Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Honestly, it’s pretty creepy. [CNET]
Maybe Facebook was paying attention when Elon Musk tweeted that he loves Overwatch. Just a day later, the site said it’s working on a game-streaming feature that would let us watch from the News Feed as Musk battle those particular robots. COINCIDENCE? Well, definitely, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t Facebook’s newest attempt to take…
As always, John Heisz can transform old, rusty blades into lovely works of art. This time, he turns a circular saw blade into a drawknife. A drawknife has two handles on each side and a blade that is meant for shaving down wood. Seeing a straight blade come out of a circular saw is pretty…
You remember the hell pit, don’t you? That giant abandoned hole punched in the Chicago landscape? Here’s a plan to make that hole a lot less holey. The 110-foot wide, 76-foot deep hole was dug with the best intentions. It was supposed to house the tallest tower in the Western Hemisphere, Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire.…
Watching dry ice sublimate (turn into gas instead of liquid) still manages to make me feel like a kid again. The kind of kid who is unsure of the difference between science and magic. Okay, not quite … I’m old now and it’s impossible to ever look at things so innocently anymore. But when I…
The are many reasons one might put off a much-needed home improvement project. Budget. Can’t find the right contractor. When it came to the tomb where Christians believe Jesus was buried, it was two centuries of infighting between some very possessive monks. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in the Old City of Jerusalem,…
Nintendo’s Power Glove is a favorite among hackers looking for new uses for the decades-old peripheral. This latest project puts humanity in dominion over our quadcopter subordinates. Hackaday spotted this ingenious tinkerer during Maker Faire in late May. The glove itself has been completely gutted and filled with modern components, including flex sensors on each…
Vroom. This video of Tokyo called Tokyo Aglow by Justin Tierney shows the city by rail and by road, offering an especially hypnotizing take on an already electric city. The video accelerates the trains to hyper speed, and the effect bends the lights into what looks more like a trip through a space tunnel than…
Last year, Converse redesigned its iconic Chuck Taylor sneakers for the first time in almost 100 years. The new version of the kicks went over so well that now Converse is updating its classic All Stars too with a modern take that replaces the canvas uppers with a lightweight and breathable knitted material. Don’t point…
In his writings, naturalist and intrepid explorer Alexander von Humboldt recounted how natives in Venezuela used horses to lure and trap electric eels. Many scientists thought it was just a tall tale, but a new paper lends credence to Humboldt’s account of eels aggressively leaping up and stunning the horses with a series of high-voltage…
If you’re reading this you got hacked, Drake. Drake fucked up one of the most basic tenets of online security, and his Twitter appears to have been hacked because of it. For the thousandth time: Don’t use the same password over again because it will come back to bite you in the ass. The person…
Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, is nearly upon us. The event runs from June 13-17 and traditionally serves as the launching point for major updates to iOS, OS X, and the company’s other platforms. In the last few years, the updates to Apple’s two major OSes has been relatively small and boring for anyone who…
The years have not been kind to the former gods of glam rock—and particularly not to William Bruce Bailey, better known as Axl Rose. There’s a minor meme, which pokes fun at the weight the once-lithe Guns N’ Roses frontman has put on since his band’s glory days. And as TorrentFreak reports, he’s using the…
They like to do things big in Dubai, including a newly-approved concentrated solar power project that will generate 1,000 megawatts of power by 2020—and a whopping 5,000 megawatts by 2030. The Dubai Water and Electricity Authority (DEWA) has announced the launch of the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) project. Located on a single site…
After years of decline, the number of deaths on American streets are starting to rise again, a troubling statistic for many cities that are working hard to get more people walking and biking. Now Los Angeles’s Department of Transportation (LADOT) is trying something new: Enlisting a sound artist to bring attention to the city’s traffic…
Author Annie Proulx moved to Seattle just two years ago, but she’s already pulling up stakes. Why? Two reasons: She recently discovered that she’s allergic to the trees surrounding her house. But she’s also sick of all the techies “high-fiving each other” in Seattle. Proulx is an author who you might know best from the…
Getting a buttery smooth tracking shot requires special camera gear, like a Steadicam rig. It also requires a skilled operator, very unlike the man in this video. Demonstrating a stabilizing rig at the recent Cine Gear Expo in LA, he failed to keep a secure hold on the Arri digital cinema camera it was supporting,…
Turns out Banksy inspires more people than just hipsters and art snobs. Bridge Farm Primary, an elementary school in Bristol, England, recently named a school house after the infamously anonymous artist. And Banksy just returned the favor. The school discovered this full mural (below) this morning after returning from a mid-term break. According to Jon…
Klaus Teuber is a name that’s probably not immediately recognizable to you but might ring a bell in the back of your mind because as the inventor of Settlers of Catan, his name graces every box. Surprisingly, board game design was originally Klaus’ hobby, but after selling 25 mil copies of Catan, he no longer…
Better graphics requires a better graphics card. This much is intuitive to most people. But asking what makes a GPU different from a standard CPU is almost a trick question, because at their most fundamental level they’re the same damn thing. Both pieces of hardware perform the same kind of task: they get a problem—in…
