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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is working with suppliers to develop a new touch-enabled watch device, which sees it jumping on the same rumored bandwagon as Apple and Samsung. https://gizmodo.com/the-nicest-apple-iwatch-concept-yet-5990104 Citing executives from Microsoft’s suppliers, the Journal reports that Asian manufacturers have been shipping components to Ballmer and co so that the…
Do not adjust your computer screens. There’s no problem with YouTube, other than the fact that it’s getting a little misty eyed—by choosing to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the VCR with a little added analog character on its digital videos. On plenty of YouTube videos you can currently find a small VCR button: click…
So taxes are due…any minute now. And TurboTax is a popular service for doing taxes. Yes? Sure. Well, that’s a lot of pressure! Cue meltdown. Everything was going fine for whoever mans the TurboTax Twitter. He or she was spending the evening watching Food Network and was then rudely interrupted by a deluge of Twitter…
More or less, this is all anyone ever wants from a piece of technology. Here’s a 90-year-old woman strapped into an Oculus Rift VR headset, and totally losing her mind over how amazing it is. Oh, man alive! Originally, were these made in Tuscany??? Oh this is something else. And I’m still sitting where I…
What is there to even say? Joerg Sprave dreamed up a slingshot that shoots glass ashtrays and has a broken beer bottle attached as a bayonet. It’s all pretty legit. The slingshot is pump-powered and holds four ashtrays at a time (three in the clip plus one in the chamber). It’s accurate at close range…
Yeah, so giant African land snails are infesting southern Florida. They’re the kind that can eat through plaster and stucco and they get as big as rats. When the rainy season ends in a few weeks the population will explode. It’s a bad situation. The same snails invaded in 1966 when a kid brought three…
There are three or four parts of “The Bleeding Heart Show” that are catchy. The beginning, that middle part and don’t even get me started on the hey-las at the end. Good stuff. But the best thing about “The Bleeding Heart Show” is the melodica backups. You don’t hear melodica (a wind instrument with a…
We all know about echolocation, but way more is happening when a bat takes flight, and some bats don’t echolocate at all. So how do they have so much precision in their flying and what’s different about bats and birds? SmarterEveryDay looks into the bone structure of bat vs. bird wings and describes how bats…
Ah digital currency. It’s all in our collective hive-mind right? Coming and going in bits and bytes. Nothing to see here. So why is a hacking process called “Bitcoin mining” using $150,000 worth of electricity a day? This had better be good. Miners need a lot of computing power to dredge up digital currency. And…
Okay, so you know your hand? Five fingers. Assorted grasping and carrying shenanigans. Right. So it turns out that your brain is constantly using sensory information to check in and make sure it still knows what’s your hand and what’s not. And it can be fooled. Arvid Guterstam, Giovanni Gentile and Henrik Ehrsson at the…
Did you hear? Nearly half of Justin Bieber’s Twitter followers are fake. Fake! Belieber nation is a fraud, life has no meaning, the abyss of treachery and betrayal that is life grows deeper by the hour. https://gizmodo.com/justin-bieber-has-the-fakest-twitter-followers-5994569/ But wait! Surely other celebrity Twitter accounts aren’t afflicted by this unforgivable deceit. Right? Actually… most of them…
It might be time for new subway cars, and the New York Transit Authority wants to do it right. So they sent a group of researchers into the subways to stare at straphangers over three weeks and make everyone super uncomfortable. Plus gather data or whatever. The researchers concluded that people will go to pretty…
Yesterday I was hanging out with a friend who has a dumbphone and he was lamenting the time he wastes composing texts. When I mentioned that I was pretty speedy with T9 in my day he stared at me blankly. And then he asked me a question that I thought I would never hear again.…
The real thing that’s frustrating about building IKEA furniture isn’t the little screws or the instructions. It’s the person who’s helping you. They misunderstand directions, hum Rihanna songs and kick the last dowel under the refrigerator by accident. And you can’t say anything because they’re doing you a favor. So Italian researchers showed their robot…
It’s really sad. No one can just build a chandelier anymore because their patron commissioned it for his feast hall. They all need a gimmick. Gauche. But this floor-to-ceiling design is made of 8,000 clear-plastic legos and looks pretty amazing, so let’s let it go. This time. Tobias Tøstesen, an industrial designer based in Copenhagen,…
In the last three months, Netflix subscribers watched four billion hours of streaming content according to Reed Hastings. And a report from BTIG Research calculates that this puts Netflix ahead of any cable channel. Richard Greenfield at BTIG reasoned that if 88 percent of Netflix subscribers are in the U.S. there would be 28.1 million…
Daniel Craig did a great job of freshening up the Bond franchise. By the time he got to it, things had gone a bit stale, gotten a bit out of control. But now that we’ve had a good trio of his, maybe it’s time to take a hop back to some Brosnan. I mean, Goldeneye…
The nanobots are coming, and hopefully they’ll do more harm than good. but if they do decide to destroy the world, I hope it’s even half as catchy. Nanobots is the lead single of They Might Be Giant’s like one billionth (16th) album of the same name. While the record dropped last month, the video…
It’s one thing to have a spacious home, it’s another to have a whole indoor suburb. “House K” does the latter, and puts a weird new spin on the townhouse by having its own little town inside its walls. Designed by Japanese architect Yoshichika Takagi, House K is intended to replicate the sort of feel…
Back in 2008, Jason Koger had the misfortune of running over a downed power line on his four-wheeler, being shocked with 7,200 volts of electricity, and ultimately having both his hands amputated. Now, he’s had the good luck to get a pair of new ones that can be controlled by an iPhone app. The i-Limb…
