Tech News

Let’s Hope This Beautiful Leather iPhone Sleeve Gets an Upgrade This Week

It’s as functional as it is simple, but if you have any intentions of upgrading your iPhone in the very near future, you’re unfortunately going to want to pass on Evouni’s lovely leather sleeve stand. All evidence points to the next-generation iPhone being taller than the current model, which means this sleeve will simply be…

FBI’s Sinister New $1 Billion Project Will Track Everyone By Their Face

How would you feel if the government could easily track your movements by automatically identifying your face on images captured by the ever-growing network of CCTV of cameras in America? The FBI is will be able to do just that soon, with its one-billion-dollar Next Generation Identification program. The FBI has been pursuing their new…

32 Microsoft Retail Stores Will Invade America for the Holidays

When Microsoft starts selling its Windows 8 Surface tablets next month, it’ll be at a major retail disadvantage to Apple. Unlike its arch-nemesis, Microsoft doesn’t have 275 branded stores for consumers to line up outside of in anticipation of new products. Microsoft is hoping to tip the scales at least a little bit with a…

How a Simple Fungus Might Resurrect the Legendary Stradivarius Violin

Because the few remaining instruments can fetch millions of dollars at auction, scientists have been trying to pinpoint exact what makes a Stradivarius sound so phenomenal so they can be recreated. It’s partly due to a rare type of wood used by Antonio Stradivari that a Swiss wood researcher has managed to artificially recreate using…

Google has updated the Google Drive iOS and Android apps to include document editing on your device. Spreadsheet party!

Your Dumb iPad Picture Taking Is Keeping Real Photographers From Doing Their Jobs

Here’s a picture of Barack Obama campaigning in West Palm Beach, Florida yesterday. Except you can’t even get a great look at the prez because of all the amateur idiots taking idiot pictures with their idiot tablets, getting in the way of the real professional photographers. This disruptive behavior has to stop. Even Amazon—which has…

Where Anonymous Really Got Its Apple IDs From (Hint: Not the FBI)

According to an exclusive report from NBC News, last week’s Anonymous hack, which at the time was reported to have affected 1 million Apple UDIDs obtained from the FBI, was not actually a hack on the FBI at all. https://gizmodo.com/antisec-leaks-1-million-apple-device-ids-obtained-durin-5940183 Instead, NBC claims that Paul DeHart, CEO of the Blue Toad publishing company, told it…

375 Completely Free Ebooks for Every Device

Last week Amazon dumped an avalanche of new Kindles on us. Huzzah for reading! Except, um, who wants to buy a whole library of ebooks? Here’s a list of 375 free books formatted for iPad/iPhone, Kindle, or for your plain old computer screen. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-new-kindle-avalanche-everything-you-need-to-kn-5941083 The list of books compiled by Open Culture consists of links…

You Won’t Want To Hide This Gorgeous Power Bar Under Your Desk

When jammed full of plugs and adapters your typical power bar is an eyesore you’re happy to stash out of sight. But Punkt’s new ES 01 wrangles all your power cables in a beautiful UFO-like design that you just might want to put on display right next to the photos of your kids. Available in…

5 Ways to Mind-hack Your Boss into Letting You Work from Home

If you are lucky enough to have a job, why not take the whole “work” thing to the next level and work from home in your jammies? Inspired by all of the mobile-office-enabling features of join.me, we asked tech entrepreneur (and work-from-home pro) Seth Porges to outline some tactics you can use to move closer…

That Pretty New Facebook Friend? Probably Taliban

In the good ol’ days of spy vs. spy, the honeypot was a tried and true method espionage technique, laced with danger, intrigue, and sex. These days—as Australian soldiers have found out the hard way—all it takes to seduce your way to state secrets is a Facebook friend request and a Google image search for…

These Cool USB Typewriters Can Type on Your Screen and on Paper at the Same Time

Jack Zylkin has created something really cool: a hack to turn any kind of vintage typewriter in a normal keyboard for tablets and computers. One that actually types on paper and works like any keyboard. Watching them in action is nothing sort of fascinating. He appropriately calls them USB typewriters—thankfully, he decided to ignore the…

Why Apple Might Have a Hard Time Keeping Up With Google Maps

You know Google’s Street View cars? You probably thought they were just gathering photos and route data, right? Well it turns out there’s more. Under the hood of Google maps is the Ground Truth Project: an automated, artificial intelligence system which scans and interprets those streetview shots for relevant information and then integrates it into…

America Never Looked More Stunningly Beautiful Than This Timelapse

Photographer and Gizmodo fan John Eklund made this extraordinary time-lapse movie of the Pacific Northwest. I thought I was getting tired of these videos, but some of his shots really push it to a new level. “I started the project from July 2011 to August 2012,” he said in an email, “I took approximately 260,000…

Sadly, You Will Not Be Able to Visit Neil Armstrong’s Grave

Neil Armstrong, America’s greatest and most reluctant hero, is not going to have a grave. He’s going to be buried at sea. Armstrong was a Lieutenant in the US Navy reserve. He originally joined the Navy in 1949, training at the Naval Air Station Pensacola and becoming a pilot. He flew 78 missions in the…

Watch These Cigar Rollers Turn a Stack of Dried Leaves Into Smokeable Art

The latest episode of the Made by Hand series profiles Martinez Cigars, a New York City-based factory and store where they’ve been hand rolling and selling cigars since 1974. Watching one of their craftsmen take a stack of dried tobacco leaves and effortlessly roll it into a cigar is mesmerizing, and the art is made…

Even Toys”R”Us Has a Tablet Now

Toys”R”Us has taken a good long look at the increasingly crowded Android tablet market and decided it wants a minuscule sliver too. So starting October 1st, every child’s favorite store will start selling a seven-inch, $150 Android device called the Tabeo (Tabby-oh? Tabe-e-oh?) targeted at younger users. But what makes the tablet kid-friendly? Besides a…

This Is the World’s Highest Surface Area Material

This isn’t an alien spine. Nor is it some elaborate climbing frame. In fact it’s a new new synthetic material called NU-110—and it’s the highest surface area material ever made. To give you some idea of what that means, if the internal surface area of one metal-organic NU-110 crystal the size of a grain of…

What Really Made Steve Jobs So Angry at Google?

With so many fanboys spinning Silicon Valley history, it’s sometimes easy to forget about the real chain of events that led to the ongoing Apple-Google thermonuclear war, how the romance turned to hate. This timeline presents an interesting case about why, despite patents and prior art, Steve Jobs had plenty of personal reasons to despise…

Leaked Sony RX1 Fits a DSLR in Your Pocket

Images and specs of a new Sony full frame compact camera have leaked over the weekend. The alleged new camera, called RX1, appears to squeeze DSLR-like specs right into your pocket—for a purported $2,800. PhotoPrice reports that the camera looks to pack a Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2.0 lens and a 24-megapixel full frame sensor into…