Tech News

Last-Minute Halo 4 Savings Are Your Red-vs-Blue Deal of the Day

It’s a pretty big day around the country! Millions of Americans have been waiting for November 6 with bated breath. Yep, you guessed it: Halo 4 came out today. You didn’t register to pre-order in time, but you still want to save some money. Don’t worry, Professor Dealzmodo will sort this out for you. Here…

The Empire State Building Will Track Election Results In Bright, Shiny Lights

ABC and NBC News may have hijacked Times Square and Rockafeller Plaza’s ice-rink, respectively, for tonight’s presidential potato sack race. But CNN will actually project their real-time results where the whole city (and country) can see: the Empire State Building. The tower’s brand new LED-technology will be put into use for the first time as…

How Induction Cooktops Make Meals with Magnets

It’s a disgrace—98 percent of US households still cook food over crude heat like a bunch of cave-dwelling heathens. Well, the 21st century is no place for such pyromantic parlor tricks. We’ve harnessed the power of electricity, and adapted it for the next wave of culinary hardware—induction ranges. Here’s how they can drag our sorry…

This Shrinking Lamp Plays Tricks On You

At first this desk lamp looks like a regular desk lamp. But surprise! It pulls the old telescoping lamp gag and shrinks down to half its original size, and clamps onto the side of your desk like a vise. The light was created by German designer Dirk Winkel for a Swedish company called Wastberg. He…

“Solarize” Shooting Challenge

I had this challenge in mind when I visited a garden this weekend in DC. I took hundreds of pictures of flowers and girly stuff in jpg. When I finally returned home I realized that I had nearly no control of the photos when I applied the sabattier effect. The only photos I had in…

27 Duplicitous Images That Reverse Light and Dark

It’s a strange effect, reversing the highlights and shadows of an image. Scenes are familiar opposites, doppelgängers that can’t quite be trusted. And that’s exactly what we see in this week’s Shooting Challenge. WINNER: Kiteboarding I took this picture at the Browns Point Community Park & Lighthouse in North Tacoma on Puget Sound. It was…

Have You Had Any Problems With Electronic Voting?

It’s election day. Some of you have the fortune of being able to vote electronically, thus removing any confusion over whether or not that chad was hanging. Well it’s supposed to remove confusion in theory. Have you voted yet? Was it some form of an electronic ballot? Did you notice anything sketchy? Let’s talk about…

LaCie’s CloudBox Shares Your Files From Thousands of Miles Away

One household, zillions of files of music, movies, and games. And today LaCie introduced another solution for sharing all of them—the CloudBox. Available in configurations of 1TB for $120, 2TB for $150, and 3TB for $180, the NAS kit lets everyone who’s hooked up to share their stuff remotely. Setup is supposed to be a…

Garbage Mountain and Armored Cars: The Rockaways Are Still in Ruin

There was a sense when the lights came back on in Manhattan that the worst of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction was over. Sadly, that’s far from the truth. For thousands upon thousands of people, life is about as far away from getting back to normal as you can imagined. The Rockaways, a community about as far…

Yep, Microsoft confirmed it’s moving its 100-million Messenger users to Skype next year.

Dyson Doubles Up On the Cyclones So Its Vacs Suck Twice As Hard

It’s not exactly the most revolutionary of improvements, but today Dyson announced two new compact vacuums that now feature two banks of its patented cyclones that promise vastly improved suction. And while the ‘just add more’ approach seems like it would be the easy route, it still took Dyson’s engineers three years and 1,859 prototypes…

America: People Are Googling “Who Is Running for President” Right Up to the End

America, the Great Republic, is holding her elections today. And her voters, you voters, are, uh, still frantically Googling to find out who’s running for President. That’s a Google Trends chart above, showing how often people in the United States have searched for “who is running for president”. As you can see, it’s spiked heavily…

Is Google Voice Sending Your Text Messages from Random Numbers?

Reports are coming in from the Google Voice help forums that SMS messages sent through Google Voice are being sent from random numbers. There are multiple complaints, including for voice SMS, claiming that the incorrect numbers are random, and different for each message. There’s an update coming to Google Voice prior to Android 4.2 being…

Spiked Bowl Stops Your Dog From Eating Like an Animal

Remember your parents telling you to slow down and thoroughly chew your food at dinner? Not only does it help prevent choking, it also aids digestion. And that doesn’t just go for little kids. Dogs can also benefit from a more leisurely approach to dining, and that’s why this bizarre bowl is covered in tiny…

Five Past Visions of Our Political Future

Twentieth-century Americans saw many different predictions for what the world of politics might look like in the 21st century. Some people imagined a world where politics ceased to matter much in daily life. Others saw a world where computers would allow for direct democracy and people voting from their homes. Some people thought that once…

How to Access Your Notes, Ideas, and Recordings Any Time and Anywhere

Recently, Livescribe™ announced the launch of the Sky™ wifi smartpen, the first digital pen to integrate WiFi technology and cloud services. But with just about every new tech toy claiming to be “part of the cloud,” what does that actually mean for a tool like a smartpen? Well, it means that your work or school…

Is It Illegal To Instagram Your Vote?

This may sound familiar: a friend of yours posts a picture of her completed ballot, shot moments ago, inside a New York City voting booth. Was it legal to take that photo to begin with? In a surprising number of states, this simple act—one you’ve no doubt seen repeated on Instagram and Facebook dozens of…

This Voting Machine Won’t Let You Vote for Obama (Updated: It Happened Again)

If this is what it looks like, it’s terrifying: an electronic voting machine that won’t let you vote for who you want to vote for. The video, uploaded today which surfaced on Reddit, is allegedly from a voting station in Pennsylvania—a major state in the election. The man who recorded the faulty machine, which is…

This Robotic Mining Car Never Stops Hauling

The demand for minerals is skyrocketing—not just for rare earths like neodymium, europium, and cerium used in the iPhone 5, but phosphorous and coal too. As that demand rises, miners must dig deeper into the ground. But the lower they go, the more dangerous the job becomes—71 miners died in 2010 in the US alone.…

Microsoft Is Turning Kinect Into a Narc

Kinect is tons of fun. Have you ever played Dance Central 3? Great game. But according to a newly discovered patent, the Xbox add-on is also maybe spying on you, which is totally not cool, man. This very big brother-y piece of intellectual property—Content Distribution Regulation by Viewing User—uses Kinect’s camera to count the number…