Tech News

Apple Maps Will Soon Remember Where You Parked Your Car

It looks like Apple’s doing everything it can to get its in-house Maps software back in our good graces. Thanks to a hidden asset buried deep in iOS 8, new icons seem to reveal a Maps feature that would remember exactly where users last parked their cars. Of course, how the new feature would actually…

You can now buy your new Kindle or Kindle Fire on an installment plan from Amazon.

Before the Hollywood Sign Found Fame, Others Signs Dotted LA’s Hillsides

HOLLYWOODLAND’s voice was not alone. Other hillsides also spoke. Across Los Angeles in the 1920s, signs announced new real-estate subdivisions in big block letters perched high above the city. BEVERLY CREST. BRYN MAWR. TRYON RIDGE. Time has largely forgotten these other signs. One still rusts away in the chaparral day, toppled and discarded long ago.…

Report: Amazon Is Launching a Service To Help You Find a Babysitter

Reuters reports that later this year Amazon will start testing a marketplace for services, where users can find and hire everything from babysitters to handymen. It will be testing the service in limited areas to gauge demand and figure out logistics before moving forward with a broader launch. According to the report, Amazon has been…

This Weird Household Machine Was the Future of Voting in 1945

Some day a President of the United States may be elected “electronically.” This sentence wouldn’t look out of place in any news story from the 21st century, despite quotes around the word “electronically.” But believe it or not, that prediction comes from a magazine article in 1945. Under the headline “Votes by Radio: An Electronic…

This Wireless Keyboard Contraption Brings Your Desktop to Your Lap

Anyone who tries to play PC games on their TV inevitably runs into the same problem: What do you do with that damn keyboard and mouse? Roccat has a clever if not super elegant solution. Just put an entire desk-top on your lap. You could do that with a normal keyboard, sure, but Roccat’s new…

New Lion King Spin-Off Show Reeks Of Nostalgia-Exploitation

Almost 20 years after The Lion King pounced into our hearts as a tear-jerking classic, Disney is bringing the pride back in an…interesting way. A new animated series aimed at preschoolers, Lion Guard, will air on Disney Junior and the Disney Channel starting November 2015. It will feature Kion, Simba’s son, protecting the jungle from…

Honest trailer uncovers the real meaning of The Lion King’s songs

We’re fans of Honest Trailers because they cut through all the bullshit from every Hollywood blockbuster there is. No movie is untouchable—including The Lion King. Like so many (all?) of Disney movies, it is so full of wrong. Their versions of the movie songs are especially hilarious. Enjoy! SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…

This is the Winning Entry for a Contest to Explain Colour

Every year, Alan Alda holds a science communication challenge, posing surprisingly tricky questions and asking for answers appropriate for elementary school audiences. This year’s question was, “What is colour?” and Dianna Cowern produced the winning video. To learn more about Dianna Cowern, a physicist who has been producing videos as Physics Girl for the last…

20 Beautiful Yosemite App and Icon Concept Designs

Apple announced OS X Yosemite along with iOS 8 last Monday and designers are already coming up with beautiful app concepts and gorgeous icon designs for some existing Mac apps. In OS X Yosemite, along with the overall design changes, the apps are also overhauled to match the flat interface. With OS X Yosemite’s new…

Here’s What How To Train Your Dragon 2 Needs To Be A Hit

How To Train Your Dragon 2 needs to do well if DreamWorks doesn’t want to risk sliding down a slippery slope from which there is no return. With three of their last four movies resulting in financial losses, this sequel to the 2010 blockbuster can breath some fire back into DreamWorks if it brings its…

Comcast Wants To Turn Home Routers Into Public Wi-Fi Hotspots

In the coming weeks, Comcast is rolling out a new feature that turns residential customers’ new Xfinity Wi-Fi routers into public hotspots. The rollout starts in Houston on Tuesday, and the company says it’ll be in millions of homes across the country by the end of the year. That’s a big hotspot! It’s easy to…

sound.tumblr.com

This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve taken a fresh start at my sound.tumblr.com account. This time I feel — as I suppose I have each time, for varying lengths of time — like I’ve finally sorted out how to manage it, what use to make of it. I’m pretty unsatisfied by simply reposting…

NASA releases spectacular X-ray image of an entire spiral galaxy

This is The Whirlpool—the common name of M51, a spiral galaxy estimated to be 50,000 to 100,000 light years across. The purple dots that make it look like the biggest neon sign in the Universe are X-ray sources as seen by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: Hundreds of glittering…

Making Music from “Making Waves Make Waves”

Larry Johnson, whose music is often credited to L-A-J, has taken the nascent modular synthesis experiment that I recently posted, “Making Waves Make Waves,” and reworked it into something considerably more nuanced and complex, for which I am quite thankful. I’ve had field recordings reworked by others in the past, but this is the first…

Google Just Bought a Swarm of Satellites To Make Maps Way Better

Today, Skybox Imaging announced it’s being bought by Google for a cool $500 million in cash. Known for its high-resolution satellite imagery and video, Skybox’s fleet of satellites could make Google Earth a whole lot crisper—and help fulfill Google’s vision of worldwide satellite-based internet access. The five-year-old startup had been planning a fleet of 24…

How Historians Are Using Nuclear Fallout to Find Fake Art

Today’s modern art forger is capable of producing fake works of art so perfect that even trained experts are unable to spot them. Even down to the most minute details of the pigments, binders, and canvass, these fakes are almost better than the works they’re based on. But thanks to a byproduct of the Atomic…

Higgs Boson Mug Serves Up Two Scoops of Science With Your Coffee

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but why just feed your body after you’ve rolled out of bed in the morning? Feed your mind, too, with ThinkGeek’s heat-sensitive color-changing Higgs Boson mug which enlightens you with details about the Large Hadron Collider and what it’s hunting for. At all times…

1 Password, the popular password management app that has long been geared nearly exclusively to OSX and iOS, has finally gotten the Android version users deserve—in that it actually works. The newly revamped edition is now available in Google Play.

Every frame in this stop-motion music video is embroidered

This sci-fi themed music video combines heavy metal, embroidery and stop-motion animation to produce something quite unusual. In fact it is the first frame-by-frame embroidered music video and it took 45 million stitches to tell the story of the band’s journey to mars to terraform the planet. The video was inspired by traditional band patches…