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Not surprisingly, the Nabisco folks weren’t entirely impressed with Joerg Sprave’s brilliant Oreo-splitting pump action slingshot, and took his video down. So as an act of revenge, Joerg has added another pump action weapon to his arsenal designed to decimate a box of cookies. But this time he’s also provided the plans and instructions needed…
ATM skimming has become an art in recent years, with the devices that crooks use becoming ever more sophisticated. But fraudsters are broadening their reach, with payment terminals and ticket machines now just as much targets as ATMs. https://gizmodo.com/this-skimmer-is-why-you-should-be-nervous-at-atms-5904949 Krebs on Security reports findings from the European ATM Security Team (EAST) which reveals that point-of-sale…
You think you’re a coffe connoisseur? Well then, you should have no problem ordering your pick-me-up of choice from this menu, which lists drink options purely by the ratios of coffee, milk, water and air present in the beverage. The menu was spotted in East London, according to Flowing Data, and it relies on customers’…
It’s no secret that the likes of China and Iran censor the internet to within an inch of its life, but now there’s a new Big Brother blocking content: Russia. https://gizmodo.com/how-china-censors-its-twitter-at-light-speed-5989161 The New York Times reports that the Russian government has recently been making heavy use of a new law to “block Internet content that…
While The Pirate Pay is certainly notorious, it’s always oddly lingered in the mid-table when it comes to real-world file sharing. No longer, though: according to fresh analysis by Torrent Freak, the site has now sailed into the top spot as the world’s most-used file sharing site. While that is in part down to a…
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, is a fundamental piece of legislation which forms the foundation of US law regarding digital rights. It’s far from perfect for consumers—but it also has a massive impact on the progress of research, too. https://gizmodo.com/everything-wrong-with-digital-copyright-and-how-to-fix-5989166 Slate has a fascinating piece on the topic, written by computer security…
The season 3 premier is upon us, people. There were a lot of quality contenders for this soundtrack slot. Mashups, covers and original tracks abound. Jason Yang’s cover of the Game of Thrones theme by Ramin Djawadi is all-around solid, though, and also pretty epic. The track incorporates acoustic and electric violin, and was recorded…
I never had a walkie talkie phone, but I sure saw a lot of Nextel commercials and Sprint still offers push-to-talk even though the original Nextel network is apparently getting the ax on June 30. In the early 2000s there was something really appealing about interrupting someone’s life with that little chirp. It’s kind of…
The Mobile Blastmaster exists. That’s most of what you need to know. It’s the boombox of your dreams, or more probably, your nightmares. It’s a little red wagon on crack. This baby has pneumatic tires to easily traverse sand and snow. It plays from any Bluetooth-enabled device with a 30 foot range. It has a…
YouTube and GoogleMaps are getting the ball rolling today. According to the release above, YouTube is not actually a video viewing and sharing site, but an 8-year contest to find the best video anyone can make. And GoogleMaps now has a treasure map layer. Nice, we see what you did there. [CNET]
The Robotics and Perception Group in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich is nailing it. Funded in 2012, they are studying the development of autonomous robots by making seasonal videos. Which is all anyone really wants. In the video a Parrot AR.Drone (they’re everywhere today) locates jellybean eggs that the Easter bunny…
There’s something really meditative about these slotted lamps. They’re made out of wood from California cypress trees and the light inside is a constant current LED, but the sculptural elements come through more than the utility as a lamp. Designed by Paul Foeckler for Split Grain in LA, the lamps range from $750 to $1,950.…
Yesterday I was printing a form and I realized it was the first time I had printed anything in months. For awhile I was the one who still had a paper copy of my bus ticket, Fandango confirmation, even driving directions. But yesterday I realized that my printer was covered in dust and stocked with…
We probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it’s so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found “survival of the fittest” acting in computer programming. Sergei Maslov of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook…
This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn’t actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth’s natural systems would slowly fail,…
The world’s fastest supercomputer isn’t the world’s fastest super computer anymore, so it’s getting turned off today. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM’s Roadrunner is being replaced by a faster, cheaper and more energy efficient computer, Cielo. https://gizmodo.com/ibm-roadrunner-tops-cray-as-the-official-worlds-fastest-5090737 The $121 million Roadrunner supercomputer was the first to consistently compute a Petaflop, or a quadrillion mathematical…
64GB HTC One will be an AT&T exclusive. Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon will only have 32GB.
Innovation in newspaper delivery techniques hasn’t really seemed like a priority in awhile because of the whole death of print thing and whatever. But since drones categorically improve all situations, a local French postal service is turning paper routes into air routes. http://gizmodo.com/5965109/30-more-buyouts-coming-to-the-new-york-times?tag=newspapers The postal service “La Poste Groupe” is using Auvergne, France as a…
Hahahaha, your Shaolin Rooster style is most impressive. But it is no match! For my Little Bunny Wu Shu! *lips keeps moving* [Crush]
Thanks to the crazy prevalence of dash-cams in Russia, we got an amazing, multi-viewpoint look at last month’s monster meteor strike just hours after it happened. But there’s more to see than just the flashes in the sky. PBS’s Nova dug in deep to figure out the details of the incident, and the disaster it…
