Bob Sorokanich

These DIY Office Supply Weapons Definitely Won’t Get You Fired, Nope

You graduated from middle school and found your way to a desk job, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave rubber-band-powered projectile launchers behind. YouTube’s mist8k is here to show us how to build three weapons of mass distraction, using stuff you’ve already got at your desk. Now (goofing off at) work can be…

Our Favorite Android, iOS, and Windows Phone Apps of the Week

Hey have you heard? Summer officially starts tomorrow. That means tomorrow’s the longest day of the year, which means you’ll spend even more daylight hours staring furtively at your smartphone. At least give your app folder a breath of fresh air with these, our favorite new apps this week. Android Email by Google Gmail is…

A Man in a Tiny Booth Wrote a Song About My Whole Life in 30 Minutes

When I got invited to Custom Melodies by Eternal Lips, I was skeptical. It sounded like another painfully self-aware ode to irony, the kind of art that can’t see straight for its own winking. Perhaps it is. But it was also one of the most genuinely sweet experiences I’ve had in NYC. http://www.mmuseumm.com/cm Mmuseumm is…

Google just added a handy feature for Android users: now, when you Google musicians or bands, you can hear their music in your favorite player app with just one click. [Google Blog]

The MTA Clearly Doesn’t Watch Futurama

This morning, passengers headed to NYC on the Metro-North rail line hit serious delays. The culprit? A suspicious package found near the Farfield, CT station. Or rather, a suspiciously Bender-shaped package. Bite my shiny metal ass, commuters. To be fair, it’s always better safe than sorry when it comes to unknown parcels in public places.…

Report: A 2.5-Inch Display Apple Smartwatch Is Coming Soon

If rumors are to be believed, Apple’s entry into the smartwatch world is coming soon: Reuters says production will start in July, with an expected launch date sometime in October. And it’s going to be (literally) big. Admittedly, this is still speculation, and we’re hesitant to call this definitive reporting. But unnamed sources at Taiwan’s…

Good news for Windows Phone users: Microsoft is bringing remote-lock and remote-wipe capabilities to WinPhone in a future software update. When it comes to you depends on your phone manufacturer and carrier, but this stuff is reducing thefts in other phones, so hopefully it’ll be a good deterrent for WinPhoners too. [Microsoft Blog via The…

The iPhone’s Kill Switch May Actually Be Reducing Theft

Good news, honest law-abiding citizens: Police in NYC, San Francisco, and London all report that after years of rising smartphone thefts, the trend is finally starting to reverse. For the first time, reported iPhone thefts are dropping. See? Those security features do work. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and his San Francisco colleague George…

How Amazon’s Fire Phone Compares to Its Toughest Competition

Amazon’s long-rumored Fire Phone is finally here, folks! It’s got a crazy cool-looking face-tracking 3D display that knows the position of your head at all times and Firefly, a scanner that identifies (and helps you buy) just about anything. But funky features aside, how does The Everything Store’s phone stack up to the major competition?…

You Can Preorder Amazon’s Fire Phone Right Now

Just can’t wait to get your hands on Amazon’s new Fire Phone ? You’re in luck: you can preorder it right now (from Amazon, natch) and have it arrive on July 25th. As we’ve mentioned, the Fire Phone is an AT&T exclusive (sorry, Verizon, T-Mo, and Sprint customers), available for $200 on-contract for the 32GB version.…

Firefly: Amazon’s Fire Phone Can Identify Almost Anything

Amazon’s new Fire Phone had to be about getting people to buy stuff from Amazon, right? Of course. Enter Firefly, which turns the Fire Phone into a sort of universal object scanner that’ll recognize books, DVDs, or jars of Nutella, and help you buy them—from Amazon. This sounds a lot like both Amazon Flow and…

Amazon’s Fire Phone Comes With Unlimited Photo Storage

Jeff Bezos just unveiled Amazon’s new Fire Phone, and with it a great feature for big-time photo-snappers: free, unlimited cloud storage for the pictures you take with your Fire Phone. That’s really quite handy. Of course, there may very well be an asterisk on that—it might just be for Prime members, or what have you.…

Rumor has it Google will unveil a new in-car Android interface at I/O next week. Dubbed Google Auto Link, the setup would let drivers control their Android phones via the car’s built-in controls and display screen, not unlike Apple’s CarPlay. [Auto News]

Color-Changing Suit Shows Injuries That Paralyzed Athletes Can’t Feel

Paraplegic athletes push their bodies to the absolute limit—and sometimes beyond. When an athlete injures a body part he or she can’t feel, that can lead to some very dangerous situations. Now, a design team at Imperial College London has an ingenious solution: an athletic suit that uses off-the-shelf pressure sensing film to show where…

Fleksy Messenger Makes Typing on a Smartwatch Slightly Less Impossible

Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatch can be handy for checking your text messages without whipping your phone out of your pocket. But it’s impossible to type on—literally, you can’t reply to texts on the watch. Fleksy just changed that with Messenger, a Gear 2 SMS messaging app that brings Fleksy’s intelligent keyboard to the very, very…

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A Look Inside the Amazon Lab Behind Tomorrow’s 3D Smartphone

Tomorrow, Amazon unveils its entry into the smartphone arena , a long-rumored device that supposedly uses eye-tracking tech to create the first 3D smartphone display . BloombergBusinessweek spoke to some of Amazon’s mad scientists for the inside story on Lab126, the skunkworks tasked with making the 3D phone a reality. As Brad Stone (author of…

OK Go Proves Again That Eye-Popping Optical Illusions Don’t Need CGI

Ignore the grumblings of some sourpuss Gizmodo staffers: OK Go’s new video for “The Writing’s On the Wall” is just straight-up fun for your ears and your eyes, thanks to a plethora of optical illusions rendered in the real world, rather than on a computer. The crazy one-take mindbender genre is familiar territory for OK…

Steaklocker Could Let You Dry-Age Delicious Beef Chunks at Home

Dry-aged beef. It’s a phrase that gets fancy steak-lovers’ mouths all drooly. The magic dance of enzymes and moisture reduction creates out-of-this-world flavor and tenderness that, unless you’ve got restaurant-grade equipment, you can’t recreate at home. Steaklocker wants to change that, with a device on Kickstarter that promises to bring that meaty magic to your…

The First Vine From Outer Space Packs One Earth Orbit Into Six Seconds

Astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this Vine shot from an observation window on the International Space Station this week. It shows one full orbit of the ISS around planet earth. It’s the first Vine recorded from outer space, and it’s literally out of this world. Reid is following in a great tradition of outer-space social media…