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The best way to get along in a foreign country is to know the local lingo. But if you don’t, your smartphone can help you cheat your way through. The instant picture translation feature rolled into Google Translate last month is only a tap away, though you shouldn’t take everything it says at face value.…
Mega is one of the only cloud storage services that offers end-to-end encryption, a great feature for people who value security. However, after political pressure from MPAA-affiliated goons, PayPal recently decided to stop providing payment services to Mega. What gives? This is crazy, but unfortunately, it’s not all that surprising. Mega’s long been in the…
You know what skill kids are never taught in school? How to perfectly apply stickers and decals to their toys. And while it’s hard enough to properly stick them on a flat surface without training, it’s impossible to do so when it’s curved. Or at least it was impossible until Mattel designed a kid-friendly vacuum…
Star Wars fans, good news – the new 6″-scaled Black Series figures are coming soon. And even better news! With them comes a new Princess Leia at long last, the first figure for the character in the line outside of an appearance in her Slavegirl outfit. The new waves of 6″ Black Series toys come…
Maybe you’ve heard of Tasker. If so, welcome nerd. If not, it’s a robust but complex Android app that lets power-geeks (like me) program their rooted phones to do just about anything. Now, thanks to a Tasker plug-in called AutoWear, you can extend that sort of ludicrous control to an Android Wear smartwatch. It’s absurd…
Athletes were among the first to adopt and wear fitness trackers, which is why they’re all styled to look like an athletic accessory. But since everyone can benefit from a little motivation to stay active, especially those stuck behind a desk, we’re starting to see fitness trackers that look more like classically-styled watches. Withings’ Activité…
Let’s all agree on one thing: The Federal Communications Commission passing the strongest net neutrality rules in America’s history is a step in the right direction. But that didn’t stop an army of naysayers from crowing about an imaginary government takeover of the internet or how the new plan would slash their profits. Some chose…
The latest in the long line of Super Sentai series, Shuriken Sentai Ninningers, made its début in Japan this week, and Bandai are celebrating with some fantastic toys of the mechs from the series – including these new ‘artisan’ versions of the new mechs. The new figure in the Artisan DX line of Sentai mechs…
This impressive Marine Corps light show is almost as good as any frame from the movie Tron. What you see is actually an AV-8B Harrier preparing to take off aboard the USS Essex (LHD 2) Wasp-class amphibious assault ship during training off the coast of San Diego, on February 24. [Sgt. Emmanuel Ramos/U.S. Marine Corps]
Rumors of Swatch making a smartwatch of its own were recently confirmed to Gizmodo by the company, we just don’t have any idea of when it will happen. So if you’re tired of waiting to strap a genuine smart Swiss watch to your wrist, Swatch has just upgraded its touchscreen Swatch Touch with the slightly…
Munchies made this really interesting short documentary where chef and food writer Dave Arnold travels the world interviewing animal-rights activists, scientists, producers, and politicians to shed some light on what is really going on with foie gras. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Porn is back on Blogger, Ericsson wants to stop all U.S. iPhone sales, and the Pebble Time crushes its own Kickstarter record. All this and more in today’s BitStream. Earlier this week, Google took a strangely conservative take on scrubbing porn from its blogging platform, Blogger. It was an especially weird move considering it use…
I know these kinetic sculptures by Korean artist Choe U-Ram will haunt me dreams tonight but, their soft movements and the dramatic lighting hypnotized me, and now I have to watch these videos over and over again. Silver Insecta Lamp URC-1 Custos Cavum SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
The baize rubs against your wrist. A small bead of sweat rolls down your forehead. You ease the corner of your two cards from the table to glimpse at what you’ve been dealt. “How much chance do I have of winning with this,” you think. Well, if you had this neat visualization, you’d be all…
His technique may not be orthodox but it’s definitely efficient. I timed it and he chops an onion in, roughly, ten seconds. Which is less than what it takes to do it with a domestic food processor—considering that you have to cut the onion first, put it in the machine, close the lid, chop it,…
Concrete is an amazing building material: cheap to create, strong when used correctly, and hard-wearing, too. But turning it into exotic and shapely forms can be prohibitively complex and expensive. Now, a 3D printer capable of producing one-off moulds as large as a phone booth could help turn architectural dreamw into affordable reality. The Engineer…
This beautiful piece of shiny scientific instrumentation is a brand new class X-ray microscope sitting inside a vacuum chamber at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Things have sure changed since we were at school. More precisely, its’a a multi-layer Laue lens module inside the vacuum chamber of the microscope installed at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline at…
Ericsson has announced that it’s filing seven new lawsuits in a U.S. court against Apple for infringing its patents—and it’s asking the U.S. International Trade Commission to block iPhones from sale, too. All told, Ericsson claims that Apple infringes a total of 41 of its patents. They describe some of the fundamental ways mobile devices…
Amazon is a keen experimenter, especially when it comes to delivery. Now though, a new patent suggests that it’s thinking of 3D-printing its products as they make their way to you. 3Dprint has unearthed a patent which explains that it could print three-dimensional goods on-demand for customers—which it already does—even from the inside if its…
Never has the color of a dress prompted so much excitement on the Internet. But now, along with some fascinating insights into the science of vision and lessons in overexposure, we have an enduring reminder of the meme, in the shape of an optical illusion truly for the modern age.[XKCD] https://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-real-color-of-that-goddamn-white-and-gold-d-1688381523
