Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
After watching this video I feel like the best microwave I’ve ever used sucked very badly. What you see here is a concept for the Heat Map Microwave, which would have a built-in IR camera on top and a screen on the front, effectively allowing you to see exactly when your food has been heated…
As long as it’s existed the Etch-A-Sketch has been sold as a drawing toy, but in reality that couldn’t be a more inaccurate description. Using two twisty knobs is just about the least intuitive way to draw there is, and while the challenge is obviously part of the toy’s long-lasting appeal, these Etch-A-Sketch-themed notebooks are…
Samsung jubilantly announced at this year’s CES as 2015 being “just the beginning of an incredible smart TV future.” And they were right. So far, it’s incredibly bad. With in the last week, Samsung has had two major issues with its SmartTV platform. The first cropped up late last week when a concerning passage in…
And no, we’re not talking about Pop! Vinyls, for once (they already have those, of course). We’ve known for a while that Funko would bring Firefly to its Legacy Collection line of 6″ figures, but it looks like their reveal will be imminent, judging by these blurry images from Funko’s Toy Fair catalogue. The images…
This collaborative animated film tells the story of two snails in love tragically separated by a very busy highway—and a daredevil frog that risks his life jumping from one speeding car to another. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Auto-update is a hugely convenient feature when you want all of your apps to be right up to date, all of the time, without having to lift a finger. But there might be occasions when you want to stop some or all of your apps from upgrading themselves without your say-so. Here’s how to partially…
What do you do with your vacuum in-between visits from your parents? Does it just sit in a utility closet until you need to do a mad-dash cleaning the day before company arrives? That seems like a waste, and Mitsubishi apparently agrees because the company has created a stick vac that does double-duty as an…
One of the many, many reasons to love toys is that they often give us a sneak peek at upcoming movies or TV series we’re dying to know more about. It’s no surprise that Avengers: Age of Ultron will arrive in theaters alongside countless toys on store shelves, but ahead of its release Hot Toys…
BitStream is the daily source for all the news tidbits and tech rumors you may have missed in the last 24 hours—all in one place. The is how the UK does autonomous driving Created with shoppers, commuters, and the elderly in mind, the Lutz Pathfinder is the UK’s first fully autonomous vehicle, revealed today in…
Age of Ultron’s big bad can look awfully creepy when he’s working those James Spader-y robo eyeballs of his – and it looks like Hot Toys have captured them pretty perfectly in their latest figure. I’m not sure I want this figure on my desk, his eyes boring into my soul in judgement. Quit being…
This video uploaded by Virgin Australia shows how they repaint their airplanes. It took 11 days, 18 painters, and 260 liters of paint to remove the previous paint and repaint it by hand. My favorite part is when the paint melts, I could spend hours watching just that. Not all airlines do this job manually.…
This lovely night shot shows the abdomen of the second largest military transport aircraft made in the United States. I can almost hear the C-17 Globemaster moaning—”I’m hungry!”—but what’s actually going on in this photo? A camera using a slow shutter speed captures the light from a flashlight Airmen from the 437th Operations Support Squadron…
After watching Interstellar and hating it, designer Nick Barclay thought on Hal 9000 and a crazy idea popped into his mind: If a circle can be a main character in a film it could also be the protagonist of a poster. So he decided to make a whole series offamous movie posters using only circles.…
The number of reported thefts involving smartphones has dropped substantially in some of the biggest cities in America and the UK, according to an announcement by San Francisco, New York and London authorities. Following years of rising smartphone thefts, the trend finally started to reverse last year. Now, the cities report that number of stolen…
Valentine’s Day is almost here and the guys at Cinefix decided to pay an homage to sweet sweet love by putting together this interesting video ranking the (arguably) ten best sex movie scenes of all time. Here’s the list: Titanic (1997) Team America: World Police (2004) Weekend (2011) Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) Coming…
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a huge filament on the unhappy face of our Sun on February 10th. The scary fissure, which looks like a grimace on the surface of the star, is actually an enormous swatch of colder material hovering in the sun’s atmosphere. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explain: SDO shows…
Samsung’s next big flagship phone—presumably to be the Galaxy S6—will almost certainly be announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. According to Bloomberg, one model be all-metal and feature a screen that covers three of its sides. According to “people with direct knowledge of the matter,” there will be two versions of Samsung’s…
No matter how hard you try, now matter how much you want to develop a logical naming system for your documents, there is only one that you really ever use. And that’s final. No, I mean, really final. Final final. [Doghouse Diaries]
It’s over 100 years since the Titanic final, fateful journey. But tucked away in engineering journals dating even further back are some fascinating details about how the ship was built—and in this video, Engineering Guy Bill Hammack casts a thoughtful eye over them. Having sifted through images and information held in copies of The Engineer…
The proliferation of fitness trackers available alone may be enough to convince you that strapping one to your wrist will quantify your self better than any other piece of hardware. But, as a new study shows, your smartphone can do just as good a job. A new paper published in the Journal of the American…