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Free software—truly free software—is undoubtedly a good thing. But given the rest of the world still uses that pesky stuff called money, how on Earth do you make a living from spending your time giving away software for nothing? In this video Matt Lee, the Technical Lead at Creative Commons, explains how he’s spent ten…
Keen not to be outdone by Apple, perhaps, Sony is said to be making a new watch whose surfaces are entirely made from e-paper. It will, according to Bloomberg, “emphasize style, rather than trying to outdo more technological offerings.” The news wire reports that the watch’s face and wrist band will be manufactured using a…
In another desperate bid to get rid of its handsets, Amazon has cut the price of its Fire Phone to $200 for an unlocked device (it still comes with a free year of Prime).
Meet Munchkin the Shih Tzu. Or as I like to call her when she’s wearing her teddy bear costume, a real life Ewok from Star Wars. Or maybe she’s just a real life teddy bear. Whatever she is, she’s super cute and when I watch her walk, I can’t help but smile. I usually think…
If you’re looking for two hours of deleted scenes and alternate footage from the original Star Wars Trilogy and hoping that they’d be masterfully edited together documentary-style, well, here you go. Garrett Gilchrist put together all this Star Wars footage you probably never seen before in Star Wars: Deleted Magic. There’s a lot of great…
“Growing up on the Reservation, the only show in town was movie night in the church basement,” director Neil Diamond says in the opening of the documentary Reel Injun. “Raised on cowboys and Indians, we cheered for the cowboys, never realizing we were the Indians.” This 2009 film explores the last century of Hollywood’s depiction…
You could hammer a nail into a wall or something but why not hammer a nail and turn it into a tiny sword? That’s right. It’s a completely silly exercise that could also be a half-commentary on creating useless objects but it also looks like a lot of fun to actually do too. Plus, it…
Sometime in the next 48 hours, you’ll likely be on a long drive, stuck at a hellish airport, or surrounded by the full chattering force of your extended family. If you’d like a moment of calm and quiet, put on Papercuts’s “Future Primitive.” The last time I’d listened to Future Primitive was in fact in…
The trailer for the new movie Jurassic World was released today. It looks fun! But some science-minded folks are already pouncing on the dino-filled movie for inaccuracies. Brian Switek, author of the book My Beloved Brontosaurus, writes that the film’s fictional super-intelligent, genetically-modified dinosaur shouldn’t have thumbs. Something about Brian’s tweet makes me think he…
We all have one of those holiday travel stories. That time you got to the airport and realized you forgot to click the buy button on the ticketing site. That time you stepped onto the train platform and the zipper on your suitcase broke sending all of your sweaters onto the tracks. That time you…
Sploid reader Andrew Seltzman sent us these videos of his custom-made radiation-shielded GoPro camera going under an industrial irradiator and getting bombarded by X-rays. Reminder: Getting irradiated by a particle accelerator doesn’t give you superpowers. I think. [The industrial irradiator] uses a particle accelerator to irradiate samples on a moving cart with a high energy…
The downright futuristic Morpheus prototype lander kicked off its newest round of testing with an anticlimactic soft abort ending the test before it started. At least this wee frog got a great view of the excitement! Top image: Morpheus fuelling up with liquid natural gas for a tether-test (left). Small frog hitching a ride on…
We’ve featured the amazing work of Isaiah Stephens on io9 before, and he continues to deliver some amazing stuff with these decidedly Tron-esque redesigns for the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. https://gizmodo.com/disney-princesses-dress-up-as-their-favorite-heroines-1448206336 Stephens’ upgrades the spandex of the original Rangers into full on body-armour that mashes the the LED-infused gear of the Tron universe with the…
It looks like winter has already arrived for much of the U.S. But you can feel a bit better by putting things in perspective. At least it’s not -128.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the coldest temperature ever recorded by humans at ground level on this planet. Yes, it dipped to -128.6 F (or a chilly -89.2…
Yes, a Blu-ray copy of Police Story 3: Supercop was destroyed for the sake of science. It turns out that the nanostructure of Blu-ray disc makes them especially well-suited to soaking up light—exactly what you’d want with a solar panel. A group of researchers at Northwestern managed to make more efficient solar panels based off…
Let’s talk total Thanksgiving tonnage here. How much Butterball-plus-fixins can you reasonably jam down your yaw this Thursday? Basically: You could eat a lot more if it wasn’t for all the saliva you have to make to break it down. According to this video by Vsauce3, the average human stomach can comfortably hold about three…
We’ve known for a while now that Amazon wanted to start offering local services. Now, the store for everything is selling TV-mounting services ahead of all the TV sales on Black Friday. And you know what? That sounds like a pretty useful addition to the Amazon family. The company is now testing Amazon Local Services…
It first graced the Gizmodo front page way back in 2007, but finally, seven years after we all first really wanted one for ourselves, that keyboard-shaped waffle maker could really be yours. Assuming, of course, its creator’s $50,000 Kickstarter campaign reaches its funding goal—so close, but yet still so far. Like Chris Dimino’s original design,…
Over the course of the mid to late twentieth century, photographers set out to document the rapidly shifting makeup of America’s expanse. Lewis Baltz was one of the foremost artists to capture the landscape and architecture in an amazingly austere, yet moving way. He passed away this week at age 69 of a long-term illness.…
Oh. My. God. Just look at this Russian Beauty. Neca’s Pacific Rim line continues to delight Jaeger lovers like me with a new, 18-inch tall rendition of Cherno Alpha (aka secret best Jaeger of the movie). It’s… it’s wonderful. Like Gipsy Danger before her, Cherno is beast of a figure at more than twice the…
