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For a while now, Paweł Zadrożniak has been treating us to some classic tunes played on his Floppotron— a musical instrument built from 64 floppy disk drives Frankenstein-ed together. His latest work nails the Ghostbuster theme song just in time to update your trick-or-treat playlist. Some songs on the Floppotron work better than others. Of…
Chrome OS is getting there. What started out as a way to make an OS that runs well on inexpensive laptop components is slowly marching to a point where it may actually be a real competitor to Windows, macOS, and Linux. And based on a some code found in the developer preview for Android 8.1,…
America, these are troubling times we live in. All the more reason we need to talk about the real issues dividing our great nation: namely, have any of those soft, simpering eggheads at Google ever even seen a damn hamburger? Maybe some of you have lost your way and can’t recall the simpler times of…
Water slides are best when they take you on a long meandering ride through curves and hills, but not every amusement park has room for a big installation. That’s why a German company has combined water slides with Ferris wheels to create this dizzying attraction that will have riders wondering which way is up. The…
Designer Robert W. Blakeley isn’t a household name, but every American has seen his work. No, he wasn’t employed by Coca-Cola or Ford or Disney, but instead worked for the US government. Blakeley’s most famous design? He came up with the yellow and black fallout shelter sign. Sadly, he died last week at the age…
Thanks to the wonders of the web, you can get your content up and in front of an audience of millions in seconds—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you still own that photo of your dog once it is live. Signing the terms and conditions on your favorite social networks could mean signing away the rights…
The lead up to Halloween is one of the best times of the year, with spooky parties, scary movies, and copious amounts of cheap candy in stores. But Halloween night, when you’re constantly running to the door to give away your coveted candy stocks, is less enjoyable. So why not build a Lego robot to…
You live and then you die and then you rot in a hole—or so say the elites, with their glasses, and their PhDs in neuroscience. This bummer reality has never appealed much to Americans, 72 percent of whom believe in some kind of afterlife. It’s a comparatively rarer, though still sizable, breed of American who…
In 2015, Google released DeepDream, a bonkers, art-generating neural net users put to work rendering everything from disturbing dog collages to even more disturbing psychedelic porn. DeepDream may have just been the prelude to less aesthetically off-putting but much more significant applications of the slightly creepy technology—such as generating photorealistic, high-definition images of people who…
2017 has been a brutal year in northern California, where a series of wildfires have burned through hundreds of thousands of acres of land and left dozens dead or missing. The deadly Tubbs fire in northern California, which is estimated to have burned roughly 5,300 buildings across 36,807 acres and killed at least 22 people,…
Elon Musk and his Boring Company have been very busy digging a deep, long hole under Los Angeles, and Musk wants to show it off. On Saturday, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO posted the first glimpse of a mostly finished portion of the Boring Company’s test site in California. Said tunnel looks pretty legit by…
Apple is very protective of its trade secrets, particularly unauthorized leaks of information about upcoming products. Case in point: The tech giant reportedly fired an engineer after his daughter recorded a video showing off features on a pre-release iPhone X at Caffè Macs, the company’s high-end employee cafeteria at its Cupertino, California headquarters, last week. Per…
Roger Stone is one of President Trump’s most vicious attack dogs, whose bark has always been worse than his bite. But the dog has been muzzled, at least by Twitter. Stone has been suspended from using the social media platform, and according to Buzzfeed it’s a permanent ban. Stone is a veteran of numerous political…
Have you ever fantasized about having a house completely and totally managed from the comfort of your desk chair? Or are you just too lazy to bother flipping switches, but inexplicably willing to devote hours and hours to figuring out a computer program that does it for you? Today’s smart home tech makes all of…
The Puerto Rico Energy Commission has launched a probe into why its efforts to rebuild the commonwealth’s electrical grid after taking a direct hit from Hurricane Maria in September are proceeding so slowly, with less than even a third of the electrical grid back online to date. According to Buzzfeed News, an eight-page document shows…
Is Mark Zuckerberg spying on you? Oh, yes, absolutely. Is he secretly recording your voice like, all the time? Probably not. Per the BBC, Facebook was once again compelled to shoot down rumors it is secretly hijacking computer and mobile device mics to covertly record conversations after Reply All presenter PJ Vogt raised the issue…
Pre-orders for Apple’s wallet-busting, $1,000 iPhone X went live this week, and initial signs were that even those customers who stayed up until the 3am ET (12am PT) opening were given shipping delays placing their orders weeks past the November 3rd launch date—possibly well into December. So it’s not surprising that some quick-thinking entrepreneurs (okay,…
Teforia was touted as the only “machine-learning tea infusion device,” on the market, and soon, the market will have a Teforia-shaped hole in it. As recently as last week, the device would run you a cool grand. Today, you can make algorithmically-infused tea for $199. All sales are final because the company is dead. https://gizmodo.com/a-400-smart-tea-machine-gave-this-brit-an-existential-1796219286…
You know how you were planning to impress trick-or-treaters this Halloween by handing out full-sized Snickers bars? If you live in San Francisco, don’t bother, because nothing you can do on October 31st will ever best Tom BetGeorge’s incomprehensibly over-the-top Halloween light show. Not only is BetGeorge’s house saturated in thousands of lights, it only…
Medicine is perfect for heartwarming stories. Some close relative is facing the most hopeless prognosis, such as being in a vegetative state. Someone tries a wild treatment, and boom, people are crying, the relative is awake, and the headlines go viral. But science doesn’t really work this way. A man recently “woke” from a vegetative…
