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J-Lo is sorry she gave a concert for Turkmenistan’s dictator and Cabbage Patch Kid lookalike Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. Had she known his human rights record, she would haven’t attended, she says. Maybe she should give her fee to Amnesty International.
RSS isn’t rocket science. And while Google Reader is gasping its last breaths—after this weekend, it’s gone forever—there’s already a veritable army of newcomers vying to replace it. There’s even a good chance one of them will be better than the dead-end Google Reader ever could have been. That’s great and all, but even the…
Love or hate haunted houses, it’s hard to deny the fact that their ability to turn otherwise rational adults into whimpering shells of their former selves is, to say the least, fairly impressive. And now, thanks to the new Haunted Mansion Backstage tumblr, you can see exactly how they turn all that dated robotic tech…
We’ve been keen on Xbox Music, but the fact that it’s been locked down to Windows 8 devices has been a bit of a drag. No more! Xbox Music now has a home on the web, complete with 30-day free trial. https://gizmodo.com/xbox-music-hands-on-the-perfect-music-service-if-you-u-5951705 A web-client is the first step toward real corss-platform functionality, but there’s no…
Lifehacker has a guide with the best 10 conversation starters for shy people, from “Nice earrings!” (talk clothes) to “Chicago really is the Windy City!” (talk weather) and the new classic “people call me David, but you can call me tonight” (tell a joke?) Practical guide or comedy, it works either way.
Even the most amazing accomplishments of modern-day science will never be able to hold a candle to the impossible powers promised by alchemy. It never delivered, but old-school alchemists weren’t discouraged by failure, and now a new-school alchemist is taking a look back to figure out what the hell they were doing that whole time.…
We tend to think of demolition as destructive: dynamite, dust, and plenty of fireworks. But as a New York Times article recently described, demolition in dense cities is, more and more often, a “stealth” operation, where a building is dismantled over a number of weeks. The article describes the slow demolition of Tokyo’s 40-story Akasaka…
Google Reader is on its deathbed, slated to meet its end on July 1st. Its demise has been looming in the distance for a while, so this should come as no surprise. And while this is certainly a time of mourning, there’s the unseemly business of finding a replacement. Here’s a list of platform agnostic…
Despite a shaky track record, it seems HP is keen to stay involved with the smartphone market—with one of its execs insisting that it’s planning to release a handset. At some point. When asked by The Indian Express about whether a future HP phone was on the cards, the company’s Senior Director of Consumer PCs…
The first ever Mozilla Firefox OS phone goes on sale tomorrow for $90 in… Spain. With any luck, it’ll hit the US in the coming months.
If you’re struggling to find the right furniture for your place, consider making your own—from Mozilla’s very own pool of open source designs. The company just opened a new office in Japan, and teamed up with design company Nosigner to develop a range of “open-source furniture” for the place. The whole set-up was created using…
While California officials warned this could be worst fire season in one hundred years and yesterday brought us 19 dead firefighters in Arizona, this is not a wildfire. These terrible—albeit eerily beautiful—images were captured yesterday in England by the West Midlands Fire Service while battling a massive blaze being fed by an astounding 55,000 tons…
If you’ve always fancied mapping out an obscure part of the globe, it could be your lucky day: you can now apply to use Google’s Street View backpack. Called Trekker, the backpack is used to image the more obscure locations around the planet that cars, trikes and snowmobiles can’t access. And now If you’re a…
The Washington Post has unearthed more slides describing the US government’s PRISM surveillance program—and they help confirm the extent of the operation. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 The new slides seem to support what whistleblower Edward Snowden has already claimed: that PRISM lets the NSA perform real-time surveillance of email and instant messaging. The new slides don’t make clear…
Apple has filed an application for an ‘iWatch’ trademark in Japan—which adds a little more weight to the rumors of Cupertino’s forthcoming wrist wear. https://gizmodo.com/an-iwatch-concept-has-never-looked-this-good-493109921
Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who once associated gay sex to pedophilia and bestiality, can’t use his name in the game Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Nintendo censors Santorum because Google says it’s “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that’s sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”
Investment banker Jon Heinemann and his Betty Draper wife are suing their children’s private school for $500,000 in damages. They felt swindled by the school during the auction of a finger painting made by kids, for which they paid $50,000. Their lawsuit claims that a teacher artificially inflated the bidding process.
The dictionary defines parkour as “the activity of running through an area, typically in an urban environment, using acrobatic techniques to negotiate obstacles.” That doesn’t even begin to describe the crazy stunts in this vertigo-inducing first person video. Watch it and remember that this guy is not using any security measures whatsoever.
Bosnian Rainbows is sort of an amalgam of band members from The Mars Volta and Le Butcherettes. They’re definitely alternative rock and have a sort of No Doubt-from-Texas vibe (they formed in El Paso) with some Latin Roots. Their drummer Deantoni Parks definitely keeps things interesting, and there’s kind of a ska feel, but without…
This week Joerg invited some students from the Technical University of Munich to create general mayhem with him via a steel axe. But an axe by itself isn’t menacing/relevant enough. It obviously has to double as a slingshot. And it does! The handle of the axe is hollow . . . The device houses four…
