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The holidays can be the most wonderful time of the year for some, but only when all of the baking, shopping, and decorating is done. Decking the halls and trimming the tree can often be a gruelling all-day affair, but YouTube’s the Hacksmith has come up with a time-saving solution in the form of a…
I am bad at Super Smash Bros. Maybe you are too! We could listen to our betters, who claim the only tact for improving is to “get gud,” or we could employ the time-honored tradition of modifying our hardware to make our gaming a little less shitty. This isn’t me encouraging you to apply some…
There are many gadgets that can be bought for friends and loved ones during the holidays. Some are useful, or thoughtful. Some would have seemed miraculous a decade or two ago. But just get them a battery pack. “Oh… thanks,” they’ll say, unwrapping an uninspiring brick of lithium, plastic, and maybe manganese, “neat.” In their…
All this talk about whether or not Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is problematic has obscured a very important question—i.e., what was actually wrong with Rudolph’s nose? Like, medically? Did no one ever think of taking him to a doctor, to see if everything was ok with his nose, before being mean to him about…
As you might have noticed, another year is drawing to a close. What you might have missed are all the tips and tricks we’ve packed into the Field Guides of 2018—and so here are some of our favorite hacks and time-savers, from exporting Fitbit data to finding hidden Windows menus, that we think are worth…
Everyone by now is familiar with the specific kind of partisan rage that manifests on Facebook, particularly with the kind of tailored memes meant to incite political outrage that find a home on its platform. But according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Facebook mulled a tool meant to facilitate greater tolerance among…
The holidays are nigh, and this year’s naughty list is long indeed—and from revelations of reckless privacy violations over at Facebook headquarters and continued labor abuses at Amazon to the generally terrible way humanity has treated our homeworld, your erstwhile chroniclers at Gizmodo have been adding names to it until the very last minute. This…
The crypto crash has continued, with about $700 billion wiped off the market since its peak at around $800 billion at the start of the year, and leaving a trail of destroyed startups behind it. Bitcoin at one point closed in on the $3,000 price mark, well below both its peak of nearly $20,000 in…
While Santa Claus himself may be sovereign, the people who work behind the scenes to track his movements in real time are not. But any concerned parties can breathe easy knowing that in spite of a government shutdown that may or may not continue on through the new year, the government organization that’s tracked Santa’s…
Updated 12/23/18 9:30 a.m. ET: Sussex Police have released the two suspects arrested in connection to the drone incident at Gatwick Airport without charge, Detective Chief Superintendent Jason Tingley said. “Both people have fully co-operated with our [inquiries] and I am satisfied that they are no longer suspects in the drone incidents at Gatwick,” Tingley…
Following an investigation by the New York Times that revealed a group of researchers mirrored tactics used by the Russians to oppose Republican candidate Roy Moore in last year’s special election in Alabama, Facebook has reportedly closed the accounts of several individuals involved with the effort. The Washington Post on Saturday identified one booted individual…
This week, the Oogie Boogie Man made of deflated basketballs currently residing in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, made good on his threat to shut down the federal government if Congress doesn’t approve $5.7 billion in funding for his U.S.-Mexico border wall project. To recap, the president has previously claimed that said wall could be…
After unnecessarily shutting down the accounts of some of its customers, Slack is now apologizing for the significant overreach. Days after some users reported that they had been barred from Slack without warning, the company said Friday in a lengthy blog post that it “mistakenly” blocked some accounts in a botched attempt to comply with…
Sprint is about to pay heavily for its tax sins. The New York attorney general’s office is coming down hard on the mobile carrier, who it claims engaged in deceitful tax behavior. The company, it alleged, “knowingly failed to collect and remit” state and local taxes on calling plans for almost a decade to the…
Autonomous car company Zoox is poised to become the first self-driving car company approved in California to shuttle public customers, Reuters reported Friday. Zoox was granted a permit by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to operate its self-driving cars as part of its Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot program. While the permit will allow…
Following news that Juul had secured a massive, nearly $13 billion deal with Big Tobacco, it was also revealed that staff of the vape company stood to receive bonuses potentially reaching in the multimillions. A special $2 billion dividend was part of the $12.8 billion deal for Altria’s minority stake in Juul and was designated…
There’s a handful of House Democrats wrestling with the idea of signing a document that, it’s safe to say at this point, will have no historical impact whatsoever. If it is remembered at all, it will be remembered as a list of people who failed to overturn one of the most unpopular decisions by the…
The road to 5G is complicated, and to get there, we’re going need a whole lot of new infrastructure, devices, and updates to make it work. But it seems in its quest to be first, or the best, or something, AT&T is cutting some corners to make it seem like 5G has arrived earlier than…
Thanks to a Federal Communications Commission vote last week, wireless carriers now have more control over your text messages. If that sounds ominous, that’s because it is—so much so that now’s the perfect time to ditch regular ol’ text messaging altogether. Here’s the deal: The FCC’s decision means wireless carriers now have a greater ability…
Algorithmically generated content can sometimes turn out to be hilariously nonsensical or remarkably dumb. But researchers at the University of Washington (one of whom sold her startup to Facebook) developed a system that uses machine vision to create indisputably cool 3D animations. The system, called Photo Wake-Up, creates a 3D animation from a single photo.…
