Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this Vine a few days ago from the International Space Station. It’s so beautiful, it makes me want to delete my Vine app. Because I know I’ll never even come close to this beauty. Wiseman’s an excellent tweeter to follow. He’s been on a real photography kick lately, tweeting out absolutely…
Today’s the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year, and a Saturday. The perfect combination of elements for spending the day roaming around, casual and aimless. No pressure, no rush. To me, this is the soundtrack for that kind of day. Sharp-eared listeners and Motown fans know this is a cover…
Pocketnow saysApple’s forthcoming iWatch will come in two styles: “Sports,” rectangular with a rubber strap, and “Designer,” round and stainless steel. Pocketnow says both models are “hard to distinguish” from a regular watch—which seems unlikely with a 2.5 inch face we reported last week. [Pocketnow]
During a downpour in the forests near Robert Frost Farm, photographer Michael N. Sutton took some footage of bullfrogs in a pond. At normal speeds, they’d probably look no different than any other frogs. But filmed in HD at 1,000 frames per second, they suddenly become regal, stately. And oh so dramatic. And then they…
If you were a kid in the 90s, you probably remember two things: Super Mario, and that song about big butts. Well, here they are, together at last. It was a mashup two decades in the making. [Digg]
Welcome to Reading List, our Saturday afternoon collection of tech, design, urbanism, and landscape reads from around the web. This week, we’ve got great pieces from The American Prospect, Modern Farmer, Ars Technica, Pacific Standard, and more. It’s like crossfit for your brain. American hero Sally Ride fought gender stereotypes and outright lack of understanding…
Android Police just published renders and specs on a rumored 9-inch HTC Nexus tablet. With an 8.9-inch, 2048×1440 display, Tegra K1 processor, and zero-gap aluminum body, Android Police’s intel says the device, named Volantis, will launch later this year at $400 for 16GB. Though it might not look exactly like the render above. [Android Police]
The B-side of Chris Sievey’s 1983 single “Camouflage” sounds like an unlistenable malestrom of noise. It’s not an avant-garde song; it’s a program for the ZX-81 computer, and if you could load it correctly, it gave you a (very rudimentary) computer-animated music video, coded in the grooves of a vinyl record. This neat little tidbit…
Happy solstice, friends! The longest day of the year is a fitting end to a week with Amazon’s new Fire Phone, the first electric Harley-Davidson, a scuffle between Ikea and its most popular unofficial fan site, and of course, Yo. Missed something? Here’s the best stuff we wrote this week. Don’t rush, you’ve got all…
iPhone rumor time comes as predictably as moose mating season, and like pheromone-crazy moose, leak-hungry tech bloggers will mount just about anything that looks like it could possibly be iPhone related. Here’s the latest: a purported 5.5-inch (14cm) display, published by 9to5Mac earlier today. The images, provided to 9to5Mac by the generally reliable Sonny Dickson,…
A train strike has paralyzed France, Airbnb has screwed San Francisco’s housing market, a lack of diversity has wrecked Austin, and two Southern California mayors fucked up, in two very different ways. It’s our joyously optimistic look at What’s Ruining Our Cities! A train strike is ruining France Called the worst strike in 13 years,…
Americans just aren’t printing as much as we used to. Where once we’d churn out driving directions, movie tickets, or school reports, these documents almost always stay in the digital domain. But for those occasions that you do need to print something, here’s how to make sure you can do it from anywhere, without a…
Last month, a drought, heat wave, and dry Santa Ana winds combined together to exacerbate fires in southern California. Here’s a pair of satellite images of the San Diego region in May, separated by just eight days and far too much fire. Southern California on May 9 and May 17, 2014. Image credit: NASA Up…
Ever since Chromecast and Roku hit the market, rumor has said that Mozilla was working on a more open, tinkerer-friendly type of streaming dongle. This week, Mozilla developer Christian Heilmann tweeted a photo that sure looks like a nearly-finalized product, and GigaOM got to play with a prototype. Casting’s about to get open-sourcey. GigaOM’s Janko…
A student team working with Google has come up with an ingenious way to translate signing into spoken word: electronic wristbands that measure the wearer’s muscle activity, recognizing sign language symbols and speaking them through an Android device. It could quite literally give signers a voice. Update: As it turns out, this concept is completely…
You graduated from middle school and found your way to a desk job, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave rubber-band-powered projectile launchers behind. YouTube’s mist8k is here to show us how to build three weapons of mass distraction, using stuff you’ve already got at your desk. Now (goofing off at) work can be…
Geology isn’t the only discipline that produced spectacular illustrations in the 1800s, and the Iguanodon isn’t the only extinct animal we’ve reconstructed differently throughout time. Here are an assortment of 19th century illustrations of extinct creatures. https://gizmodo.com/this-geological-field-notebook-is-an-elegant-look-at-mo-1588374224 https://gizmodo.com/illustrations-of-the-iguana-toothed-dinosaur-1574184389 https://gizmodo.com/strange-19th-century-drawings-of-dinosaurs-and-other-ex-1593696125
This is silly in an I’m not exactly sure why this exists but it still made me giggle kind of way. TNT Russia stitched together movies to make famous movie characters look like they’re taking selfies as they go about the scene. It emphasizes how awkward the act of taking a selfie is and laughs…
There’s just something about tube bending machines that I can never get enough of. This video of the Sharpe Nissin CNC tube bender machine is basically hypnotizing me. As the tube pops (poops?) out of the machine, it gets bent and shaped perfectly. I can’t imagine what history would think of all the cool toys…
It looks like it’s full speed ahead at Nest: Just a few days after putting its Protect smoke and CO alarm back on the market, the company announced it will acquire Dropcam for $555 million. Eventually, Dropcam could become the eyes and ears in Nest’s constellation of smart home systems. The five year old Dropcam,…
