Leslie Horn

Most Beautiful Items: January 17 – 24, 2014

All you see from your window might be ice, but from this screen you’re eyes will catch nothing but beautiful things. From the worlds of art, architecture, and design, here are the most lovely things we found this week. Don’t you dare go outside; it’s way too dangerous. A frozen Niagara Falls light show looks…

11 Tech Support Questions My Mom Has Asked Me (And How I Answered)

Being a tech blogger has made me the default tech support for my family. Especially for my mother. While she’s pretty savvy, all things considered, she still asks me some pretty funny questions. Rather than getting frustrated that she can’t remember how to upload photos from her camera onto her computer for the umpteenth time…

How a Giant Underground Air Conditioner Supplies Zermatt With Snow

Ski season and crap tons of snow don’t always coincide with one another in the way resorts would like. That means they have to use the power of machines to manufacture snow. The resort of Zermatt, Switzerland, does that on a polar vortex-like scale, thanks to 1,000 machines pumping out 7 megawatts of power for…

Watch These GIFs With Music (As They Were Intended)

GIFs are beautiful and pure. But sometimes they need sound. Here’s a neat site that will let you listen to music over your GIFs. All you have to do is press the top play button. Many of the animated loops are recognizable from 90s commercials. Dream Phone? Oh, you better believe I had one of…

3D-Printed Nails Are Way Crazier Than Your Typical Press-Ons

Man, I really love nail art. You might not share the same kind of enthusiasm for crazy custom manicures, but we can all agree that the Laser Girls’ 3D-printed nails are decidedly cooler than your average press-on acrylics. The Laser Girls is a collaboration by designers Sarah C. Awad and Dhemerae Ford. You can see…

How Often Do You Blow Through Your Internet Provider’s Data Cap?

Chances are, your cable provider has allotted you with some kind of bandwidth cap, depending on your plan. You stream stuff on Amazon, download seasons of the HBO series du jour, but how often—if ever—do you go over that limit? Even if you don’t, we’re interested to know how much of your allotted data you’re…

Snowblower turns Fifth Avenue Apple Store glass into beautiful painting

The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan? You know the one—it cost $6.7 million to build. Yesterday, a snowblower smashed one of its 15 seamless glass panels, which created this beautiful cracked vignette of New York City. It looks like a painting. Image above from Twitter Plenty of pictures of the smashed panel have…

Oculus Rift Lets You See What It Would Be Like To Swap Genders (NSFW)

Oculus Rift is amazing in that it lets you experience other worlds beautifully and immersively. And, in this project by BeAnotherLabs, it’s letting users experience a few minutes as the opposite gender. (Warning: some nudity ahead). https://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598 The group calls it the “Machine To Be Another.” Kind of weird and kind of cool, and to…

Report: Amazon Might Create an Online TV Service To Compete With Cable

The next company in a seemingly never-ending deluge of company working on some kind of online TV streaming service? It’s Amazon, according to a WSJ report. Amazon has apparently approached some major “media conglomerates” to strike up some deals for a service that would combine channels you might get on cable with content you could…

Purveyor of all things candy, Hershey, just made the delicious announcement that it will be making 3D-printed sweets in the future using machines from 3D Systems. Is your mouth watering?

Sacramento Kings Accept Bitcoin Now, Still Can’t Buy a Bucket

The Sacramento Kings will become the first pro sports team to accept BitCoin. Great news for all nine of their fans. The franchise will accept the currency for merchandise and tickets starting March 1, and transactions will be processed through BitPay. It’s sort of ridiculous and fitting that the Kings are the first team to…

Photoshop Is Getting Support For 3D Printing

Adobe is updating Photoshop to let you create 3D-printable files within the program. Hooray! The update is available today for free for existing Creative Cloud subscribers, or for $50 for new sign ups. It converts models into STL, OBJ, 3DS, Collada and KMZ files. These files can then be exported to a MakerBot machine, outsourced…

How One Group Is Infiltrating North Korea With USB Drives and Balloons

North Korea is very famously closed off from the rest of the world, but one organization—Fighters for a Free North Korea—is working to breach the walls of the regime by airdrop. But they’re not using conventional means and fancy technology; they’re delivering info via balloon, The Atlantic reports. From a launch site near where the…

The Best Her Parody Yet Has a Punchline Worth Waiting For

In the new Spike Jonze film Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a dude who falls in love with an operating system. But what if it the gender roles were flip flopped? This parody from HitFix shows a situation that might be all too familiar. https://gizmodo.com/her-review-loneliness-never-looked-so-beautiful-or-fu-1485058395 There aren’t any spoilers here (in fact, I haven’t seen the…

Google Drive just got an activity stream that details everything you and the people you’re working with have been doing with your documents and spreadsheets.

50 Cent: Ayo Technology

Off the 2007 album Curtis, this song is an oldie, but a goodie. Since we met with 50 Cent last week as he was hawking his #SMSAUDIO headphones at CES, and the song says freaking tech-nol-o-gy in the title, well there’s your tech peg, nerds. https://gizmodo.com/50-cent-would-like-to-talk-to-you-about-his-headphones-1496720365 Even so, this song has almost nothing to do…

Muppet Twitter Arguments are the Best Twitter Arguments

Forget about Breaking Bad and throw Leonardo DiCaprio and his squinty, squinty eyes in the trash. The arguments over their merits are boring. But this? This is what a Twitter charge for the new Muppet movie to sweep the Golden Globes would have looked like. Oh yeah, in spite of the fact that Muppets Most…

Who Do You Actually Email Nowadays?

My email is full of spam and bills and newsletters I mean to read but never do. Rarely do I use my personal account to actually, you know, communicate with my actual friends and family. What about you? Do you, like me, detest your email account? Are you wishing you never subscribed to X, Y,…

The XX: Shelter

After six days straight of a gadget deluge at CES, I’ve been laying low all weekend, listening to calming music. For some reason, I’ve found comfort in the soothing sounds of the XX. Shelter? Please, give it to me. I need it. And I’m finding it alone and in the dark where there are no…

This Is the Biggest Goddamn Smartwatch I’ve Ever Seen In My Life

Wow, okay. Where to begin? This is the Pine by Neptune. It’s a 2.4-inch watch that you’re supposed to wear on your wrist, in spite of it being much, much bigger than your wrist. Seriously, why need a phone when you have this thing? It does everything your phone already does in a decidedly more…