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Professor Brian Kernighan is computing heavyweight: he worked at Bell Labs, helped develop Unix and was one of two authors of the C programming language. Here, he talks with one of the UK’s foremost computer science professors, Professor David Brailsford. Time to geek out. Yes, it’s 30 minutes long. Yes, Brailsford isn’t quite a chat…
You don’t buy an instant camera because you care about photo quality. You buy it because you yearn for a simpler, easier time, when photographs were tangible objects, and cameras came in cutesy colors and swallowed film. Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 70 is the newest addition to the existing Instax cameras. It adds such modern and…
LG’s Watch Urbane is one of the best-looking Android Wear watches you can buy (admittedly, not a high bar). The second edition takes the same formula, and adds a sprinkling of LTE. Oh, and there’s a bonkers new smartphone with two screens. The LG Watch Urbane Second Edition isn’t too different style-wise: a round P-OLED…
After the Ashley Madison fembot scandal, this scenario sounds familiar. Internal documents leaked by whistleblowers at dating site LOVOO, which boasts 36 million users across Europe, reveal the company used bots called “promoter bitches” to flirt with men and get them to spend Euros on the site. German tech site c’t has been investigating leaked…
Penitentes are nature’s ice sculptures: snowy pillars that form high in the Andean glaciers, where the air is particularly dry. Now physicists have figured out not only how these pillars form, but also why they tend to form at preferred spacings between columns. They’re called “penitentes” (or nieves penitentes, Spanish for “penitent-shaped snows”) because they…
New Yorkers like to make fun of LA’s subway. Angelenos like to make fun of how New York is a raging hellhole of gentrification that reeks of desperation and greed—but with great trains! So with their baseball teams meeting in the playoffs, it’s only natural that their transit systems start talking smack. LA started the…
Styrofoam: Cheap, convenient, and the bane of environmentalists. Americans throw away 2.5 billion foam cups every year, and the damn things just sit in landfills for millennia. Unless, that is, you sic a bunch of hungry mealworms on them. That’s right: Mealworms will happily subsist off a foam diet, turning the environmental scourge into carbon…
When it comes to insulation, forget cotton. This fleece hoodie will shed water while staying much warmer and, with a knit face, looks much classier than you’ll feel. Stio is a new outdoors apparel brand out of Jackson Hole. They make nice stuff that’s functional, but comfortable too. And man, are you going to be…
Gizmodo has confused Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday’s episode of Meanwhile in the Future was a little different from a lot of the other episodes we’ve done. Instead of exploring what a future might look like, we tackled whether a future was plausible. That future involved genetically engineering humans to reduce their carbon footprint. You can listen…
This little guy is a thorn in the side of Big Energy and the Republican politicians that serve it. Why? It was able to unite hunters, ranchers, land owners, local politicians, the USDA, the Audubon Society, universities, and even ConocoPhillips to prevent it from being listed as Endangered. Which probably ensured its long term survival.…
In an effort to ease the transition of would-be iPhone owners who fear losing the contents of their Android devices, Apple made a simple tool to help make the transition as smooth as possible.Move to iOSworks—even though it really doesn’t do anything at all. I spend a lot of time jumping from phone to phone.…
This is awesome. Here’s a guy who just passed his 9G centrifuge test, going through four different bouts of 9 G-force (and making funny awesome faces the entire time) and even lasting 10 seconds under 9G’s. High-G training is done to train pilots and astronauts to get them ready to deal with the crazy g-forces…
If you’re going to go off-road in your car or on your motorcycle, you need to know how to fix a flat tire. You’ll often be a long ways from help and likely without cell reception. Luckily, it’s easy to do. We just made a video showing you how. IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about…
Gizmodo wrote about our first impressions, our thoughts on 3D Touch, and put the camera through its paces, but I’m curious about your experience. Are you holding an iPhone 6s right now? Is it rose gold? I’ve gotten used to my trusty Samsung Galaxy S6 and am unsure if I should make the swap back…
BBC posted this truly stunning footage of a volcanic ash cloud just bursting with lightning and it’s totally staggering to see. It’s a violent phenomenon but in the picturesque setting of Patagonia, it almost looks like a painting that’s been animated. The burst of bolts almost looks fake. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us…
Unfortunately for us, we’ll no longer be able to publish exhaustive lists of the ugliest US government websites. But fortunately for the American people, any url ending in .gov is going to look and function better than it ever has before, thanks to new government-wide standards. The US Web Design Standards have been revealed: A…
Commuting affects your mental health, your physical health, and even the way you think about other people. And these changes are more profound than you might think. The average commuter spends about an hour a day heading to and from work, but plenty spend as much as three hours commuting. Those hours we spend in…
The chocolate bomb intended to kill Winston Churchill became the stuff of wartime legend. But depictions of the device and other cleverly concealed explosives were only recently rediscovered. During World War II, German sabotage experts invented an array of cleverly disguised bombs. At the time, Britain’s MI5 counter-sabotage and explosives unit, B1C, contained only three…
Here’s a fun little thing that you think shouldn’t be able to happen but totally understand why it happens after you see it happen. If you stick a candle in a bowl of water and let it burn, the flame will actually be able to be under the water level for a good amount of…
There’s a new Chromecast in town and Amazon’s Fire TV Stick is getting an update — which means it’s time for another streaming showdown. Roku’s stick hasn’t been updated since last year but we’re still throwing it into the face-off. Specs For the sake of matching up the best, we’re comparing Roku’s HDMI version of…