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My friend Russ designs grills for Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet, where the starting price is around $14,000 $10,000. He just sent me this video, a glimpse at their manufacturing process. Man, these are sweet pieces of kit—all hand-made in an adorable town in Michigan, able to burn wood, gas, or charcoal. *drool* Well, I am not rich,…
Start 2013 with a new laptop. This 15-inch Vizio is way over-specced for the price: you get a 1080p screen, a 256GB SSD, and a top of the line dual-core Intel mobile processor. Plus, it comes with Windows 8—this is a new machine, after all. We liked its unibody design when we reviewed it, and…
Westinghouse is rolling out a 4K UHD 110-Inch television at CES—most likely via fork lift.
On July 16, 1945, the US Army destroyed a small part of New Mexico by testing the first nuclear bomb in human history, the most powerful weapon of all time. It then proceeded to blow up 1,054 more. All of these detonations were part of separate operations, given cute code names like Wigwam and Teapot—hundreds…
Every year, we’re promised beautiful, useful, innovative gadgets that will supposedly make our lives better. Then something goes wrong and we don’t get them. Humph. Google Nexus Q When the Nexus Q was announced back at Google I/O in June, it seemed like Google had thought the concept all the way through because the weird…
You might’ve read a story today that a quarter of Instagrams millions upon millions of users abruptly stopped using the massively-popular service over Christmas. But there’s good reason to believe this is crap—and Instagram flat out denies it. The rumor, which has already knocked down Facebook’s stock today, started with a little company named AppData,…
The new year is only yards away, which means you’ve got a shining chance to reinvent yourself as less of a jerk. Adopt these tech principles and you’ll be a better person in 2013. 1. Turn on iMessage Read Receipts So People Know You’ve Read Their Messages We generally hate read receipts—those little notifications that…
Kokichi Sugihara loves to screw up human perception. He is the master of 3D optical illusions, designing solid three-dimensional models that do impossible things. This house is his latest creation, presented a few days ago at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Sardinia, Italy. Sugihara—a mathematics researcher and professor at Meiji University in Kawasaki,…
Cycloramic is the new app which uses your iPhone’s vibration and sensors to rotate itself and take a 360-degree video. It’s amazing to see in action—and Woz loves it so much that a video he shot using it has appeared on Facebook. https://gizmodo.com/cycloramic-an-app-that-automatically-rotates-your-ipho-5971557 Woz emailed the video to the guys at Cycloramic, who posted it…
By a vote of 73 to 23, the US Senate just voted for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens until 2017. The vote, set to affirm to eradicate the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, means we’ll be living with Bush-era spy laws for another half decade. In 2007, the Senate voted to grant blanket…
Sometimes, simple explanations can be the most revealing. Take this map, for example, which depicts thousands of years of human history by representing each country with a single word. Turns out to be painfully accurate. Cartographer Martin Elmer explains how he made the map: This map was produced by running all the various countries’ “History…
In 1969, composer Alvin Lucier created a work that’s half science demo, half wonderfully creepy art: he recorded and then re-recorded, his own voice, over and over, until it turned into nothing but noise. It’s the coolest thing you’ll hear today. Lucier’s recording—”I Am Sitting in a Room”—banks on the fact that for any given…
It’s that strange time of year, the lull between Christmas and New Year, when you’re not really celebrating but not really working either. So, how about you wrap your brain around the world’s hardest logic puzzle to keep yourself amused? Y’know, just for fun. New Scientist has a lovely feature (which is available to read…
RIM is ponying up a cool $65 million to Nokia, in the first of a series of patent settlement payments. Ouch. https://gizmodo.com/rim-and-nokia-have-dropped-all-legal-action-against-eac-5970416
It’s the end of an era: Sony’s stopping shipping the PS2, the wolrd’s best selling console, in Japan. Sainara! [Famistu]
Every year, without fail, we all receive some bad gifts. Sure, you may’ve scored that phone, e-reader or laptop that you were lusting after, but there will be shockers, too: a hand-knitted sweater from your grandma, novelty socks, or, perhaps if you’re incredibly unlucky, an $80 Walmart tablet. And with gifts that bad, there’s only…
While Google’s Zeitgeist gives us a glimpse into the spur-of-the-moment searches we all made this year, Wikipedia’s most viewed pages reveal what we actually felt a need to bone up on. Brace yourselves. https://gizmodo.com/the-10-most-searched-things-of-2012-show-how-screwed-up-5967799 While Wikipedia doesn’t actually publish official end-of-year results, devs can root around in log files to provide the data. Which is…
Posterous now lets you export your old blog posts and media with its new backup tool. Time to get nostalgic. [Posterous]
HP has announced that the Department of Justice has opened a fraud investigation relating to Autonomy—the company that HP bought for $11 billion then ended up costing a further $9 billion. https://gizmodo.com/company-hp-bought-for-11-billion-just-cost-hp-9-billi-5962107 When news first surfaced of the massive loss owing to Autonomy, things definitely didn’t feel right: at best it was a massive accounting…
Snapchat, the sexting app of choice recently cloned by Facebook, might not be as private as you think. BuzzFeed reports that video files sent using the app are actually not deleted from the phone immediately—meaning they can be copied onto a computer and watched over and over. https://gizmodo.com/poke-facebook-just-cloned-snapchat-update-hands-on-5970590 BuzzFeed describes the simple process required to…