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A well-shot portrait is an amazing thing: it can reveal hidden depths of personality and convey layers upon layers of emotional complexity. This video tries to get to the bottom of what makes the perfect portrait photograph. Perhaps understandably, that’s no easy task, and there’s talk of philosophy and feelings as much as insight and…
You can fit an awful lot of information into the classic Periodic Table—and here, Brazil-based designer and illustrator mayra.artes has taken advantage of it to communicate the contents of… booze. Providing details about composition, percentages, year of invention, and more, it might not prove as useful as the real Periodic Table—but it’s probably a bit…
Ubuntu’s crowdfunding effort for its Edge smartphone has fallen massively short on Indiegogo—by a staggering $19 million. Bad luck, Linux lovers.
Yesterday, Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for crimes related to stealing government documents and sharing them with WikiLeaks. Now, you can read the letter he’s sending to the President to state his case. https://gizmodo.com/bradley-manning-sentenced-to-35-years-in-prison-1177370126 The letter was read by defense attorney David Coombs following Manning’s sentencing yesterday, but the Associated Press…
Microsoft has had an indecisive month or two recently, contemplating a series of U-turns in its attempts to compete with the forthcoming PlayStation 4. But now, it seems to have settled on a final decision about one of the most controversial flip-flops: every Xbox One WILL come with a Kinect. https://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-is-worse-for-everyone-if-kinects-not-mand-1113731041 About that, there now…
Sure, we would all love to travel around the world and do stuff but then life, work, money and excuses get in the way. So why not try to do what comedian Mark Malkoff did? He Skyped with 162 different countries, traveling the world with technology. And though that sounds horrifying in that you have…
Oh, OH! Deathinger like “designer” with a lisp, not Deathinger like “Death Thinger.” Ok this totally makes sense now.
For less than $500 you can’t find a tiny camera with the image quality and flexibility of Canon’s parade of S-series Powershot cameras. With the S120, the tradition marches on. Canon’s top point-and-shoot cameras aren’t the industry leaders they were in the heydey of cameras like the S90 and the S95. While S-series cameras have…
If you were to re-draw the map of the world according to each country’s population, you would get a warped world that looked like this. Some giant countries like Canada and Australia become tiny strips and dots while other giant countries like China and India predictably inflate and take over the map. You can also…
When’s the last time you put all your eggs in one basket? Probably never. But! When’s the last time you put all your data in one hard drive? Probably right now (you gotta learn better backup habits). And though we know that practice makes perfect and that patience is a virtue, what actually applies to…
Is Instagram over yet? Or our distant relatives just finding out about filters? Wherever the picture sharing app currently stands on the sliding scale of not owning a TV to being an Oprah audience member, it’s obvious to anyone who has used Instagram that people like hashtags, people like food pictures (and sunset pictures and…
You know that soul dropping feeling you get when you see someone drop their phone? It’s the sound that’s the most horrifying thing. A crisp crack that’s not unlike adding ice to your soda. Painful. There goes hundreds of dollars! Now imagine that same feeling multiplied as you watch in horror as some stranger drops…
Japan has a complex history of engaging (or not) with the outside world—starting in the 1600s, when the shogunate put a strict ban on foreign trading, religion, and language. Much has changed then, but Japanese designers still have an interesting relationship with Western culture. For example: The fact that the badge of every Japanese car—even…
Every summer, the Earth gets destroyed by another couple of apocalyptic disaster movies. Why do we love seeing ourselves destroyed? Because daily life is a banal struggle, so global catastrophe or alien invasion seems fun in comparison. Plus, people behave beautifully when fighting a war together. https://gizmodo.com/whats-your-favorite-or-least-favorite-disaster-porn-1179307511
Everyone loves wine—or rather, everyone likes to seem like they love wine. And what better way to give off an air of sophistication than to be able to offer perfect recommendations, pairings, and analyses on any wine at a moments notice? Delectable lets you do all that with absolutely no preparation required. What does it…
We’ve been hearing for years now unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones) are the war machines of tomorrow, the weapons of a new age, the way of the future. There’s only one problem: no one wants to fly the dang things. Air Force Col. Bradley Hoagland just published a paper outlining the challenge of finding enough…
The pinwheel-like drawing above is nothing but black and white lines. When you look at it the right way, though, something strange and beautiful happens: it begins to flicker. You may think it’s just a regular old optical illusion at first, but actually, you’re looking at your very own brain waves. To see the optical…
SwiftKey is fantastic. It’s got great prediction, great personalization, swipe-based entry options, and pretty much anything else you could want. Now, it’s getting even better with SwiftKey Cloud, which syncs your data between all your devices. https://gizmodo.com/swiftkey-4-adds-flow-so-you-never-have-to-stop-typing-5985629 Part of SwiftKey’s secret sauce is how it can learn about your written voice from your Gmail, Twitter,…
Government waste is a funny thing, because most everyone is outraged when they hear about real wasted money, but it’s only anti-government reactionaries who use such stories to justify taking away needed services from the elderly and sick children. Still, there are more than 500 good cars just sitting around federal property in Washington. Like…
Some purists will definitely argue with this, but skiing (or snowboarding) isn’t really complete without music. Not to mention the necessity of making and receiving phone calls with your comrades. Thus, most of us spend each lift ride fumbling with gloves, wires, and buttons in sub-freezing temperatures. No longer. The company that brought you the…
