Computers

Future Versions Of Chrome Will Kill Flash, In The Name Of Battery Life

It’s no secret that Google Chrome hogs RAMand battery life like an Overly Attached Browser. In an effort to reduce the strain on your poor overwhelmed laptop, Google is introducing a feature that will auto-pause ‘unimportant’ Flash elements on a webpage. Hell yes. In a blog post, Google’s Tommy Li, a Software Engineer and Power…

Asus ZenBook Pro UX501 Review: Just Ignore The Word “Pro”

You want a laptop that looks nice. Asus understands that. That’s why the company has tried so hard to build a better MacBook. The ZenBook line has given birth to many beautiful, powerful, desirable machines that offer PC people a chance to preen—even when they’re surrounded by MacBooks at their local cafe. The newest addition…

Why Facebook Is Evil, According To Mindblowing New Series Mr. Robot

The dark, psychological hacker drama Mr. Robot slayed audiences at South by Southwest, and now it’s become a series on USA. It’s one of those rare shows that actually seems to understand what’s corrupt and rotten at the heart of the tech industry — and wants to burn it all down. We talked to the…

How Android Is Becoming the New Windows

It’s more nuanced than you think. Last week at Google I/O, one of the striking themes of the keynote was Sundar Pichai’s focus on Android as the future of Google. Android isn’t just the core of Google’s booming smartphone and tablet business; it’s also core to the company’s next phase, as they move into what…

Why Google Translate Will (Probably) Always Suck

If it seems like Google Translate and Skype Translator have solved the language barrier, you’d be right, in the same sense that smoke signals solved long-distance communication. Machine translation much difficult still translate long way go to, as YouTuber Tom Scott explains. As Scott points out, language is about far more than just communicating simple…

This Crazy Shape-Shifting PC Is the Gaming Rig Optimus Prime Would Use

If you’ve always been disappointed by the simple way the Asus Transformer changes shape, prepare to finally be impressed. This Asus gaming PC tower flexes and folds more like Opitmus Prime than any two-in-one tablet ever could. A collaboration by the Asus Republic of Gamers and case manufacturer In Win, this transformer-esque case was spotted…

Corsair Bulldog: A Living Room PC With a Face Only a Gamer Could Love

If you build your own PCs, you’ve probably considered parts from Corsair. They sell well-liked memory, cases, power supplies, coolers, SSDs, even peripherals these days. Now they’re introducing their own do-it-yourself living room gaming PC. And gosh is it big and ugly! It’s called the Bulldog. Yeah, I’m not quite sure why Corsair decided that…

New Asus Tablet Has Swappable Backs That Add Extra Features

Asus has announced a new ZenPad tablet that allows you to swap its back panel. But unlike phones of yesteryear, these changes add new features—like extended battery life or a more powerful set of speakers. The new ZenPad 8 Z380C, Verge reports, can use a back panel with added battery capacity to give you an…

Mystery Woman Casually Recycled a $200,000 Vintage Apple-1 Computer

One woman’s trash is literally everyone else’s super-expensive, rare $200,000 piece of computer history. Most of the time, recycled electronics are too crappy to sell on Craigslist. But one California e-recycling center recently received one of the most coveted gadgets ever: A genuine Apple-1 computer. An unidentified woman dropped off the desktop computer, one of…

Asus Zenbook UX305 Review: A Great Laptop for Just $700

The new MacBook is way too thin. The Dell XPS 13 is the Windows laptop to beat. But say you’re looking for a slightly cheaper razor-thin machine? For just $700, the new Asus UX305 is a pretty damn good deal. What Is It? A 13.3-inch MacBook Air-styled laptop running Windows 8.1 instead. Thinner and lighter…

Have You Ever Had a Computer-Based Dream?

The other day I woke up convinced that Gawker Media management sent out an email that never actually existed. The dream was so real I had to search my inbox just to be sure. Has this ever happened to you? For those of us who work at Gizmodo, the experience seems pretty common. It makes…

The original Raspberry Pi board just got a price cut: the Model B+, which spent a while as the flagship board before the Pi 2 came into being, is now just $25. The Raspberry Pi foundation claims this is due to manufacturing efficiencies found in the manufacture of the Pi 2 board; I’m sure it…

Russia’s Building A (Slow) Computer Chip Of Its Very Own

While Russia might have fleets of tanks and fighter jets to call its own, there’s one important product it still relies on the western world for: computer chips. But thanks to the launch of the Elbrus-4C, the 2006 Intel Pentium chip finally has a competitior. The top-of-the-line (in Russia) chip uses a proprietary architecture called…

This Is the World’s First 6TB 2.5-Inch SSD

If you need masses of storage but like your laptop’s performance super-fast, then this new SSD may scratch your itch. With 6 terabytes of storage, this is the world’s largest capacity 2.5-inch SSD (for now). The Fixstars SSD measures just 9.5 millimeters in thickness, and offers read speeds of up to 540 MB/s and write…

Microsoft Surface 3 Review: The Tablet I Want At The Price I Don’t

I’m dancing on the grave of Microsoft’s original Surface tablet, and I feel no remorse. It’s hard to feel sad—it was a beautifully crafted ten-inch tablet that ran a crippled version of Windows. It was awful. Now it’s dead, and I’ve got a way better tablet. I’m so happy. What Is It? It’s a cheaper,…

How to Fix Most Any Computer Glitch By Yourself

Knowing the difference between HDMI and USB qualifies me as the local tech “expert,” so folks often invite me around to fix their computer problems. I’ll let you into a little secret, though: Most of the time, I’m not doing anything all that impressive or magical. Troubleshooting basic computer problems is actually pretty straightforward. That’s…

Someone turned Lego computer consoles into life-size working electronics

Half the fun of playing with Lego is actually building your creation. The other half is using your imagination to bring it to life and wonder what it would be like to be inside your rocket ship, race car, or space station. A talented artist named Love Hultén decided imagination wasn’t enough, so he turned…

We Only Just Solved a 33-Year Old ZX Spectrum Challenge

When the ZX Spectrum was released in 1982, a problem was posed in chapter 19 of the computer’s manual. Now, 33 years later, that problem has finally been solved by a team at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science. Chapter 19 of the manual explains ‘BEEP’, a BASIC command that made the Spectrum play…

IBM Just Cracked One of the Biggest Problems Facing Quantum Computing

Quantum computing could make complex calculations trivial—but it’s currently fraught with problems. Now, though, IBM has solved one of the biggest, allowing it to detect the internal errors that could otherwise render quantum calculation useless. One of the many problems exhibited by the breed of future computers is that they exist in the delicate and…

Rebuilding Cambridge University’s First Computer

In 1946, scientists at Cambridge University built the institution’s first ever computer—the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. One of the first to be used to solve real scientific problems, it was scrapped to make way for its successor. Now, it’s being rebuilt. During its lifetime it gained the ability to perform some pretty complex operations—-dealing…