Eric Limer

Your First Computer Love Deserves a Place in Your Heart and On Your Wall

Maybe the old computers you’ve been hoarding are broken. Maybe you just got rid of them before the nostalgia set in. Either way, these slick schematic prints of classic computers are a great way to give a shout-out to the gadgets you love without devoting any of your precious shelf-space to a dinosaur. Made by…

iPad Price Cuts Mean New Models Can’t Be Far Behind

It’s been a scant six months since the announcement of the iPad Mini and the fairly superfluous iPad 4, but it looks like the new generations might be on the horizon. Walmart, Best Buy, and MacMall have all slashed their prices on the devices, as good a sign as any that new ones are on…

Kick Your Pesky Cocaine Habit By Blasting Your Brain with Lasers

Have you ever had one of those days where you thought to yourself “Boy, I sure wish I didn’t have this sexy yet expensive cocaine addiction”? Fortunately for you, there could be a new solution on the horizon, and all you have to do is fry your brain with lasers. Equally sexy. A new study…

How Chess Got Its Timeless Style

You know a chess piece when you see one. They might be the most recognizable objects in gaming. But they didn’t always look that way. In fact, for the longest time they didn’t even look a way. The Smithsonian Magazine dug into the roots of that iconic design and it’s not as old as you…

Airports Are a Beautiful Twisted Mess

Airports are a weird contradiction; labyrinthine roadways and arteries between terminals, surrounded by an expanse of seemingly limitless straightaways. Put both together and you get wonderfully calculated mayhem, and a few killer photos. As a kid, New York photographer Jeffrey Milstein loved to film planes at LAX with his 8-millimeter camera, and he brought the…

Moscow’s Getting a Giant Copper-Coated Glacier

Russia has its share of concrete monstrosities and majestic spires, but the new Moscow Polytechnic Museum and Educational Centre in Moscow manages to be neither. Instead, it’s like a big, beautiful, sculpted iceberg, with a parking lot. Designed by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas—who won an international competition with their design—the museum is due to be…

Last Night’s Game Of Thrones Premier Was the Hottest Torrent Ever

Game of Thrones season three premiered last night, and that’s kind of a big deal. If you’re a fan, you’ll need no convincing. But if you need proof of its potency, here you go: according to numbers collected by TorrentFreak, the Game of Thrones season three premier now holds the record for the biggest BitTorrent…

Manhattan’s Oldest Time-Keeping Sidewalk Has Been Ticking for Over a Century

Deep in lower Manhattan, embedded in the sidewalk, is a clock that’s been ticking since long before you knew what time was. Installed in 1889 with a single redesign in 1940, the timepiece has counted off hundreds of minutes, and tens of millions of seconds, all while withstanding the endless march of both time and…

This Teensy Keychain Knife Could Save Your Life One Day

There are plenty of knives out there you could feasibly carry around with you all the time—Gerber’s got a whole suite of them. The latest to join the crew is an especially tiny lil’ guy, but it could save your life. https://gizmodo.com/strap-a-tiny-toolbox-to-your-zipper-with-gerbers-daily-5992638 The Gerber Daily Carry Hook Knife is a itty-bitty, reliable, discreet little sucker…

A Beautiful Meteorite That’s Not Trying to Destroy the Planet

Not all meteor strikes have to be scary, exploding harbingers of an apocalypse to come. More often, in fact, they’re just pretty. This one just screaming on through the Northern Lights even moreso than most. https://gizmodo.com/meteor-strike-the-complete-story-of-russias-cosmic-fir-5993048 Shot by Photographer Shannon Bileski of Signature Exposures, the picture was a lucky one. Shannon had been taking 8-second…

Amazon Cloud Drive can now sync across OS X, Windows, web, and Kindle Fire. Watch out Dropbox, you’ve got competition.

Ice Cube Innovation Is Just a Bear-pig-ipede Away

If you’ve never spilled an ice cube tray full of water or accidentally dumped a dozen cubes on the floor, I hope you have the medal you deserve. For the rest of us, a clever, covered ice cube tray like this could be a cool solution. Designed by black+blum, the awkwardly-named “brrrr” tray takes an…

Report: Facebook’s “Phone” Is a Home Screen That Could Be Coming To Your Phone Too

Android Police has managed to get its hands on a system dump for the upcoming “Facebook Phone” this Thursday. And while there will be a physical device announced, it seems “Facebook Home” is a really customized launcher, eventually destined for a wide variety of handsets. https://gizmodo.com/is-facebook-about-to-announce-a-facebook-phone-running-5992843 The disassembled data reveals a lot of information about…

Meteor Strike: The Complete Story of Russia’s Cosmic Fireball

Thanks to the crazy prevalence of dash-cams in Russia, we got an amazing, multi-viewpoint look at last month’s monster meteor strike just hours after it happened. But there’s more to see than just the flashes in the sky. PBS’s Nova dug in deep to figure out the details of the incident, and the disaster it…

Nine Inch Nails: The Day The World Went Away

It’s always good to have some tunes on tap that sound their best at ear-shattering volumes, and if you’re in the market, Nine Inch Nail’s “The Day The World Went Away” deserves a spot at the top of the list. Off the “band”‘s 1999 classic The Fragile, the perplexingly titled “The Day The Whole World…

These Awesome Floating Vases Are Practically Invisible

An expensive, ornate vase can be as much of a centerpiece as the flowers that are in it. These floating vases designed by the Japanese group oodesign take things in the opposite direction by making them look like water ripples. The vases themselves are just discs of clear plastic, but the design idea behind them…

Scientists Built a Fake Virus Shell to Make a Sterile, Zombified Vaccine

Vaccines beef up your immune system by giving it a little taste of a weak—or dead—version of diseases. Now researchers in the UK have developed an alternative approach: build a synthetic doppelganger and let your body crush its hollow husk. Not technically viruses but rather virus-like particles, the vaccine developed by researchers from the U.K.…

Your Old Hard Drives Are DIY Cotton Candy Machines Just Waiting to Happen

What with cloud storage becoming more and more affordable, chances are you’ve got a stack of old hard drives just laying around somewhere. At least one. You could just throw them away, or leave them to languish, or you could throw caution to the wind and make one into a cotton candy machine. Just in…

San Francisco’s Stunning New Transit Hub Is One Beautiful Slice of Future

Public transit doesn’t have to be a total bummer if you’ve got a nice enough hub for it all to connect to. That seems to be the logic behind the upcoming 1.5-million-square-foot, San Francisco Transbay Transit Center. Some are calling it the city’ “Grand Central,” and if it lives up to the plans, it’ll certainly…

What’s Your Earliest Memory of Using a Computer?

We all use computers every day, but at some moment in each of our lives, there was that first meeting. A first interface, if you will. You might not remember the real first time you used a computer, but there’s got to be one shining gem of nostalgia that sticks out in your mind. What…