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What happens when the United States is closed? We asked you to show us—to capture both areas shut down by the government and just random things you found abandoned, rusted, and closed. And from here, the US looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. WINNER: The National Parks Are Closed So honestly, this is a pretty crappy…
Kinja blog The Dogs has unearthed this funny 1993 clip from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, starring a very young Louis CK, Robert Smigel—aka Triumph the Insult Dog—and Adam Sandler. https://dogs.kinja.com/louis-ck-speaks-dog-on-conan-in-1993-1443891998
Sonos is hands down the best wireless audio streaming solution, and discounts on products from their lineup almost never happen. Buying one of their speakers from Amazon today will net you the Sonos Wireless Bridge, which normally carries a hard $50 price tag, for free. If you’ve been dying for a Sonos but found the…
When most people hear the word “drone,” they probably picture a cockpit-free plane zipping over the Iraqi desert. But there’s more to it than that. The Army is in the process of adopting a whole new generation of unmanned vehicles that will assist soldiers on the battlefield—and they’re by far the scariest remote-controlled cars you’ll…
When you’re working your way through all the ingredients in a complex recipe, you can easily lose track of how much of this or that you’ve measured. Or at least Japanese designer Atsuhiro Hayashi does, which inspired him to create a set of measuring spoons with numbers in relief that leave no question as to…
The CAPTCHA is a wonderful thing, but it’s not without its failings. And as hackers get better and better at cracking them, a team of CMU engineers are proposing an alternative: Inkblot tests. It’s called a GOTCHA (of course), and it stands for Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. The test…
Remember Webvan.com? A lot of people do, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone with anything nice to say about it. At the dawn of the internet retail revolution, Webvan was supposed to do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. The site failed miserably. But that’s not what futurists of the year…
Dick pic enthusiasts and general voyeurs, rejoice! The new app SnapHack lets you effortlessly download any Snap (pic and video alike) without the person on the other end ever having any idea that their privacy has just been demolished. https://gizmodo.com/snapchats-been-handing-unopened-messages-over-to-the-p-1445103119 The more traditional way of making the ephemeral Snaps permanent has been to take a…
As was foretold by the ancients, Apple will hold its holiday iPad jamboree on October 22nd. We’ll see some new tablets, sure. But there also might be a trove of other odds and ends awaiting us next week. https://gizmodo.com/apple-is-holding-an-ipad-event-october-22-1442646657 While Apple normally plants hints of what’s to come in its invites, it’s not entirely clear…
It hasn’t taken Garmin long to announce a successor to its Approach S2 and S3 golf watches announced earlier this year. But the latest edition to the lineup adds a feature that makes the S4 a must-have upgrade: Bluetooth, allowing the watch to relay notifications about incoming calls, emails, and texts while you’re battling to…
For better or worse (ok, probably worse), the hashtag, @reply, and retweet have become inextricable from modern language, and it’s hard to imagine a time when saying “hashtag blessed” would have seemed insane. But all things must originate from somewhere, and Quartz has managed to track down the founding fathers of all three. https://gizmodo.com/justin-timberlake-show-us-how-dumb-we-sound-when-we-use-1382465357 Perhaps…
The ability to passively track people within a given space is every retailer’s dream (and every conspiracy theorist’s nightmare). Those dreams recently took a step closer to reality with the debut of a new people-tracking system from MIT. Unveiled at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL), the system works much like Microsoft’s popular Kinect…
A team of scientists just made an exciting and very pop culture-friendly discovery in Montana: The first ever fossilized mosquito with a belly full of blood. This little guy’s been hanging out underground for 46 million years, and it’s a small miracle that it hung in there so long. “The abdomen of a blood-engorged mosquito…
A marine science instructor has found this gigantic 18-foot-long oarfish—one of the most elusive animals on Earth—in Toyon Bay, 22 miles off the Port of Los Angeles. A horrible beast that, sadly, is too flabby and gooey to eat. Here’s a living oarfish captured on camera, a very strange event. https://gizmodo.com/a-marine-science-instructor-found-this-18-foot-long-oar-1445530770
Future versions of Grand Theft Auto—at least those set in Switzerland—could include a detailed and incredibly accurate 3D model of the Matterhorn for thrill-seeking gamers to explore, thanks to a swarm of drones that recently scanned, mapped, and photographed the iconic peak. The lightweight autonomous ebees drones, developed by a company called senseFly, each spent…
Nike just showed off the second-gen version of its Fuelband, and for the first time, the fitness tracker is coming in a whole slew of colors. Here’s everything you need to know about the improvements. The display is the same, the form factor is the same, but now you’ll have a choice of three shades…
Starting today, you can preview Flickr’s new picture viewer, with a 25% bigger picture that pushes the info bar off to the side. It’s the latest addition to the full-site redesign from earlier this year. [Flickr Blog via VentureBeat]
Following several rumors, Engadget has confirmed that T-Mobile is doing away with old data plans and forcing customers to choose from one of its current Simple Choice plans. According to a statement from the company a “vast majority” of customers will get “similar or better features at a comparable price.” A scanned letter sent to…
App launchers typify the Android phone experience: don’t like the way your home screen looks? Tinker around with it! But while plenty of launchers offer deep visual customization, in the end they’re all basically elaborate paint jobs. Aviate, launching in beta today, doesn’t give you as many tweaks for your home screen, but it makes…
Still upset about breaking the handle on your favorite mug? A 3D printer can make it as good as new, and thanks to researchers at the University of Southern California, the process is even easier now since they’ve developed a printer that can build directly on curved surfaces. The most common 3D printer design on…
