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When Chrome OS first appeared, it was practically useless without an internet connection. Now, an offline Chromebook is no longer the functionless brick it once was because there are dozens of web apps with offline capabilities. Here’s everything you can do today on Chrome OS without online access. Create and edit documents As you might…
Using your fingerprint to verify your identity is not only more secure than a password, there’s also no complex string of characters for you to forget or repeatedly mistype. But if you’re also determined to use your ancient laptop until the day it dies, Synaptics’ will soon have an easy and unobtrusive way to upgrade…
The Amazon rain forest is full of enormous flora and fauna that are more than happy to kill you without blinking an eye. But compared to say, a giant centipede or a harpy eagle, the giant earthworm seems downright friendly. If the prospect of befriending a five foot worm is your cup of tea, that…
Former Tor Project employee and well-known computer security and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum has issued a statement denying public accusations of sexual assault. His statement was made days after anonymous claims of sexual mistreatment led him to step down from the Tor Project. “In the past few days, a calculated and targeted attack has been…
Humanity has been given another chance to redeem itself: Google’s Go-playing computer will compete against the world’s best Go player, Ke Jie, before the year is out. The decision is a change of heart for Ke, who is 18 and comes from China. Ke initially boasted that he could beat the AlphaGo machine, which sounds…
The onetime public face of Verizon—famous for asking “can you hear me now?” in its ads—has defected to Sprint. And it’s not subtle. In Sprint’s new ads featuring actor Paul Marcarelli the actor calls out his old employer by name. The ads are even called “Paul Switched.” “Hey, I’m Paul, and I used to ask…
First the hackers came for Katy Perry. Now they’ve come for someone who should know better than to use the same password on multiple sites: Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out he’s as dumb as the rest of us. Zuck’s Twitter and Pinterest (though, crucially, not Facebook) accounts were hacked over the weekend, and, supposedly, it wasn’t…
Elon Musk may think we’re all living in a video game, but the man still has suggestions for which video game we should play while we’re all stuck in this simulation. And of course the game involves fighting sentient AI. On Sunday, the tech billionaire tweeted a recommendation to play Overwatch, Blizzard’s new multi-player shooter…
It had all the elements of a catastrophe: a truck hit an electrical pole in the bone-dry canyons outside LA, exploding a transformer. Winds were brisk with temperatures above 90 degrees. Despite that, the 500-acre blaze that looked particularly scary has only damaged three structures, reportedly because local residents had take the right precautions to…
Every Friday night comedian Bill Maher puts on a show with an interesting mix of guests. But this past Friday, Maher repeated a claim he often makes that was finally smacked down by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Namely, Maher said that conservatives are consistently more anti-science than liberals. That’s bullshit. “Let’s not pretend that Democrats and…
We love the destruction video channels: hydraulic presses, waterjets, and slingshots. Now, Joerg Sprave, the guy behind the Slingshot Channels has come up with his own version of a press. The Hydraulic Press channel sent him some gifts, which prompted Sprave to go and create his own ‘The Rubberaulic Press’, powered with a 7.5 kilogram…
YouTube has more tricks up its sleeve than you might think—including a built-in video editor and tools for the extra paranoid—and you can actually use the regular YouTube site to record anything happening on your computer screen. From showing off an app to the world to showing the grandparents how to use Skype, there are…
We’ve all seen the videos of people who keep tigers or panthers as pets in their homes, or of these animals playing, and it’s easy to forget that these large animals are some of the most deadly predators out there. Big Cat Rescue of Tampa Florida is an educational non-breeding sanctuary that takes in abused…
Bose likes to talk about how they invented noise-canceling headphones. While technically true, it didn’t seem to give them any advantage over the competition that’s now saturated store shelves with wireless ear gadgets of various kinds. But, finally, Bose is making its most popular noise-canceling headphone, the QuietComforts, completely wireless. And there was much rejoicing.…
Of course you’re going to use the camera on your phone to snap some superb selfies and sweeping landscapes, but there are plenty of other uses for it that you should be aware of. Here are three other tricks your camera can pull off, and the apps you’re going to need to make the magic…
We love watching things get crushed by a hydraulic press, but how about a waterjet? There’s a YouTube channel for that as well. In the channel’s latest video, they cut a hydraulic press in half. This has got to be one of the more decidedly meta moments for YouTube destruction channels like this – there’s…
There’s a reason for why museums have signs saying not to touch the objects on display. Some visitors to the National Watch & Clock Museum of Columbia, Pennsylvania learned that the hard way. The museum was home to a unique clock designed by James Borden. It looks like the visitors were touching and manipulating the…
When you’re as big as this cruise ship—and it’s really big at 964 feet long, 105 feet wide, and 91,000 tons—it can be hard to stop. So you have to make sure you slow down in time or you’ll destroy things because once again, you’re a really big ship. This cruise ship, the Celebrity Infinity,…
It’s not the best way to capture the uniqueness of a city like Tokyo—all the way up in the sky, and away from the energy—but these aerial views are nice, because they show off the massive sprawl and the lighting of city life at night. There are just so many damn buildings everywhere. And it’s…
If you were young once upon a time, and maybe had some sips of alcohol and then made the mistake of going to a crowded club because your friends wanted to, you’ll know this scene that Mitchell Crawford paints in the short animation Club Drunk all too well. The crude animation perfectly captures the messiness…
