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Music festivals generate a lot of litter. Tons of it. Litterally. It’s been a problem for ages, but Glad has come up with a clever design solution that solves at least part of the problem: a trashbag tent. Your average concert-goer probably isn’t going to be too stoked at the prospect of a free trashbag,…
AT&T’s jumping on the no-contract bandwagon with its new BYOD, pre-paid AIO brand. For $40 a month you can get unlimited talk and text and 250MB of data. 2GB is $55 and 7GB is $70. No LTE though. Welcome to the party, guys.
When a Stanford University professor said the bizarre Atacama skeleton likely belonged to a human child between the ages of six and eight, it seemed crazy. How could this tiny, long-headed creature with less ribs than standard kids been inside a child of grade-school age? Today there’s a more plausible explanation: The “alien skeleton” was…
Remember the now ubiquitous bullet time effect in the Matrix? That technique requires dozens of cameras and other expensive gear, but JPL engineer, inventor and Gizmodo friend Mark Rober, figured out how to do it for just a few dollars. https://gizmodo.com/seven-years-in-the-life-of-one-of-the-engineers-of-the-5935453 He managed to achieve the same effect using a ceiling fan, some card board,…
The human olfactory organ is the result of millions of years of evolution and biological refinement. But, in spite of your face, it can’t tell the difference between an apple and a pear nearly as well as this mechanical sniffer. First explored in 1982, research into duplicating the human sense of smell in robotic systems…
Taking inspiration from a motorcycle helmet, which protects riders from the elements without hindering their line of sight, Stephen Collier created the Rainshader to be the next generation of umbrellas. And given it can survive Gale Force 7 winds up to 40 miles per hour, it could be the last brolly you ever buy. Working…
New Yorkers have spent the past four hundred years changing the coastal island they call home. It’s easy to forget (or not even realize) that Manhattan—or Mannahatta—was once a thin, marshy outcropping that protected the mainland from the ocean. But a recent look at the earliest known map of New Amsterdam reminds us: you don’t…
There’s a great Netflix feature in Bloomberg Businessweek today, which details how the company delivers its enormous catalog to 36 million customers without a hitch. It’s more than impressive math—it’s almost a miracle. Wrestling with movie studios over rights to the hottest content is only step one of Netflix’s struggle. You see, Netflix’s customers don’t…
Do you live in a tiny apartment in the city? Here are some awesome tips to make the most ouf of it by Graham Hill, the guy who made the magically transforming apartment above—a perfect living environment that packs “1,000 square feet of function in only 420 square feet.” [Lifehacker] https://betterstate.kinja.com/ask-the-designer-behind-lifeedited-how-to-maximize-your-475116335
Google Earth wasn’t around until about 2005, but with the power of archival satellite footage, Google’s whipped up the most comprehensive timelapse known to man, covering the past 20 years of Earth. The ultimate, beautiful conclusion of this little project? Dope GIFs. A joint effort between Google, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and TIME,…
It’s been a tough week for The Onion—it was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army—but it really knocked this one home. Fart Scroll. Code to make your website fart. https://gizmodo.com/how-the-onion-was-hacked-by-the-syrian-electronic-army-498441103 The code is a simple enough. Just include “fartscroll.min.js” on your page, and then define how often (how many pixels of scrolling) you want the…
Trying to pinpoint what exactly in your car is making that weird ticking noise can drive anyone to madness. As sensitive as our ears are, they’re not always as great at precisely locating where a sound is coming from. Thankfully you have four other senses to help, particularly your sight, which this unique SeeSV-S205 acoustic…
Gadget nuts have CES, kids at heart get Toy Fair, video gamers have E3, but if it’s watches that ring your bell, every spring you’ll want to head over to Basel, Switzerland for Baselworld. It’s where the world’s horological masters gather to unveil their latest timekeeping works of art. And these are the most wonderful…
It was tough to tell for sure if The Onion really had been hacked earlier this week or if it was all just a joke—but now it’s explained exactly how its Twitter account was compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army. https://gizmodo.com/well-it-looks-like-the-onions-twitter-feed-got-hacked-t-493158547 Turns out Onion employees were phished three ways. First, they started getting emails like…
It’s normally quite hard to get excited about portable chargers. But, somehow, Nokia has managed to make one that’s… strangely irresistible. The DC-18 is a neat little primary color cuboid packed full of electrons. In fact, it looks a little like the live tiles that Nokia’s Lumias sport on their screens—helped along by the fact…
Since Adobe Photoshop was launched in 1989 photographers have had it easy, being able to tweak images to their heart’s content without getting their hands dirty. But it wasn’t always like that. CreativePro stumbled across a 1946 book called Shortcuts to Photo Retouching For Commercial Use, and it makes you realise just how much painstaking…
Following a Freedom of Information Act request by MuckRock, the National Security Agency has been forced to make public a book it produced called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research. Understandably, it’s full of gems. Sadly, though, it’s a whopping 643 pages long, so there’s quite a lot to sift through. But while…
Before I go off calling everyone who has read receipts on but still doesn’t reply in a timely matter rude assholes, please note that I am one of them. But still! I hear it’s verrry annoying for other people to see some messages be read (and for Facebook, it pretty much has to be that…
No matter how advanced the invading alien culture, rest assured that humanity will find a way to fight back—be it the bacteria from War of the Worlds, Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day, or a pipe rip of the sticky icky from Stephen J Mitchell’s awesome stop motion short, Take Me to the Fog.
TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft, which has already made an interesting $300 million investment in Nook, wants to double down and buy the whole darn thing. Specifically, Microsoft wants to pay $1 billion to acquire the digital assets of Nook Media LLC—that would be the separate Nook company that spun off from Barnes & Noble…
