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My kitchen table looks like some kind of laptop turf war right now. On the left, my beloved beater ThinkPad. On the right, a borrowed MacBook. I’ve been using both all day. It’s driving me crazy. I’m used to switching between Mac and Windows machines. There’s an iMac at my desk at the office, and…
Big goings on this week. New gadgets, new airline laws, new mysterious barges popping up on both coasts. Here’s the best things we wrote this week. iPad Air First Impressions: Big Never Felt So Small It’s fitting for the iPad Air to have a new name, because it feels like an almost entirely new device.…
Miles is a great kid fighting a courageous battle against leukemia. But for one special day in November, he’ll be fighting crime as Batkid, riding alongside his hero Batman and protecting the streets of San Francisco. Make-A-Wish of the Greater Bay Area and thousands of volunteers will turn downtown San Francisco into Gotham City on…
There goes any feeling of accomplishment us grown-ups had today. Ten-year-old Nathan Gray just discovered a supernova, unseating his own sister as the world’s youngest to do so. Talk about sibling rivalries. Nathan was looking through images from the Abbey Ridge Observatory in Nova Scotia when he spotted the potential supernova, PGC 61330, in the…
If your growing weariness of being constantly tethered to the internet has become overwhelming, it might be time to scrub yourself from the social media sphere altogether. Here’s how you can become a ghost on the Internet, by tracking down and eliminating your digital past. The Big Four Before you go hunting down your old…
A rogue computer program broke loose and spread uncontrollably. By the end of its rampage, the virus conquered a full ten percent of the world’s internet-connected machines. An unfathomable 6,000 computers had crashed. Twenty-five years ago today, the Morris worm’s path of destruction began. As it turned out, the damage was unintentional — Robert Morris,…
Autumn is the best season for tech lovers. As the leaves fall off the trees, great new gadgets fall from the sky. We raked through the pile of new gadgets that came out in October. Here are our favorites. Kindle Paperwhite (2013) We loved the Paperwhite in 2012, and the 2013 model gave us even…
Motorola says Android 4.4 Kit Kat is coming. If you’ve got a Moto X on any carrier, or a Verizon-serviced Droid Ultra, Maxx or Mini, the company says you’ll get the newest Android OS soon. [Motorola via The Verge]
When iOS 7 came out, the animations were the first thing everyone noticed. Some people even claimed they got seasick watching their phones. Now we know why: those flat, pastel-colored cards can hit nearly 17 miles per hour as they zip toward your face. https://gizmodo.com/ios-7-review-pretty-is-as-pretty-does-1327221981 Over at Buzzfeed, John Herrman and Jake Levy looked at…
In a planned mission, three ISS crew members took their Soyuz out for a ride around the ISS. Why? Did they want to show Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity how it’s really done? Not exactly. Instead, it’s actually the astronaut equivalent of moving your car out of a parking space so your roommate can park…
“Everything in the Universe is a little bit sticky,” explains Spacebaby, the protagonist of this intriguing stop motion short by James Kwan. Spacebaby, you see, is on a quest to find his friend, Mr. Moon, but instead stumbles across something far beyond his scope of reality. What in the world is it?
Quick what does the United States have in common with Serbia and Yemen? No, not just that they all have the vowel E in them. No, not because they start with letters in the second half of the alphabet. And no, not nothing either. According to popular estimates, the US, Serbia and Yemen make up…
In the transaction of receiving real-time titillation via pixels over the Internet, it’s easy to forget how complicated some situations can be. Sure, there are gobs of money and endless credit card numbers being punched through but sometimes it’s just a prettier version of indentured servitude. https://gizmodo.com/indentured-servitude-money-laundering-and-piles-of-mo-5941976 The website brbxoxo reminds you of such sadness…
The shift in season reminded me of this cool old project in cold Helsinki, where a team of designers turned an abandoned oil tank into a lovely, year-round public art project. The silo is located outside of Helsinki in Kruunuvuorenranta, a residential area across the water from the city. The neighborhood’s old harbor and terminal…
Another week done, another bunch of gadgets to ogle. Today’s big news was the iPad Air, but that’s not the only gizmo game in town. Here’s what you can get your grubby, sticky-from-Halloween-candy hands on. iPad Air It might not look a whole hell of a lot different from last year’s iPad, but the Air…
Learning to read is a massive adventure in itself, but discovering the library—a magical place where the stories are plentiful and the books are free—is downright mind-blowing. In an effort to match the fun between the pages, the Mexican branding studio Anagrama transformed the interior of a local heritage site into Niños Conarte, a geometric…
The Atlantic just published a gorgeous collection of images from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, including the photo above, which is brand new to this retro-future bloggist. It all looks pretty standard — except for the outfits. https://gizmodo.com/official-guide-book-1939-worlds-fair-512627265 The photo is cropped to show the Railroads on Parade stage show, which featured trains of…
South African designers Warren Lewis and (the somewhat extraordinarily named) Porky Hefer have come up with Birdwatcher, a bird house in the form of a CCTV camera that will feed the local birds and help you scare burglars away. Birdwatcher “acts as a deterrent for uninvited visitors as it can be mounted outside, either on…
Sure slow motion is great for a lot of things but the effect is probably at its dramatic best when it captures explosions. Preferably building explosions. Preferably building explosions with a guy running away from said exploding building. The slow motion experts of the Slow Mo Guys laced a building with explosives and blew the…
Long week, huh? Probably because of all the Halloween hoopla, which seems to have started last weekend and probably won’t let up til Sunday. If you’re a grown-ass adult sick of all this pumpkin pandemonium, check out these apps while you pointedly opt out of yet another dumb Halloween party. Ya big grump. Multi-Platform Updates…
