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It’s not often something as mundane as a tape dispenser is worth a second glance. But then again, most of the office supplies on your desk weren’t created by one of Alessi’s talented designers. The Filo is as minimal as tape dispensers can get, and that’s what makes it beautiful. Explaining why your expense report…
The Microsoft Surface arrives today. It’s been touted as the perfect compromise between laptop and tablet. (From what we can tell, that’s not quite the case.) But hybrid gadgets have a checkered past. Most seem to fail at first, and yet some find success later. So all hope might not be lost for this quirky…
Designed by Fanny Adam, an arts student who was clearly living in a cramped dorm, the multi-functional Story sofa is an even more accomplished transformer than Optimus Prime. It changes from a sofa, to a bed, to a dining table—all the while providing ample storage with drawers and cubby holes. The best part is that…
Chinese designer Vega Wang combined space-age styles with electroluminescent material to make Alpha Lyrae, an amazing line of gorgeous, glowing dresses. You can see them glow like nebula in the sky at a star-speckled site the Creators Project, Vice, and Intel just launched. Each radiant piece is inspired by different phenomena in space, like black…
BriefMobile got its hands on what it says is the upcoming Google Nexus 10 tablet. Supposedly manufactured by Samsung, the tablet is said to have a dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos processor, a 2560×1600 retina-grade display, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 16 gigs of storage, a 5 megapixel camera, NFC, and Android 4.2, which is still called…
I’m sure you’re a good person, but you’re making everyone feel awful with the pictures you share. Why? Because your Instagram images have become an enormous swinging middle finger to all of your friends. We need to fix this. You need to stop. Instagram isn’t designed to do anything more than share pictures—usually altered to…
So you got up early this morning and ordered yourself a spankin’ new iPad Mini. Good for you! Sure, the iPad Mini might not be the best value, and that screen can be called pixel-poor, but there’s still enough there that millions of people will buy one. Considering the fact that the iPad Mini is…
Don’t break out your shotgun, gas mask, and emergency rations, but make sure you know where they are: it looks like an enormous chunk of the Internet in North America is dead. According to the Internet Traffic Report, which “monitors the flow of data around the world,” we’re in the midst of some kind of…
Every day, an army of computers and human operators toil in control rooms, providing electricity to a city, guiding planes across the sky, or searching for the Higgs-Boson. These rooms are all extremely important, whether they’re making breakthrough discoveries or just keeping the lights on. Here are a couple of examples of the most awesome…
A puffy down feather jacket is one of the lightest and warmest things you can wear. But the tradeoff is that if you get it even the slightest bit wet, you’ll be wearing a cold soggy mess. Not the Brooks-Range Mojave, though; thanks to a special coating on the feathers, it doesn’t skimp on the…
Tumblr is down due to what must be a catastrophic network problem. Not even Tumblr’s status blog is loading. On Friday no less! What the heck are we supposed to do to burn time until the weekend? Where will you find GIFs without Tumblr? More importantly, where will you post them? [The Verge]
Paul Ceglia, the upstate New York wood pellet salesman who claimed to co-own Facebook with Zuck, was just arrested at home on fraud charges. AP reports He could spend his next 40 years in prison. If you’re tempted—don’t. Ceglia’s claims were always pretty laughable, hinging on (doctored) messages he claimed to have exchanged with Zuckerberg,…
If you’ve used the newly arrived Windows 8, you may have noticed that among the army of colorful tiles, there’s something important that’s conspicuously absent: Google. Microsoft is pushing its own Bing and Internet Explorer hard, but if that doesn’t cut it for you, Google put out this catchy little video on how to get…
One day, I’m sure, a version of this robot will hunt humans through forests, swamps, deserts, jungles and cities. Watch it as it saves different obstacles and you will clearly imagine it too, even while now it’s so slow. Give them a decade and the US Army will have their Terminator soldiers based on this…
Truckers of the world! No matter how many times you try it, no matter how much you duck inside your cabin as get through it, no matter how strongly you believe the warning signs don’t apply to you, your vehicle is never going to be able to survive an encounter with Durham’s 11-foot 8-inch tall…
Google Maps now shows terrain by default. Deserts and forests and mountains, oh my! [TechCrunch]
You’ve never seen baseball like this. While HD and slow-motion replays have become old hat for MLB broadcasts, this post-season, FOX Sports is determined to document this year’s action in unprecedented detail—capturing at-bats by the microsecond. And this pair of ultra-high-speed Phantom cameras is how they’ll do it. The Vision Research v642 is widely used…
This seems like yet another boring refueling video taken by a KC-135 Stratotanker’s flying boom operator—until the NATO E-3 Sentry AWACS plane almost crashes with it. At the last second, the Sentry’s pilot pushes down in a massive negative G-force party, avoiding a fatal outcome. Things look fun when a major disaster is averted. [The…
Meteorologists are forecasting what could be the worst storm to hit the eastern United States in more than 70 years. Dubbed the “Frankenstorm” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the system could potentially pummel the Mid-Atlantic and northeast with gale-force winds and snow at the same time. Yes, that sounds like a scene from…
In a few short years Volvos-the fancy ones, anyway-will include a cruise-control system that lets your car drive and steer itself through crawling traffic. So if your daily commute involves a long stretch sitting in a jam, you’ll be able to sit back and read a book, get caught up on work, or just keep…