Chris Mills

I Really Want This Impossibly Complicated Wrench

Between adjustable wrenches and socket sets, mankind has plenty of perfectly adequate tools to fasten and loosen nuts. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting this (concept) irising wrench all the same. The design, the brainchild of Seattle designer Jordan Steranka, uses the same system as your camera lens to make the six-sided hole smaller…

Go See How Depressingly Non-Green Your City Is

No-one lives in a city because they enjoy being surrounded by hulking concrete monoliths. Thanks to this mapping tool from Portland State University, you can now see exactly how lacking your city in the tree department. As part of a project funded by the U.S. Forest Service, researchers overlaid information about air pollution, tree coverage,…

Hack Amazon’s Dash Buttons to Do More Than Order Stuff

Amazon’s Dash buttons are $5 Wi-Fi enabled portals of pure consumerism — at least, if you use them how Mr Bezos would like you to. Or, if you’ve got a little programming skill, you can hack them to do almost anything. https://gizmodo.com/you-can-now-buy-those-stupid-great-amazon-dash-buttons-1720886109 In a post on Medium, Edward Benson details how the Dash buttons work,…

Drones Stress Out Bears Just As Much As Humans

Flying RC drones is hugely fun, but also endlessly stressful: at any time you’re liable to chop someone’s hand open, or crash your $1000 toy into a power line. As it turns out, humans aren’t the only ones who get stressed by nearby UAVs. According to research published in Current Biology, black bears have a…

Want to try Microsoft’s (surprisingly OK) new Edge browser, with committing yourself to Windows 10? Well, Microsoft has new Virtual Machine builds of Windows 10 available for free, complete with Edge — probably easier than having to downgrade an entire computer. [Microsoft] Contact the author at [email protected].

Google Hangouts Has a Gorgeous New Home On the Web

Google Hangouts has been a depressingly central part of my life for years now, but the web interface has always felt a little hacked-together. Today, all that changes, with a redesigned interface, and a dedicated homepage for Hangouts. The new URL follows Google’s normal naming convention: hangouts.google.com. The new homepage works like an expanded version…

This Is Probably My Favorite New Aurora Video

Astronaut Scott Kelly, on board the ISS for a full year, has been bombarding the internet with countless stunning images of the aurora borealis. But his latest video of the Lights just before sunrise blows the rest away. Contact the author at [email protected].

Which Device Would You Miss the Most?

According to a detailed study from Ofcom, the UK version of the FCC, different generations have vastly different attachments to internet devices: the grandparents can’t live without the TV, and (surprise surprise) you’d have to wrest the smartphones from millenials’ cold, dead hands. What surprised me in the study was the variation: it’s not just…

Photoshop Reveals How Different Countries See Body Image

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or more commonly, it’s shaped and defined by cultural standards that are different around the world. To try and understand how the perfect body is viewed across the world, designers from 18 countries were asked to Photoshop the same model. The aim of the project, commissioned by…

You Definitely Need This Update for the Zenfone 2

There’s a new update for the Asus Zenfone 2, which in addition to fixing the Stagefright vulnerability, also adds a bunch of new features. There’s a new ‘Mobile Manager’ app which is an actually useful way of controlling your data usage, and the music controls on the fantastic Flip cover now finally work with Spotify.…

NASA’s Gecko Adhesive Can Cling On in the Vacuum of Space

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is working on many important pieces of technology, but perhaps none are more significant than the gecko-inspired tech that could one day be better than ducttape. Conventional tapes that we use may seem magical (all hail Lord Ducttape), but they have flaws: the adhesive loses its tackiness after a few uses,…

Siri Has Another Cool Feature: Saving Lives

If you’re ever trapped under a truck, the last person you’d think to call for help would probably your creepy digital assistant. But as Siri recently proved, even fake humans can sometimes save lives. As Fox 17 reports, a young teenager working under his (poorly propped-up) truck had the thing fall on him, trapping his…

Bill Nye Explains The Science Behind Exploding Spaghetti

You probably remember Bill Nye from when he taught you real things about actual science. But as it turns out, he also knows about — and I’m quoting here — “blowing shit up”. To promote the charmingly-named charity auction, “Blowing Sh*t Up With Arnold”, everyone’s favorite Science Guy took to YouTube to explain the science…

FCC Hits Asshole Robocallers With $2.94 Million Fine

The FCC has been conducting some major ass-kicking lately, a trend it is continuing with its latest move: slapping a $2.94 million fine, the biggest in FCC history, on a serial robocaller. The robocaller in question is Travel Club Marketing, a Florida company that tries to sell package holidays and timeshares over the phone. The…

Apple has a new version of BootCamp,actually designedto work with Windows 10. If you’re already running it, look for the update in your Windows partition; otherwise, the update should be available soon. You’ll need an Intel-powered Mac running OS X Yosemite to take advantage. [MacRumors] Contact the author at [email protected].

Why Do We Use a Dumbass Unit to Measure Explosions?

There’s been some confusion over the size of today’s explosion in China’s Tianjin province, with some people mistakenly thinking it was the largest non-nuclear explosion of all time. It was not — that honor goes to the Russians — and you can partly blame our stupid system of measurement for the mistake. An explosion is…

Paying For Stuff With Your Heartbeat Is Now A Thing

Apple Pay’s fingerprint authentication is already miles better than the laughable magnetic strip on our credit cards. But to try and create the The Nymi Band is like a contactless credit card, which only works when you (and only you) are wearing it. It uses a sensor to record the electrical activity of the wearer’s…

Why Are Our Boats And Planes Getting Slower?

Humanity used to have supersonic passenger jets and 70mph car ferries. Now, we have gate-checked bags and the TSA. How did we fall so far? Tom Scott’s video should help explain. The focus of Scott’s video is the hovercraft ferry that operates between Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, and the Isle of Wight,…

SpaceX’s Crewed Rocket Passed A Major (Simulated) Test

Provided that they stop spontaneously blowing up, SpaceX’s Dragon rockets will someday carry astronauts up to the International Space Station. It’s a long, potentially explosive road to a manned mission, but a recent ground simulation puts the team closer. At the avionics testbed facility in Hawthorne, California, the SpaceX team recently simulated a flight to…

Galaxy Note 5 Rumor Roundup: Everything We Think We Know

Samsung is set to debut the fifth iteration of the generously-sized Note later this month, but this is the internet—why wait in patience, when we can piece together rumors and half-truths instead? Here’s everything we think we know. The Galaxy Note has long been the trend-setting Big Android Smartphone: Samsung basically invented (don’t-call-’em) phablets when…