Jamie Condliffe

Boxee Wants To Be Inside Your TV

Up’n’coming streaming box company Boxee isn’t content sitting next to your TV. Instead, it’s firing up an initiative to get inside your TV by offering an embeddable option to manufacturers. https://gizmodo.com/walmart-puts-its-boxee-where-its-mouth-is-5956414 The scheme will see Boxee partnering with chip provider Sigma to allow TV manufacturers to embed Boxee’s cloud-based live TV, DVR and streaming apps…

These Optical USB and Thunderbolt Cables Are Up to 330 Feet Long

If you thought screens were where glass started and finished in gadgets, think again. Corning, the company behind Gorilla Glass, has also started making optical USB and Thunderbolt cables—and they’re super, super long. https://gizmodo.com/gorilla-glass-3-hands-on-somehow-even-more-indestructi-5973945 The cables are optical instead of your typical wired connection. There’s no speed advantage, but because there’s less signal attenuation in…

The Kilogram Is Putting on Weight

There’s long been debate over the accuracy of the standardized kilogram. Now, though, scientists have shown once and for all that the lump of metal defining the unit of mass has been putting on some weight. https://gizmodo.com/frances-kilogram-standard-is-no-good-for-americans-5676347 The original kilogram—the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, made of platinum and iridium alloy—is the standard against which…

How to Turn Your DSLR Into an Instagram DSLR Using Some Tape

You might have your fancy-ass DSLR, but can you, like, take a square picture like all the cool kids on Instagram? No of course you can’t, sucker! But here’s how to with a little… tape. Photographer Maciej Pietuszynski has posted what we desperately hope is a humorous blog post—actually it’s hard to tell if it’s…

The low-end 21.5-inch iMac can now be configured with Apple’s Fusion Drive for $250. You won’t regret it. [MacRumors]

These Flexible e-Paper Tablets Could Change Your Desk Forever

Everyone dreams of an electronic display they can roll up and shove in their pocket—but now it’s closer than ever. These flexible e-paper tablets are the stuff of dreams. Developed by Queen’s University, Plastic Logic and Intel Labs, the displays look pretty much like sheets of paper. Actually, though, they’re 10.7-inch plastic displays which are…

This 3D Printer Churns Out 3-Color Objects as Big as a Basketball

We all know size matters. As, seemingly, does 3D Systems, because its latest desktop 3D printer is a whopper, with a build platform that can handle designs of up to 1,030 cubic inches. Yes, that is big enough to recreate a basketball. The CubeX—which 3D Systems modestly refers to as “the ultimate desktop 3D printer”—offers…

Swype Now Crowd-Sources Your Autocorrections

Swype, the sliding keyboard that dramatically speeds up typing on Android, just got a little more clever. As well as offering a more fluid typing experience, it now crowd-sources your autocorrections—which should (hopefully) make for fewer embarrassing mistakes. The new feature, called Living Language, essentially crowd-sources its dictionaries. Opt-in, and you join a population which…

Can Vizio’s New Android Tablets Compete with Nexus?

In an attempt to get its screen everywhere, Vizio is planning to launch new 7-inch and 10-inch Android tablets in the coming months—and they look pretty good. Based on the specs and our quick hands on, it seems these slates could be something worth considering. The 10-incher, for instance, will come with Nvidia’s new Tegra…

Samsung’s announced that the Galaxy S II will get a Jelly Bean update—but it’s a manual, not OTA, update. [SamMobile]

These New Mad Catz Controllers Work With (Almost) Any Gaming Device

Mad Catz has announced a new range of GameSmart hardware which is designed to work across pretty much any platform. These things will get you gaming on PC, Macs, tablets, phones, TVs—and even consoles. The new slew of hardware includes the C.T.R.L.R. wireless gamepad, the R.A.T.M. wireless gaming house, a F.R.E.Q.M. mobile headset and the…

Windows RT Jailbroken to Run Desktop Apps

Windows RT has been hacked to allow desktop apps to run on Microsoft’s ARM-based OS. The trick circumvents a setting which usually restricts ARM-based apps to Microsoft’s built-in ones, so that unsigned desktop apps can also be installed. The Verge explains: Using a method to exploit the setting in memory, the vulnerability could allow Windows…

HTC Reports Its Lowest Profits Since 2004

Despite releasing a handful of stellar handsets, the end of last year brought bad news for HTC. The company’s posted a profit of just $34.5 million for the final quarter of 2012—its lowest ever since 2004. https://gizmodo.com/htc-droid-dna-review-verizons-big-beautiful-beast-5961246 For some perspective, that’s a $99 million drop compared to the third quarter of 2012 and a staggering…

Craigslist has expanded its map-based listings to yard sales and flea markets. Happy hunting! [Tech Crunch]

D-Link’s SharePort Go 2 Is a Feature-Packed Pocket Router for Road Warriors

This teeny portable router from D-Link is everything a human holed up in a hotel room could dream of: Wi-Fi hotspot, emergency battery and wireless media sharer, all rolled into one. The device can take a single Ethernet connection—like you’d find in your hotel room—and turn it into an instant Wi-Fi hotspot to share between…

HP’s Tiny Pocket Playlist Records Hulu or Netflix Video Then Shares It via Wi-Fi

This sleek, simple HP pebble is more powerful than it looks. The Pocket Playlist is a portable storage device which can store and record media from a host of sources, then stream it to five devices over Wi-Fi, no internet connection required. The stick is capable of streaming unencrypted content—movies, music, images, whatever—to up to…

A Time Warner Tie-In Just Turned Your Roku Into a Full-On Cable Box

Verge is reporting that Roku and Time Warner have announced that the cable company’s app—which offers up more than 300 channels of live TV—is coming to the little purple puck. That essentially turns the $50 streaming device into a full-on cable box. It’s amazing news for Roku and those who own the device, but it’s…

Dropbox is finally available for Windows 8 and RT. It’s slim on features, but it’s better than nothing. [WIndows Store]

Move Over GPS, a New Positioning System Has You in Its Sights

GPS is now so widespread that we take it for granted. But it’s not always perfect—so what if a new technology could achieve more than those triangulated military satellites in the sky? In fact, a team of researchers has been mulling exactly that, and come up with a new positioning technology called Locata. New Scientist…

Teenager Posts About Drunk Driving on Facebook, Then Gets Arrested

Jacob Cox-Brown had a pretty wild New Year’s Eve. So wild that he decided to drive home drunk. The problem came, though, when he decided to post about his journey on Facebook. The 18-year-old posted a message on the Big Blue explaining: “Drivin drunk… classsic 😉 but to whoever’s vehicle i hit i am sorry.…