Eric Limer

Blackberry World is getting next-day TV downloads and day-and-date DVD releases. It’s keeping up with the Joneses. [RIM]

Kim Dotcom Is Stranded in the Middle of Nowhere and Live-Tweeting About It (Update: Escape)

Kim Dotcom is a character. Giving the finger to the government that took his site down by setting up a new one. Throwing a press conference complete with a fake FBI raid, pyrotechnics, and dancers. Demolishing cheap lawn furniture. Now, thanks to helicopter problems, he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. Ever the showman, he’s…

They Might Be Giants: Till My Head Falls Off

They Might Be Giants are well-known for their crazier themes and lyrics, and also for that totally-annoying-in-its-entirety Malcom in the Middle theme song. But occasionally, there’s a little dark sincerity poking out of their work, and “Till My Head Falls Off” is a perfect, catchy example. Off the groups sixth studio album, Factory Showroom, released…

How Often Do You Use Your Phone to Make Actual Calls?

Smartphones. The more you think about it, the more the term just seems antiquated. A relic that just stuck around, sort of like the word “rewind.” With hulking phablets coming out more frequently and in larger sizes, it seems like the phone part of a phone is increasingly incidental. How often do you actually make…

Watch This Renegade Phone Pull Off Its Own Aerobatic Stunts at the X Games

We’ve all broken our share of phones, and generally the only day-to-day danger they face is a three or four foot fall, or maybe the odd puddle of water. Norwegian X-Games competitor PK Hunder’s phone had a bit more to deal with when he lost it in mid-air, half-way through a 720 during practice yesterday.…

Mega Passed Its First Copyright Takedown Test

In addition to protecting itself from your pirated content with its see-no-evil encryption, Kim Dotcom’s Mega service aims to stay on the law’s good side by playing nicely with copyright takedown requests and keeping that super important DMCA safe harbor status. So far so good, too; it’s responded to an early batch of requests with…

Watch the World’s Highest Resolution Drone-Mounted Camera in Action

Sure, your phone can take a decent picture, but it’s not even in the same universe as the best camera the government’s got. At 1.8 gigapixels, the DARPA-developed ARGUS-IS the highest resolution surveillance platform in the world, and, when mounted to a drone, can single-handedly do the work of an army of 100 predator drones…

Chainsaw Javelins Are The Most Ludicrously Awesome Slingshot Ammo Ever

Joerg Sprave specializes in absurd slingshots with absurd ammunition, but now he’s reached what might be the pinnacle of abnormal ammo: chainsaw javelins. Where can you go from here? Launched from a mammoth slingshot bazooka that must be nearly seven feet in length, each chainsaw round is complete with a stabilizing metal rod on its…

Remembering Apollo 1, NASA’s First Major Disaster

46 years ago today, veteran astronaut Gus Grissom, first American spacewalker Ed White, and rookie Roger Chaffee were killed in a cabin fire during an Apollo 1 launch pad test. The first majorly fatal accident in NASA’s history, the fire was caused in part by the cabin’s pure oxygen atmosphere and a number of other…

Do You Backup Your Social Media Accounts?

Whenever something sketchy happens to your favorite social network’s TOS, there are always folks who say they’re packing up, taking their data and leaving. But backing up your social data doesn’t have to be a last resort. After all, who knows what might happen to the cloud. Do you back up any of your social…

Nokia Music+ Offers Premium Streaming for Half the Going Rate, If You’ve Got a Lumia

Nokia launched its free, ad-free, Lumia-exclusive, and pretty sweet streaming music service “Nokia Music” in September of last year, and now it’s upping the ante with a moderately priced paid version that comes with all the fixin’s. https://gizmodo.com/your-lumia-phone-just-got-a-sweet-free-music-streamin-5940209 Nokia Music+ is pretty much like your paid versions of services like Spotify, but at just $3.99/€3.99…

The New H.265 Video Format Will Help Chew Up Video So Your Network Can Swallow It

Streaming video is the future. Well, it’s the present, but the future too. And as resolutions increase, it’s going to be a tougher and tougher proposition to pipe all that data to your screen of choice in a timely fashion. Fortunately, the new H.265 standard has been approved by the ITU and it’s here to…

This Is How You Build a Ford-Class Supercarrier

The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is a beast. It’s the first of the new Ford-class supercarriers, and arguably the best aircraft carrier ever designed. And building these mammoths is a serious undertaking. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-what-makes-the-uss-gerald-r-ford-the-best-airc-5944380 Here we see the ships 555-metric ton island being lowered onto the deck. 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, the…

What It’s Like To Go Off the World’s Largest Ski Jump

You probably don’t have the balls to go ski jumping. If you do, congratulations; I hope you’re reading this in flight. For the rest of us, this video is a great (read: less scary) way to get just the smallest slice of that action. A piece you can safely chew and swallow. Filmed at Vikersundbakken,…

Bear Vs. Shark: Catamaran

I discovered Bear vs. Shark by accident. A college roommate had insisted I listen to Minus the Bear, and I wasn’t paying attention, so only the “Bear” part stuck. It proved to be a serendipitous little mistake though, because Bear vs. Shark is as awesome as the battle portrayed in their name would be. “Catamaran”…

Scientists Have Created a Microscopic Tractor Beam

Spaceships can’t pull in foreign objects with a almost-magical tractor beam yet, but researchers have been making progress towards that goal. Scientists have now shown that tractor beams are possible, and can actually work. For microscopic objects over microscopic distances at least. Researchers from the Czech Republic’s Institute of Scientific Instruments and Scotland’s University of…

Creep On Strangers’ Lives Six Seconds at a Time With Vinepeek

Some people are out there using Vine for pretty dumb things. Others are capturing more interesting six-second snippets their actually interesting lives, or making stop-motion videos. And you can creep on all of them, one after the other, in a constant fire-hose of anonymous, random video with Vinepeek. https://gizmodo.com/the-single-dumbest-way-people-are-using-vine-5978709 The new site has a simple…

Las Vegas Is One Bright Hole Straight to Hell

Paris may be the City of Light, but the City of Sin is looking to give it a run for its money. This pair of shots was tumblr’d (tumbled?) and tweeted by Colonel Chris Hadfield, who’s currently up on the ISS. At night, the city looks like some pool of molten metal, scalding the desert’s…

Instagram Is Asking Users To Prove Their Identities with Government IDs

If you’re not claiming to be famous, normally people couldn’t care less who you say your are on the Internet. In fact, most people actively don’t care. Instagram isn’t in that crowd however. After its recent TOS update, it’s been harassing more and more users to confirm their identities with pictures of government-issued IDs. https://gizmodo.com/instagrams-new-terms-of-use-translated-into-plain-engl-5977053…

Anonymous Attacks Department Of Justice Website and Threatens Worse Over Aaron Swartz’s Suicide

Since Aaron Swartz’s suicide two weeks ago—an incident largely blamed on the charges being levied against him—the ‘net has been grieving. And Anonymous has been doing that in its own special way: tearing shit up. In the latest of several attacks, they took down the U.S. Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission site and left behind a…