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Restaurants have to strike a fine balance between eerily quiet and shouting-across-the-table loud. At Oakland’s Oliveto, the high-tech solution is a set of mics, speakers, and sound-absorbing panels that constantly record, modify, and pipe back the ideal background noise—essentially real-time Photoshop for sound. In The New Yorker, the magazine’s music critic, Alex Ross, recounts a…
Once a year, toy companies from all over the world converge on New York to reveal what everyone will be fighting to buy their kids—or themselves—when the holidays roll around again. And once again we grabbed our cameras, put ourselves in the mind of a child (that was the easy part), and set out to…
File this one under Please dear god let this not be a joke. And even if it is, it’s still funny. Twitter user John Anthony points out that Comcast’s new Xfinity XR5 remote has a stamp on the back that looks very familiar, a fact seemingly confirmed by this eBay post for the remote. In…
The Arrow we see on television is essentially Batman with a Bow, and we love him for it – but Oliver Queen’s stern nature as the archer of undetermined viridian hue is exactly well reflected in this new Funko Pop toy. In fact, he looks pretty damn adorable for a vigilante who goes about sticking…
Kids shouldn’t be allowed to play on the stairs. (Too dangerous!) Adults, on the other hand, just need a good reason. This interactive Skeeball-style game played with bouncey balls and flashing lights might just be the reason you need. The game is called Ballroom. Or at least that’s the name of the interactive art project…
Love. Is there anything more important? No. Which is why, even though Valentine’s Day may be over, you still have nothing more important to do then check out the 12 photos of love, submitted for this week’s Shooting Challenge. Winner: Haystack Rock For Valentine’s weekend, the girlfriend and I headed to Portland. This mostly involved…
Starting this month, the venerable University of Massachusetts at Amherst will no longer allow Iranian nationals to matriculate as graduate students in many of its programs in engineering and the natural sciences, including physics and electrical/computer engineering. Over at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin has done an excellent job following this story, which began with this…
São Paulo is Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city, a bustling concrete jungle of 11 million people. Now imagine the city going for days without water for drinking, bathing, or cleaning—it’s a dystopian scenario not far from São Paulo’s reality thanks to a water crisis made worse by drought. As the New York Times reports, taps…
Google’s Chromecast is cheap and awesome and it’s about to get even better. The latest changelog posted by VLC—which mentions a “Chromecast output module”—suggests that the Swiss Army-knife of media players will finally get Chrome support. If that means what we think it means, you’ll soon be able to cast any video from the VLC…
Pegas is a Romanian company that makes bikes. And they have a new app that lets you sample colors from the city landscape, and find a paint match to use on your Pegas City Bike. It’s a weird idea, but the result is this diverting video about what it’s like to bicycle in Bucharest. Which…
Hot Victorian Moustache Simulator Steampunk shooter The Order comes out this week continuing February’s sudden surge in video game goodness. But it’s not all there is. Are you planning to pick anything up? Come talk games and deliciously rendered facial hair in this week’s Tuesday Game Room! What have you been playing this week? I…
Mine is specific: Laying in my bunkbed at night and hearing the crackling fuzz of the dial-up as my parents connected our brand-new internet in their office across the hall. At least, that’s what I think I remember—memory is nebulous, and it’s entirely possible that we’d had internet long before. Either way, it’s a very…
If you use more than one desktop, laptop or tablet running Windows 8.1 then you can use Microsoft’s OneDrive platform to sync some settings across all of these devices, from the background wallpaper to the passwords stored in your browser. Here’s how to configure the feature and to switch it off if you don’t want…
Infowars.com, radio host Alex Jones’ virtual mecca for conspiracy theorists, preppers, and otherwise non-sheeple alike, is full of bullshit. But the most spectacular of this particular brand of insanity lies in its online store. Where you can buy a chance to save yourself from the New World Order—in bulk. Most of Alex Jones’ “cures” to…
Throughout the 20th century, radio nerds were trying to figure out how to build the perfect headphones. Over-the-ear varieties could get hot and sweaty. In-ear varieties would fall out. And then there were these clamp-ons from 1927, which looked like the least comfortable of the bunch — despite what the manufacturers insisted. The June 1927…
Comic artist Kris Anka is drawing a different Steve Rogers a day over on his tumblr, and half way through the month we’ve already got some wonderful doodles of Cap that show Steve loves changing his look just as much as he loves his country. Which is to say very, very much. So many Steves!…
There are plenty of very good, fun, and helpful things that drones can do—things like monitoring crops and delivering beer and saving lives. Unfortunately, over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released the first draft of its rules for commercial drones, and guess what? The rules would make a lot of those things illegal.…
It only took more than a century, but we now know how tall the Washington Monument really stands thanks to—you guessed it—science. Oh, and we know the exact location, too. Finally. Odd though it sounds, it’s actually not surprising. The Washington Monument was built in 1848, long before the technical standards for building height we…
Making a photograph today is a matter of pressing a button and letting a bunch of electronics do their thing. Before that we had film, and before film we had even more cumbersome processes. Did you know that making photographs once involved materials like egg-whites, asphalt, and platinum? Watch these videos to hear and see…
The other day, Google started running a promotion where you can get a free 2GB of space for your Google Drive account just by reviewing your security settings (which you should be doing anyway). Today’s the last day it’s good. Do it. Dooooo iiiiittt. For your own good. Instructions below! https://gizmodo.com/get-2gb-extra-google-drive-space-just-by-checking-your-1684923230
