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American restaurants had to get creative during World War II when certain foods were being rationed. Once hamburger meat became hard to get, fast food chains like White Castle considered everything from veggie burgers to chop suey to replace their burgers. White Castle’s experiments with spaghetti actually turned out to be quite a hit in…
When you’re cooking, you can toss almost any series of ingredients into a pan and end up with something edible. But when you’re baking, you need to pay close to attention to precisely measuring out ingredients so your creation turns out as expected. So as with anything requiring precision, it’s best to leave it to…
Recently, Comcast and its call center habits have been thoroughly lambasted from all sides—and for good reason. But what many of us keep forgetting is that it’s not just Comcast. The call center system as a whole is broken. And as you’ll see from the tales below, it’s breaking its employees along with it. As…
If you don’t mind running to your nearest Target store, you can take $10 off a $40 order today when you buy online, but pick up in-store. You can use this deal four times per account, giving you up to $40 in savings on video games, electronics, groceries, or anything else in stock at Target.…
“Experimenting on people” makes most of us feel uncomfortable, like we’re rats in a lab being prodded with weird devices and fed food that makes our organs bloated. But today, OKCupid tried to put that notion to rest—or at least, it tried to explain that services need to experiment on you in order to make…
Wiretapping used to be straightforward. Potential drug lord? Bug his phone! But the proliferation of online chat options is making it hard for law enforcement officials and intelligence agents to carry out court-ordered wiretaps. FBI officials told The Washington Post that the Bureau has trouble fulfilling wiretaps because suspects use such a wide range of…
Last week, a man pushed a drone out his Seattle hotel window and conducted a fly-by of the nearby Space Needle. Police got a report that the drone had hit the Needle, and confiscated the video he had shot as evidence. But there was no collision, just this dramatic sunset footage, with tiny tourists waving…
Do you remember the first time you were introduced to a mobius strip and its never-ending looped surface? It was probably during grade school science, and it probably made you rethink everything you knew about the world, the same way this Mobius Chair by Takeshi Miyakawa will make you rethink everything you know about sitting.…
We wanted Amazon’s recently released Fire Phone to be many things, but most importantly, we wanted it to be (relatively) cheap like all Amazon hardware. So when Jeff Bezos announced the Fire Phone’s $650 price tag ($200 on contract), there was some definite sticker shock. How could Amazon—a company that built its reputation on low-balling…
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: SoundCloud is amazing. But many people, especially newcomers, complain that it can be hard to find the fist-pumping signal in the noise. A new SoundCloud recommendation engine called DiscoverTracks, however, makes it super simple. If you’re a SoundCloud user, it takes two clicks to fire up…
Even though it’s still officially a prototype transport system, the K-max unmanned delivery helicopter from Lockheed Martin and Kamen has become a workhorse for US Marine Corps But despite its strong showing throughout the War in Afghanistan, the future of this pilotless chopper remains uncertain. https://gizmodo.com/the-war-zone-cargo-copter-that-lifts-6-000-pounds-witho-5921101 It was only supposed to last six months when…
Uber lets its drivers rate their passengers, and its passengers rate their drivers. These scores should be public. Some Uber users have been understandably curious about whether their chauffeurs consider them charming or churlish; over the weekend a workaround that let people see their Uber passenger ratings popped up. Uber quickly shut it down. Instead…
Last week we told you about the Kickstarter campaign to fund a genius gadget that lets you fill 100 water balloons in one minute. It’s perhaps the greatest summer fun time invention since, I dunno, the Super Soaker. We caught up with it’s creator Josh Malone to find out more. Starting at 11:30 AM EST,…
I don’t know if the new Mad Max: Fury Road is going to be good or bad. All I know is that the trailer is pure eye candy made of real brutal stunts, crazy camerawork, and a varnish of pitch-perfect digital effects. It really looks amazing. I think I’m ready for yet another 80s revival…
This is the all-new Polaris Slingshot, a $20,000 173 HP three-wheel car obviously designed by Wayne Enterprises to realize the dreams of Batman and Robin wannabes across the planet. Seriously, this thing looks amazing and incredibly fun to drive, although nobody has tried it yet. Check out the videos of it in action. Their product video,…
Crack your knuckles, and get out your checkbooks, hackers! Russia is offering a $110,000 contract to the first person who can come up with a good way to discover the personal information of otherwise anonymous Tor users. But there’s a catch. The privilege of competing will cost you over $5,500. So this is funny on…
We’ve all seen the MetLife blimp, emblazoned with Snoopy, floating slowly along the NYC skyline once a year every summer. Far fewer have seen the view from inside the blimp. But this month, I was lucky enough to ride along with British-born pilot Mark Finney as he steered MetLife’s 20-year-old Snoopy 1 along this exact…
Ryan Fox thought it would be a good idea to attach a GoPro camera to the center of a car wheel for his Video Sketchbook class at the University of Wisconsin. He was right, but now I’m a dizzy. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
There’s something wonderful about listening to radio soaked in that soothing NPR gravy. The public radio powerhouse’s new NPR One app keeps a personalized stream of lovely stories pumping into your ears at all times. NPR One is a curated stream of local, and national news mixed in with other programming like segments from On…
Smartphones have been killing off fogey tech since the first iPhone. Goodbye MP3 player. So long stopwatch. Good riddance physical maps. Now, with some help from Hilton hotels, room keys are next to face extinction. The worldwide mega hotel chain spilled some of the details of its $550 million plan to The Wall Street Journal…
