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If you’ve ever been on a road trip with someone who has totally different taste in music than you, letting them play DJ is a major test of your friendship. If you can figure out how to compromise between the Rat Pack and Slipknot, you might as well make each other godparents to your first…
DIY’s have emerged as one of the key ways that people are keeping themselves sane under quarantine, with videos dedicated to tie-dyeing to hair-cutting to sourdough-baking racking up millions of hits apiece in recent months. Now, it turns out one of the slightly less wholesome corners of these digital DIY-communities has attracted the attention of…
Paul Vasquez, the colorful character behind the viral “double rainbow” video, has died. Vasquez, 57, died Saturday in the emergency unit at the John C. Fremont Hospital in Mariposa, California, a spokesperson for the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Gizmodo. The spokesperson did not comment on Vasquez’s cause of death; however, Vasquez posted on…
For tiny little devices that you pop in your ears for listening to music, the name AirPods makes a lot of sense. Even when Apple released high-end in-air earbuds with a slightly different design and built-in noise canceling, the AirPods name still held up. But when it comes to over-the-ear headphones, continuing to stick with…
There’s plenty of reasons not to leave your laptop unattended, but a Dutch researcher has found yet another. With just a screwdriver and five minutes alone with your computer, a hacker could potentially take advantage of your Thunderbolt port to read and copy all your data—regardless of whether it’s encrypted, locked, or set to sleep.…
After designing a curved basketball backboard that redirects every shot through the hoop, Shane Wighton has engineered a new and improved version that’s even more forgiving by actively tracking a ball’s trajectory and then repositioning the backboard so every shot is nothin’ but net. Wighton’s previous design took a passive approach to turning anyone into…
Purely on the level of physical appearance, Mark Zuckerberg is unprecedented; I doubt he’s ever once heard the phrase “you know who you look like?” unless the follow-up was “an unfinished police sketch left out in the rain.” But if we’re talking about Zuckerberg the man—or, more precisely, the nihilistically expansionist tech mogul—the historical record…
Iran’s military accidentally hit one of its own ships with a missile during a training exercise on Sunday, according to a new report from Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency. At least 19 people were killed and 15 were wounded, according to several reports early Monday, a substantial revision from earlier official reports that claimed only…
Accidentally hitting reply-all on an email thread was one of the earliest online faux pas to emerge. This week, Microsoft began rolling out a feature to help save future inboxes from ever knowing the horror. Aptly named “Reply All Storm Protection,” it detects possible reply-all screw-ups and essentially puts all recipients on a temporary time-out…
Yes, dear readers, another week has gone by. I’m just as amazed as you are. Although time has just about thrown me for a loop, I’ve been taking comfort in checking out what my favorite cats on Instagram are up to. It’s soothing to see them sleep the days away and play with their toys…
Days after South Korea relaxed its social distancing measures, Seoul, its capital city, has tightened them once more after dozens of new coronavirus cases were linked to bars and nightclubs. On Saturday, the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, shut down the city’s bars and clubs and claimed that at least 40 infections were connected to the…
The coronavirus pandemic has kicked the Trump administration’s concerns regarding America’s dependence on Asian factories for supplying critical technology into overdrive. According to a new Wall Street Journal report, officials are in talks with several semiconductor companies about potentially building chip factories within the U.S. in an attempt to ramp up the country’s manufacturing capabilities.…
More than two years later, the battle between ex-Google engineer James Damore and the company is over, although we won’t know much about how it ended. Earlier this week, Damore and three other men asked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed that the company discriminated against conservative white men. Google also joined their…
Thanks to a few patent filings that have surfaced over the last two years, we’ve had an idea that Sony’s been tinkering with finger-tracking technology for a line of new VR motion controllers. It’s still unclear whether these controllers are intended to be a successor to PlayStation Move or part of the kit for the…
On Friday, Google announced it’s rolling out some new features for its video chat app. No, not that one, the other one. No, the other other one. This latest update adds a “family mode” to Google Duo, the search giant’s mobile-friendly answer to Apple’s FaceTime and an app that you’d be forgiven for confusing with…
California’s 20 million-plus registered voters will be issued mail-in ballots for the upcoming November election, Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday. In-person voting will remain available, albeit with new restrictions due to public health concerns regarding the covid-19 pandemic. Newsom issued the mandate via an executive order signed Friday, citing projections from health officials that the…
Uber, which has maintained for years that it’s not actually a car service and that the people who do drive cars for Uber are actually its customers, has made a startling heel-turn and plans to offer some healthcare benefits to workers. Or maybe it’s not so startling. The announcement comes days after California sued the…
Yesterday, the prominent bitcoin investor Michael Terpin announced that he’d filed suit against the ringleader of a “SIM swap gang” that he’d been chasing down since 2018, following the theft of roughly a collective $24 million in bitcoin from his digital wallets. And it turns out the culprit, in this case, wasn’t a criminal mastermind,…
Two months ago, Comcast joined the crop of broadband giants taking part in the push to “keep Americans connected” in the midst of the current pandemic. For many of the big names on the list, this meant laying off on late fees and service cancelations for their low-income customers for a straight 60 days, and…
During a time when more people are sheltering at home and practicing social distancing, Seattle is making the closure of some streets permanent to allow residents and families to use them for outdoor health and exercise at a safe distance. Back in April, Seattle announced a pilot for what it called the Stay Healthy Streets…