 2013; thanks to a FAA decision, the company is now one step closer to coming through. https://gizmodo.com/every-major-airlines-wifi-service-explained-and-ranked-1701017977 Up until…

Being Rude to Your Doctor Could Be Bad for Your Health

In the interests of not being a jackass, you should probably be nice to your doctors. But if common courtesy isn’t a good enough reason, a recent paper suggests you’ll get worse medical treatment if you’re worse. The experiment put 24 different medical teams (1 doctor, two nurses) in charge of a newborn baby with…

Hardcore Pirates Are Reportedly Banning Windows 10

There’s casual Pirate Bay piracy, and then there’s private torrent trackers: members-only clubs that share the best movie and TV rips among themselves. As you’d expect, they tend to be pretty hardcore about privacy, enough so that some groups are banning members from using Windows 10. As TorrentFreak reports, groups like iTS and FSC have…

Go Test-Drive a Samsung Phone For a Month, For Free

Are you an iPhone user with even a slight curiosity about The Dark Side? Because if so, Samsung has one hell of a promotion going on. Samsung’s ‘test drive’ will let you try a Galaxy S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, or Note 5 for 30 days, free of charge. The company will even throw in a…

Dropbox Now Lets You Save and Share URLs

In its continuing quest to amalgamate your entire digital life, Dropbox has introduced a new feature: you can drag and drop URLs into folders to save them for later, or share with other people. The feature is mostly neat because you can put everything relevant to a trip or project in one folder, rather than…

What Would You Do If You Could Teleport?

Forget all the technical details of trying to actually teleport: the fun stuff is imagining what you could do with your new-found superpowers. YouTuber Tom Scott has examined some of the potential logistical difficulties and opportunities that would go along with teleportation. For example, the surface of the Earth is moving at different speeds in…

Why Does Montreal Have a Bitcoin Embassy?

In the heart of downtown Montreal, between a boarded-up bar and a poutine shop, there’s a three-story glass building. It looks for all the world like realtor’s office — that is, until you spot the sign swaying in the wind: “Bitcoin Embassy.” The idea of a brick-and-mortar embassy for a digital payment system most often…

10,000 BIC Pens Were Repurposed Into This Sculpture

The BIC ballpoint is a triumph of efficient design; it’s also a pretty good mascot for disposable consumption, with 100 billion having been manufactured since the 1950s. But empty pens are good for more than just landfill: chain 10,000 together, and you can have yourself a neat canopy. The ‘BIC pavilion’ is a clever structure…

California Is Pumping So Much Groundwater That the Land Is Sinking

The Mad Max plot playing out in California is causing all sorts of problems, not least for farmers, who have turned to pumping groundwater to irrigate crops. According to NASA, all that pumping is having an effect: in some places, the ground is sinking by two inches per month. https://gizmodo.com/learning-from-australias-drought-lessons-to-avoid-a-mad-1703693517 Subsidence — the technical word…

15 Years Of Drought Have Not Been Kind to Lake Mead

The water level in Lake Mead has been fairly steadily falling for the last 15 years, something proven quite easily using many charts and graphs. But nothing hammers it home quite like NASA’s before-and-after shots. As the GIF shows, water levels have dropped significantly since 2000 — you can see the northern arm shrink down…