Tom Hawking

Tom Hawking's posts

Windows 11 with Pacman

Here’s How to Check If Windows 11 Is Secretly Gobbling Up Your Disk Space

...and how to ask it nicely to stop doing so.

Privacy & Security Tom Hawking Jul 7

Amphibious cyborg cockroach

Scientists Built Amphibious Cyborg Cockroaches and We Regret to Inform You They Work

Next week: cyborg locusts!

Biology Tom Hawking Jul 6

Petty Million banner screenshot

What Is the Whiniest Country in the World? A New Site Aims to Provide a Definitive Answer

Disclaimer: the answer may not be definitive, and I intend to complain about it.

Culture Tom Hawking Jul 3

Surah Koran

Typographers Have Spent a Thousand Years Trying—and Failing—to Render Arabic Properly

How a millennium of kludges and workarounds led to one man's "will not fix."

Culture Tom Hawking Jul 2

Flagdoku game

World Cup Watchers: Test Your New Flag Knowledge With This Weirdly Addictive Game

Vexillophiles of the world, unite.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 30

Ameca robot

Why Is a San Diego Charter School Spending $500,000 on Two Humanoid Robots?

Is half a million dollars really worth a bad Nikola Tesla impersonation?

Artificial Intelligence Tom Hawking Jun 29

You're the OS game screenshot

Spend Five Minutes With This Hellish Operating System Simulator and You’ll Never Swear at Your Computer Again

Seriously, I'm sorry I had a gazillion browser tabs open alongside several hours' worth of unsaved work. Please don't crash. Please.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 28

Matthew Trahan in his 3D printed outfit

It’s Possible to 3D Print an Entire Outfit Now. ‘Should You?’ Is Another Question

One plucky YouTuber explores whether 3D printers might let us wrest back the means of production from Big Fashion.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 27

Jerry Gretzinger and his map

This Guy’s Fictional Map Requires an Entire Gym to Assemble

Four thousand separate panels, decades of work, and one deck of cards dictating everything.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 26

GTA Online screenshot

Are British Civil Servants Merrily Playing ‘GTA Online’ at the Taxpayer’s Expense?

Scandalous waste of resources or conservative media beat-up? Oh go on, guess.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 23

Age of Empires II goat

Frustrated Microsoft Researcher Uses Goats in ‘Age of Empires II’ to Demo the Absurdity of LLMs

Would you view a GoatGPT response differently to ChatGPT? Even if they worked the exact same way?

Artificial Intelligence Tom Hawking Jun 23

An illustration of a turtle wearing spy glasses and a a spy hat.

China’s Ministry of State Security Accuses ‘Spy Turtles and Spy Fish’ of Stealing Sensitive Marine Data

It all seems a bit fishy to us.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 20

Criterion Closet

‘The Closet’ Is the Next Best Thing to Actually Getting an Invite to the Criterion Collection’s Fabled Closet

Take as many titles as you like! To stream!

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 19

CrankGPT device

CrankGPT Is a Hand-Powered Chatbot to Guide You Through the Post-Apocalypse

Hallucinating your way into the larder.

Artificial Intelligence Tom Hawking Jun 18

Lego Pinball Machine

Lego Announces a Fancy, Playable, Space-Themed Pinball Machine Set

You'll have to provide your own sci-fi noises, though.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 17

Google Earth flight simulator

Google Earth’s New Flight Simulator Provides You With the Whole World to Crash Into

Explore the world in a new, not-at-all stressful way!

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 16

Animated badgers are seen dancing

The British Film Institute’s New Online Video Archive Celebrates Memes, How-Tos, and a Head of Lettuce

Archiving memes is tougher than it sounds.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 16

Ioccc Tompng source code

The World’s Weirdest Coding Contest Honors the Most Unreadable Programs

Welcome to your nightmare, Claude.

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 12

Boutywork Memecoin

Crypto Hits a New Low With Misspelled Memecoin Forehead Tattoo Bounty

Either way, this story is profoundly depressing.

Cryptocurrencies Tom Hawking Jun 10

COBOL first person shooter

Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL

No kink-shaming, but...

Culture Tom Hawking Jun 9

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