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For those who enjoy taking Imogen Heap‘s dreamy electronic vocals along for a workout, you’ll love “Run-Time,” her newest single. Heap—a dedicated runner—has recorded this song using an app she helped design which builds custom soundtracks for running. Instead of starting in the studio, the track of “Run-Time” was built using an app Heap developed…
Microsoft’s titan of a word processor is used almost everywhere by almost everyone, but what if you don’t want to spend seven bucks a month? Here are our favorite alternatives to Word. They’re all free, they’re all capable of working with the ubiquitous .docx format, and they all offer some very useful features on top…
Google Voice is going to die and become a part of Hangouts. It’s going to be great. And it might actually be happening soon because you can now make Hangouts calls from the Google Voice homepage. http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/23/google-voice-offers-web-based-calls-through-hangouts-no-g-prof/ This (very minor) change brings Hangouts and Voice closer together than they’ve ever been and cuts Google+ out…
For better or worse, the world is overrun with some truly abysmal, positively ludicrous smartphone cases. And you, dear readers, have seen a lot of them. Here are the biggest offenders. Because when the human race is wiped out, smartphone cases and candy-colored headphones will be all thats left. This is our legacy. 1. The…
The limits of real-life technology mean that the giant robots that made Pacific Rim so awesome are hundreds of decades away. Sad, for sure, but with the technology we do have at our disposal we can at least simulate the experience of piloting a towering jaeger with the use of an Oculus Rift. https://gizmodo.com/final-pacific-rim-trailer-a-rock-em-sock-em-slugfest-656460692 At…
Ebook subscription service Oysteris expanding its services to mobile and web browsers. I’m not sure what kind of maniac chooses to read a book on their web browser, but it’s good to see Oyster growing. The New York-based company has one of the better ebook selections, with agreements with Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.
If you have ever experienced going to a music festival and sleeping in a tent you already know how shitty that can be. Well, these Belgian designers came up with a cool looking and comfortable solution for that: Hexagonal sleeping cells each containing a king-size bed. “We thought, why not stack a honeycomb, not for…
Watch this six-year-old roller skater limbo under 39 SUVs—a clearance of about seven inches. Gagan Satish, from India, coasted the 230-foot distance in just 29.8 seconds. The flexible kid has been rollerskating for about three years and practises regularly when he is not at school. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
Photographer Martin Bailey captured these gorgeous images of Antarctic ice during a seven week working trip to the continent. As summer temperatures soar it is hard not to see these sublime and moving landscapes in terms of giant slices of ice cream. Martin Bailey is a Tokyo based nature and wildlife photographer. He has a…
Look at that lonely guy, so tiny and fragile on the edge of the fiery Gates of Hell—the Kilauea Volcano’s Halemaumau Crater. His name is Andrew Hara, the photographer who took this amazing self-portrait, which was just featured as photo of the day in National Geographic’s Your Shot. How the hell did he do it?…
We have featured time-lapse videos of objects being sanded down one millimeter at a time before, but this film by Mexican illustrator and animator Simon Gerbaud is the best I’ve ever seen. I would keep watching that shoe GIF forever if there weren’t so many other awesome examples here: SPLOID is a new blog about…
It probably requires a lot of planning and a lot of strategic rope placement and a lot of brass balls but once you’re all the way up there and everything is set, chopping down a tree with a chainsaw looks like crazy amounts of fun. This GoPro footage from the chainsaw’s perspective proves that. The…
Made by Duncan Elms, this video imagines a future where Earth has been ravaged by wars, cyclones, food shortages, destructive weather and horrible humans and turned into areas of uninhabitable zones. And yet, cities would still make bids to host the Olympic Games, even if they’re during a nuclear winter. SPLOID is a new blog…
You might not believe me, but I was kind of a nerd when I was a kid. My family lived out in the mountains, miles away from anyone my age, so I spent my days buried in books and playing with my rock collection. Then, the summer before I started kindergarten, Honey, I Shrunk the…
The Google Maps app has proved invaluable for the intrepid urban explorer in navigating the city. Now a new update for iOS and Android can provide specific contextual details about what’s around you depending on your location, time of day, and even the weather. So if it’s raining (or about to), it will warn against…
On a recent trek to Minnesota to visit family and do a bit of research on experimental cities, I knew exactly where the soundtrack for my journey around the state would be coming from: 89.3 FM, The Current. I discovered some great new music while listening to the station, but one song stuck out as…
The Federal Aviation Administration has been dragging its heels on drafting drone regulations, lots of people are confused about, where it’s okay to fly their small aircraft. Using OpenStreetMap and government data, the wizards at MapBox created an interactive map to clear the air. To be more concise, the map shows you exactly where the…
Do you ever have flashbacks to that middle school dance, the one where you slow-danced to All-4-One and had your first kiss under an elm tree while Quad City DJs closed out the night. (Not that that happened to me or anything.) A dead simple but super fun website now lets you travel back to…
The landslide in March of this year that buried the community of Oso, Washington killed 43 people. That makes it the deadliest landslide in American history, and yet it happened in almost totally unremarkable circumstances. So, what happened and can we do to reduce the risk of future landslides? Top image: Oso landslide, 31 March…
The infamous Costa Concordia is sailing again after running aground on the island of Giglio, Italy. Francesco Marinari has filmed this drone video as it’s being transported for scrap to Genoa. It’s so eerie and weird. The structure that keeps it afloat makes it look like some kind of Mad Max/Waterworld prop. SPLOID is a…
