Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Heartbreak can take on a lot of physical forms. A box of unsent love letters. An engagement ring you never got to take out of your pocket. A luxury mattress your partner boned someone else on that you have to sleep on every night which you’re now selling for $150 on craigslist. This poor guy…
Imgur, everyone’s favorite super simple image hosting site, has had an Android app out for about a month now. As of today, though, the app is also available for iOS users, and now nearly everyone can be just a little bit less productive, together. What does it do? You can do virtually everything you’d be…
Nerds have been decorating with the periodic table forever, but let’s face it: it’s never looked good. This lovely minimalist interpretation does the impossible and actually makes it mesmerizing to behold, if just slightly less informative. Designed by Alison Haigh, the print is just barely a period table. Instead of numbers and letters, each element…
The early 1980s was a time of serious dread for many people worried that the U.S. and the Soviet Union might start World War III. And it’s easy to understand why. One wrong move by either nuke-equipped country, and it was the end of civilization as we knew it. In fact, that’s nearly what happened…
Skype Premium subscribers will now get access to Skype Wi-Fi for free—The service allows you to connect to “more than one million hotspots worldwide” using only your Skype account. That means that for $5 a month, you’ll (almost) never have to sign up for a random service in random place just to get online. https://gizmodo.com/skype-wifi-gets-your-iphone-online-at-a-million-hotspot-5831779
Haagan-Dazs should make its own app, you can just picture a coked-up branding executive typing into a sweat-soaked BlackBerry after wrestling a horse to the ground with his bare hands. And so they did, they built a Haagen-Dazs app that’s really a 3D augmented reality violin concerto. It’s wonderful and horrible, and it’s everything. Imagine…
Russia, a fascist state that’s armed with enough nuclear weapons to easily kill everyone on Earth, is also a country that legally and officially hates homosexuals and anything that could be considered (by a bigot) to be pro-gay. At next year’s Winter Olympics, visitors and foreign athletes will be subject to the same outrageous anti-gay…
Quirky, purveyors of kitchen gadgets for the lazy and other items of whimsy, has invented a new game for sale called StrataChute. What’s not to love about a new game for the park, especially when it has parachutes? The premise is insanely simple: players are given little balls with parachutes inside them. You aim them…
The Moto X leaves a terrific first impression. It’s well-built, it’s fast, it comes in a variety of trims. On the one hand, it exudes the kind of class that you’d expect from mature, seasoned companies like Google and Motorola. On the other hand, dick jokes. https://gizmodo.com/moto-x-hands-on-forget-specs-this-thing-is-awesome-991536492 Above is a section of the Moto X’s…
The fabled Moto X has been detailed by Motorola at long last, and as expected, the company is flaunting the customizable appearance of the phone—there are more than 2000 possible color and material combinations you can assemble. Here are the 18 possibilities for the back, and they are oh so lovely how will anyone choose?…
Rejoice, humans of the Earth, for the ugly off-center 1 in Apple iOS 7’s Calendar app icon has been at last, FIXED! It took almost two entire years of design rants after every update, but someone in Cupertino has at last listened and corrected what was a horrible design decision made by someone else who…
You’d think that in this day in age of digital software, scientists wouldn’t need to destroy a real building to test the strength of its materials. But that’s exactly what’s happening this summer in Buffalo, where a team of Johns Hopkins engineers are using a hydraulic “shake table” to recreate the 1994 Northridge earthquake in…
The Moto X is actually pretty awesome all on its own. But super nerds can be happy it’s also going to come in a baby-fresh stock-Android-having Google Play version, with zero bloatware, and available directly from Google. It’s a trend we continue to be real happy about. https://gizmodo.com/moto-x-hands-on-forget-specs-this-thing-is-awesome-991536492 The Galaxy S4 and HTC One are…
After essentially leaking every spec possibly imaginable, the fruit of Motorola’s Google-ized loins is finally here. And just as promised, it’s a colorful, smooth beauty to behold. Which is great, but the real test comes with what it’s packing under the hood. Can the Moto X keep up with the smartphone market’s toughest competitors? https://gizmodo.com/moto-x-hands-on-forget-specs-this-thing-is-awesome-991536492…
Today you can grab a refurb. Apple TV direct from the source for 75 bucks. That’s 25% off retail on an item that rarely goes on sale, and it comes with the same warranty included in a new box. [Apple] Free Trials of Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus As you probably know, we’re bullish about…
Motorola is teaming up with fashion-forward headphone purveyor Sol Republic on a co-branded Bluetooth speaker. The Deck is weird looking little thing, but it’s got a few features that make it stand out from the otherwise saturated cheap wireless speaker market. Unlike most $200 Bluetooth speakers, this isn’t a little box with front-facing drivers. Instead,…
It’s been no secret whatsoever that the Moto X was coming, but now it’s finally here. It’s the first cross-carrier hero phone out of Motorola since it was taken under Google’s wing. We just spent a little while loving it up, and here are our first impressions. Design One could argue that Motorola has not…
Did you miss the $300 off MacBook Pro deal from this past week? Are you beating yourself up inside? Well, stop—because you’re about to be rewarded for your patience (or laziness) big time with that same $300 off a 15-inch retina MacBook Pro, with an Apple TV thrown in free for good measure. Now that’s…
Mashups, intellectual property laws, bootlegs, copyright. While those are all valid concerns today, they’re hardly anything new. Just ask Charlie Chaplin. Peter Decherney’s 2012 book Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of intellectual property. Decherney covers everything from the rampant duping that early…
Apple’s just acquired Passif, a wireless chipmaker that specializes in making tiny chips that require very low amounts of energy. The deal, it seems, happened sometime in the last few months, reports Jessica Lessin. What’s that mean for Apple? Well, it could indicate that Apple is, in fact, making some type of wearable device. Or,…
