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If ever there was a product designed to bring joy but ultimately destined to frustrate, it is these smiley face screws. They look beautiful, adorable, fun even. But you will shout and swear and stamp your feet every time you need to tighten them up. The Screw:) is the result of a collaboration between Japanese…
This is what a life online looks like. If you’re interested in seeing your very own browser history all piled up, head right on over to Iconic History; a plug-in that turns your page clicks—all of them—into an unfiltered grid of favicons. Every URL you visit will make an appearance, sorted and stacked by when…
With supercomputers capable of beating our best chess and Jeopardy players, you’d think that being able to simulate the sounds a tire makes while rolling on a road was easy—but it’s not. In fact, Yokohama had to team up with the Japanese equivalent of NASA to finally recreate how air and sound behave around the…
Forget infected USB sticks and complex card skimmers: sometimes, the low-tech solutions work just as well. Now, a team of crooks from Salford, UK, has used a simple old tunnel to steal cash from an ATM. The team of criminals dug a 50-foot tunnel under a building to gain access to an ATM outside a…
When developers talk about bootstrapping, they’re not referring to a technique they’ve developed to avoid tying their shoelaces—but a means of running code wherever the hell they like. The concept behind bootstrapping sounds very simple: separate code and machine, allowing one piece of script to run on many different pieces of hardware. In reality it’s…
Having proudly claimed the first Android-Windows Phone dual-boot phones would arrive by spring, Huawei is now backpedalling—saying they won’t happen after all. Sound familiar?
Nothing may inspire music-making quite like the fear of dropping one’s laptop in the toilet. Earlier this month I had the welcome opportunity to give a guest talk at the music department at Santa Clara University, not far south of San Francisco, where I live. It was the latest in a series of guest talks…
If you’re still a little confused about why everyone is talking about The Big Bang and gravitational waves and cosmic inflation and space and twists of light and so forth, it’s okay. Much smarter people are taking care of answering those questions for humanity. But it’s a big effing deal so us less wrinkled brain…
Sliders. They’re made so you can eat different burgers with different recipes instead of a big monolith. But I want to eat these three Lolita burgers: “potato chip encrusted, foie gras pâte à choux, a sultry sweet onion jam, bacon peanut butter, pan seared foie gras, and a grass-fed beef patty.” SPLOID is a new…
Speed painting can be purposefully misleading but it’s always fun to have your brain pump in that delayed “Ohhhh” reaction once you realize what’s going on. You feel like a complete idiot with your mouth open until you see it. And even then, you’re not completely sure it’s not sorcery. Here’s one of those sorcery…
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Scruffage is spread. This growing trend among American youth is not some innocent, victimless high. It’s a highly-contagious parasitic infection that changes human physiology at the most basic facial hair level, transforming young men and women into cantankerous, chain-smoking, rail-riding hobos forever addicted to the simple freedom of…
Enjoy. Huffington Post created a supercut video of all the dancing that Christopher Walken does in movies and it’s just so fun to watch. You’re going to want to boogie after you see 30 seconds of it. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
The World Photography Organization has announced the winners of the 2014 World Photography Awards. I love this one by Michael Nordqvist, a Swedish skydiver and base jumper who won the 1st Place Nordics National Award. Captain Sweden! The picture is a self portrait taken half a second after exiting the aircraft. I held the camera…
The world starts to blur. People and trees and houses and stores are just streaks of colors as you zoom by. The roads become vertical as you make your turns. You’re going so fast that, if you hit anything on the road, even a stick, you’re probably going to fly hundreds of feet in the…
In the sixth chapter of his 2010 book The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan L. Ensmer looks back at the 1957 movie Desk Set within the context of 1950s computing and the fear that one day we’d all be replaced by machines: What is less widely remembered about Desk Set is that it was sponsored…
Motorola wowed us earlier this week with its sleek and incredibly watch-like take on the smartwatch. Now, Moto’s design chief Jim Wicks has spoken out about the creative process that led to the new device. https://gizmodo.com/moto-360-this-is-motorolas-android-wear-powered-smart-1546422737 Speaking to The Verge, Wicks has described the design story behind the new watch. Here are some choice cuts:…
Everybody knows Lunch Atop a Skyscraper. Eleven men eating lunch on an I-beam beam hundreds of feet above New York City, none of them wearing safety harnesses—it’s iconic! That’s what makes this roller coaster recreation of it so much fun. A few months ago, ten steelworkers celebrated the completion of a new roller coaster at…
The bros at Rocket Jump already impressed us once with their incredibly impressive and almost believable knife-throwing video and now they’ve done it again with this clip of nine trick shots in a row. They’re also filmed in one continuous take. It would be really impressive—if it were real. But alas, it’s another fake in…
A built-in sprinkler system is a better way to water a garden than just standing there randomly blasting plants with a hose. And taking that idea one step further, the Droplet turns your sprinklers into intelligent snipers that only water the plants you tell them to using a focused stream—except when rainy weather already has.…
In 2010, Treehugger founder Graham Hill shrugged off his possessions, designing a high-tech microdwelling that would house all his needs in a single, small room. Now this sweet little transformer of an apartment is on the market. The price? $995,000. How small is it? According to the listing, it’s 420 square feet, which actually does…
