Sam Biddle

Look Back on Your Awesome Life with Facebook’s 2012 Personal Roundup

The best part of Facebook is using it as a mirror, and what a mirror they’ve made today—a Timeline that pulls together your “20 biggest moments,” life events, how many people you friended, and other crowning achievements. So what’ll you find? I was presented with a group shot I took on Election Night (significant!), a…

North Korea Says It Just Put a Satellite in Space (Updated)

North Korea just tested another one of their ICBMs made out of twigs and rubber bands into the air, where it quickly disintegrated and fell into the Pacific Ocean. Again. Update: Maybe it worked this time? https://gizmodo.com/north-korea-defies-the-world-and-launches-menacing-rock-5901325 The Japanese government, which doesn’t appreciate rockets being flung around willy nilly, is pissed—despite the fact that North…

Twitter vs. Instagram: Ultimate Filter Battle Royale

Twitter and Instagram want you to decide between the two of them. They used to be very different, but as of today, you can use them both to apply faux-vintage filters to your pictures. But only one can be the best. It’s not exactly a fair fight—Instagram boasts more than double the filters of Twitter…

Here’s a USB Drive in a Deep Fryer Because Hey Why Not

There’s probably a term you learn if you’re an econ major to describe the point at which your product is so similar to every competitive product that you deep fry it in order to differentiate. Here it is. LaCie makes great portable storage stuff—hard drives, flash drives, and the like. Their little XtremKey is a…

The Year in Hacking

Hackers embarked on a strange voyage this year, beginning with spectacular, chaotic success, and ending with a whimper. We saw Anonymous nosedive from the most feared hacking force in the world to disorganized bench warmers. The dizzying highs, the stupid lows: here are 2012’s greatest hacking hits. January — Anon Avenges Megaupload Our dear Anonymous.…

Gifts for The Obsessive Gamer

You have someone in your life who loves gaming. You want to get them a gift. But you can’t get them Black Ops II, because they snatched that up the day it dropped. Boost their gear arsenal instead. Hey there! You might notice our gift guides look a little different this year. That’s because we’re…

Hold On To Your Butts: There’s a New Instagram With a New Filter

Nashville? Brannan? Rise? More like rise out of bed and go to hell, because a new Instagram update just dropped with big improvements and a new filter. Yeah, a new one. Go Instagram your eyeballs which just popped out. Instagram 3.2—which should be available for download right now—has a redesigned face. Here’s what matters: New…

The New MySpace Review: Just Die Already

MySpace is back, again. But this time, it realizes how horrible it used to be—and almost everything old is gone. It’s a totally fresh start. Unfortunately, New MySpace is like Old MySpace in one very important way: It’s still stupid. An important caveat: I was invited to use New MySpace before it opened to the…

If You Order Amazon Gift Wrap, You Might Get This Instead

Amazon lets you pay a few extra bucks to “gift wrap” an order in case it’s being sent to someone special. Say, this holiday season! What they don’t tell you is that it’s being done by a mule. Redditor thinkimasofa sprung for the extra $3.99. He was expecting this. Instead, he received this. Close enough,…

The Best Way To Sext

Here we go again, talking about apps for horny people way more than usual. But that’s because there’s a new king: Snapchat. It sounds like something designed for children. But really, it’s really designed for penises. And if you use Snapchat wisely, you can be the emperor of the dick pic. https://gizmodo.com/sexting-on-snapchat-isnt-as-safe-as-you-think-5965929 What exactly are…

Sad Chinese Factory Workers Photographed with the Cheap Things They Build

Having a bad job is better than having no job, but there’s no doubt that monotonous, bottom-wage manual labor is the pits. Photographer Michael Wolf snapped this haunting series of Chinese workers building cheap toys for… us. The labor depicted here is of a very different kind than that at Foxconn in one important way:…

Today, Facebook “subscribers” will start being labeled “followers.” It’s the exact same thing, so don’t be confused!

This Is Now the Coolest Microwave of All

Sure, this other microwave is “the most beautiful,” and it certainly is “classy,” “modern,” and maybe even “timeless.” But this microwave is a god damn dome. And because it’s a dome, it wins it all. It wins microwaves. https://gizmodo.com/is-this-the-most-beautiful-microwave-ever-created-i-sa-5935698 The Fagor Spoutnik has two major things going for it: it’s called the Spoutnik and it…

The Most Infamous Sexts of 2012 (NSFW)

Hacked pictures. FBI inbox sweeps. Cameras pointed at mirrors. This year was full of horny, naked Internet. As long as celebrities, politicians, and ordinary people like you, me, and the postman keep taking pictures of their penises, this will keep happening. It doesn’t make it right—nobody likes being shamed across the web. But it’s hard…

Your AT&T Bill Will Soon Be a Video

Deciphering wireless bills requires a degree of patience only slightly lower than interpreting the Constitution, so we’re very happy to see AT&T making theirs a lot more human-friendly. Starting today, AT&T is explaining your monthly costs with a simple video. Each video is custom-generated for a given billing cycle, and inserts your own numbers and…

This Credit Card Prototype Is So Old It’s Made Out of Cardboard

In 1960, engineers set out to develop the technology that would convert our society into debt-crippled shopaholics. But before we all started wielding plastic, it was made out of cardboard—and now you can buy the original IBM prototype. Despite being nothing more than a small piece of cardboard with some magnetic tape wrapped around it,…

Vice Magazine Just Accidentally Revealed Where John McAfee Is Hiding (Updated)

Next in line at the great journalistic jungle buffet is Vice, which sent down two dudes to chat with paranoid/fugitive John McAfee and reprint his various insane thoughts. And more: they forgot to clear GPS data in an uploaded photo. https://gizmodo.com/secrets-schemes-and-lots-of-guns-inside-john-mcafees-5958877 The data, gleaned from an iPhone snap of McAfee smiling and smoking a cigarette…

AT&T MiFi Liberate: The Best Mobile Hotspot I’ve Ever Used

If you can afford one, hotshot, an AT&T LTE MiFi will change your life a little bit: you have Internet virtually everywhere you go, a wireless high-speed network in your bag. Most mobile hotspots are lousy. This one is stellar. What Is It? A tiny portable wireless hotspot that lets you jack up to ten…

Europe’s Killer Drone Is Alive and Flying

It looks like a furious Cylon, it subsists on croissants and lattes, and now it’s successfully on its way to blowing things up: the European nEUROn drone just made a giant leap. https://gizmodo.com/europes-first-stealth-drone-looks-like-an-angry-cyborg-5877900 The 41-foot wingspan UAV—built through a partnership between France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and Greece—had its first successful takeoff over the weekend.…

Here Are Barack Obama’s Hands Typing on a Laptop Right Now

President Obama is answering questions on Twitter. This is what it looks like. Here are his hands—on a keyboard. It’s a MacBook Pro, of course, because he’s the President and he gets whatever he wants. He’s also using the Twitter web client—no TweetDeck. Nothing fancy. A populist. The web client is the client of the…