Kyle Wagner

The Xbox One Can Tell When It’s Overheating, and Adjusts to Fix It

So here’s a cool thing the Xbox One can do: It automatically recognizes when it’s overheating—probably because you’re an idiot and left a pizza box on top of it—and can adjust on the fly. In fact, it’s designed with extra room to make those adjustments. In our chat with Xbox’s General Manager of Console Development…

Snowden: Any Unencrypted Message Goes to Every Intelligence Service

The New York Times Magazine has a quick Q&A with Edward Snowden, conducted through intermediary Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who’s been filming Snowden since earlier this year. It’s mostly straightforward, except for one potentially significant reveal. The nuts and bolts of the interview are pretty standard, though still interesting given the subject: Snowden went…

The Xbox One Is Worse For Everyone If Kinect’s Not Mandatory

Using Kinect with your Xbox One is no longer mandatory. Yay, right? No. Wrong. Again. This is another dumb subtraction from Microsoft, presented as choice. https://kotaku.com/xbox-one-wont-actually-need-kinect-plugged-in-microso-1113142909 It’s simple: As a standard-issue, always-on-and-enabled FEATURE of the Xbox One, Kinect was something that had a hugely better chance (not a guarantee, but a good chance) of being…

I Really Want a Giant Unabridged English Dictionary and I Don’t Care

Does a 35-pound dictionary count as a gadget? I don’t know. I don’t know. The Oxford English Dictionary is useless. It serves no practical purpose, is devoid of any remnant of meaningful utility, is obsolete, is a 19th century relic compiled over decades during which the whole of the Transcontinental Railroad was built and John…

The New York Public Library’s Selling 22,000 Vinyl LPs This Weekend

Hell yes. The NYPL’s Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound is selling off 22,000 LPs at cut-rate prices this weekend. The LPs are all duplicates the library has received that it already has a copy of on file. So, they’re priced to move, with all the proceeds going to expanding the collection. Here are…

The Weirdest iOS 7 Beta Feature (?) Yet

So here’s something strange. Syncing from iCloud seems to have changed a bit. And I honestly can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. After installing the newest beta for iOS 7 and loading up a backup from iCloud, I noticed that my apps weren’t automatically downloading as they do in iOS…

Report: The Cheap Kindle Fire to Be Replaced by Cheaper Fire HD

The Kindle Fire HD is the Amazon tablet for most people. Last year, it was just $40 more than the improved-but-uh-why-would-you-buy-this-again second gen Kindle Fire 2. BGR has an unconfirmed report, though, that last year’s Fire HD is this year’s Fire is very confusing for everyone, probably. There are already reports of the new Fire…

Scientists Find New Genetic Link for Autism and Schizophrenia

Despite all the years of research that have gone into them, cognitive conditions like autism and schizophrenia are still largely a mystery. Here’s one nice step toward figuring them out, though: Researchers from UCLA have discovered a specific genetic trait in a small community in Finland that might have some clues. There are communities in…

NSA Appears to Be Tracking the Anonymous Internet

That custom-built malware that’s tracking down Tor network users? Turns out it might not be the FBI behind it after all. It looks like it might be the NSA. After the Firefox JavaScript exploit was uncovered, there was a rush to figure out who was behind it. At first, that looked like the FBI. The…

The Best Way to Troll Someone Who Just Got Lasik

Here’s a screenshot from a Reddit user giving a course in Advanced Trolling Theory. The text isn’t actually text, just an image of blurry words dropped right into the post. Here’s some context on the message board board: it’s a private message board and is therefore not indexed in google http://digitalgangster.com and it’s something the…

I Don’t Want to “Just Root It”

Can we all agree that rooting a phone is not for everyone? That’s kind of important, because these days, Android actually is a platform for most people. I was kind of excited yesterday when I realized that 1. the Moto X is awesome and 2. I can get it on Verizon with something resembling stock…

Teacher Takes Student’s Phone, Sets Passcode as Math Problem Answer

This is what you want from a math teacher. The word problem you see here is what happened after a Redditor’s “friend” was caught using his phone during math class. The teacher confiscated the phone, and set the passcode to a certain number, found by answering the problem. It reads: A car dealer offers Lachlan…

Microsoft Just Improved the Xbox One’s Graphics Powers

Well, Microsoft does seem to be listening to people. A sticking point for a lot of fans on the next-generation console has been that it’s less powerful than Sony’s PlayStation 4. In a podcast today, though, Major Nelson talked with Xbox’s Marc Whitten about some changes to the Xbox One that will let it crank…

Yep, That’s the Saddest Craigslist Ad of the Week

Heartbreak can take on a lot of physical forms. A box of unsent love letters. An engagement ring you never got to take out of your pocket. A luxury mattress your partner boned someone else on that you have to sleep on every night which you’re now selling for $150 on craigslist. This poor guy…

Everything Right and Wrong With Apps in One Bizarre Haagen-Dazs Concerto

Haagan-Dazs should make its own app, you can just picture a coked-up branding executive typing into a sweat-soaked BlackBerry after wrestling a horse to the ground with his bare hands. And so they did, they built a Haagen-Dazs app that’s really a 3D augmented reality violin concerto. It’s wonderful and horrible, and it’s everything. Imagine…

Good News! The Moto X Will Have a Stock Android Google Play Version

The Moto X is actually pretty awesome all on its own. But super nerds can be happy it’s also going to come in a baby-fresh stock-Android-having Google Play version, with zero bloatware, and available directly from Google. It’s a trend we continue to be real happy about. https://gizmodo.com/moto-x-hands-on-forget-specs-this-thing-is-awesome-991536492 The Galaxy S4 and HTC One are…

Here’s Lionel Messi Playing Soccer Dressed as a Light Monster, for Some Reason

A person who takes drugs dressed Lionel Messi up in a suit with a bunch of LEDs on it and filmed him at 1000fps with a Phantom camera. I can’t stop watching it. This is a commercial for an adidas shoe or something, but whatever. It’s just mesmerizing watching the little maestro run around like…

Technology Really Is Making You Fat (But Not How You Think)

It’s lazy to point out that technology makes us lazy. Of course it does. The entire idea of technology is predicated around an efficiency whose end is specifically a decline in human exertion. You know, lazy. But technology’s actually making us fat for another reason altogether. Kathy Sierra wrote a piece last week pinned to…

Microsoft Has to Change SkyDrive’s Name Because of a Lawsuit Now, Too

Ha. In a pain-in-the-everything development for Microsoft, it’s agreed to change SkyDrive’s name because it infringes on a trademark owned by British Sky Broadcasting Group, one of the largest media organizations in the UK. This is, of course, deeply funny. Last year, Microsoft had to rename its Metro interface after it lost a slapfight over…

Hey, Microsoft Office is out for Android now, too. Now you can work even more. It’s not optimized for tablets, though, so stick to the Office web apps if some deranged kidnapper is forcing you to work on a tablet. [Google Play]