Tech News

What Do You Use Flash For on Your Android Phone?

Today is the last day that Flash will be supported on Android in any sort of official capacity. Once seen as a killer feature for mobile devices, HTML5 has all but decimated the web standard on portables and is making Flash increasingly irrelevant in the PC space. But there are some of you who certainly…

Big Windows Phone 8 news coming soon—we’ll be posting live from a fancy Nokia/Microsoft reveal in NYC on September 5th.

Beautiful Image of Russians Fighters Piercing the Sky

Flight Global has a beautiful image of the Russian Knights—the equivalent of the US Navy’s Blue Angels, the USAF’s Thunderbirds, or the RAF’s Red Arrows—celebrating the Russian Air Force 100th anniversary with a perfect, flare-riveted dance in the sky, riding their Sukhoi Su-27s fighter jets. It’s a great desktop background too (make sure to zoom…

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: How a Smithsonian Exhibit I Never Saw Changed My Life

Twenty-eight years ago this month an exhibit called Yesterday’s Tomorrows opened to the public at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. I wasn’t even a year old yet, but this 1984 exhibit would have a profound effect on my life many years later after I discovered the exhibit book by Smithsonian curators…

Dell Customer Support Uses Fake “Sweepstakes” To Push Unnecessary Warranty

Don’t dial up Dell’s slimy tech support unless you hate yourself. Laptop Magazine did some undercover sleuthing and in a simple call about a battery issue, a rep claimed that they had won a sweepstakes that entitled them to pay Dell $317 for a four-year extended warranty. What luck! In fact, Laptop could hardly get…

Netflix’s new “post-play” feature will zip you past closing credits and onto the next show, you lazy slob. [Netflix]

Shooting Challenge: Black and White City Portraits

Architecture is about lines, shades, textures and curves. So no wonder, we love architecture in black and white. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, capture your city in beautiful, minimal black and white. The Challenge Capture a photo of your city in black and white. Focus on the architecture—think of it as a character and a…

Proof That Stupid Online Chat Robots Are Stupid

Oh, look, this nice girl lives in Anonymous Proxy! What a coincidence, I live in Anonymous Proxy too! I will love her forever. Oh wait. Nice girl, you are lying. You don’t live in Anonymous Proxy, you stupid online robot. You live in Stupid Robot City. Stupid. [Thanks Karl!]

The Most Ridiculous Kindle Fire Sleuthing You’ll Ever See

Does this FCC filing reveal information about the next Amazon Kindle Fire? It’s hard to say for sure because, as exhaustive detective work by the Digital Reader reveals, it was filed by a front company for a front company that’s fronting for someone that’s maybe/probably Amazon. Oh the joys of poring over FCC documents! Because…

See What Happened When We Gave a Photographer a Plane Ticket to Paris

Paris: Land of delectable pastries, cathedral-dwelling hunchbacks, and the site of our first Intel-Inspired Ultrabook™ Shooting Challenge. So congrats to everybody who guessed The City of Light as the location of our mystery photo, and earned themselves a shot at winning an Ultrabook (and if you didn’t, don’t worry: We’ve still got five more of…

Why Isn’t There Just One Way to Pay For Things With My Phone?

A bunch of big retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, 7-Eleven, and Sunoco are supposedly getting together to launch a joint mobile payment system called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), the WSJ is reporting. But seriously, why another network? Google Wallet is promising, but it’s not on many devices, nor is it available at many places. Why can’t…

Samsung reports from its Galaxy Note 10.1 launch that it’s sold 10 million Galaxy Notes to date. Those poor souls.

The Cigarette Packages of the Future Are Going to Be Really Horrible

It’s official: after rejecting the tobacco companies’ appeal, the High Court of Australia has declared the country’s new obligatory cigarette packaging law constitutional. Look at them above—starting on December 1, the packages’ iconic brand design will be fully replaced by the horrors of smoking. Rest assured, this is coming sooner or later to the rest…

I Want to Crawl Through This Sprawling Lego City

Living in a city is fun, but there’s no question any metropolis would be better if it were made entirely out of Lego bricks. Not practical, sure, but as proven by this (mini) architectural installation, very beautiful. The project, “Porous City,” is a giant grid of over 600 Lego towers at 1:1000 scale—an exercise in…

OLPC’s Latest Tablet/Computer Hybrid Coming in 2013

The OLPC Foundation is still on their quest to bring technology to less developed parts of the world, and the latest plan is to release the XO-4 Touch in 2013. It will be a tablet/laptop hybrid with a 7.5-inch, multitouch display designed for constant exposure to sunlight and a low-power Marvell chipset. Though we know…

Court Rules That Cops Can Track Your Phone’s Location With No Warrant

A federal court just ruled that if your carrier’s towers can see you, the police can see you too. They don’t need a warrant to track your all over the country. All they need is a rubber stamped request for the information from your carrier. In 2006, Melvin Skinner was busted in a motorhome with…

Why We’re Fat—Explained In One Minute

Why can’t you stop eating at the sight of delicious fatty or sugary food, even while your stomach is full? Answer: You have a good system in place to avoid over-eating, but it’s overridden by your caveman instincts. Confused? Watch this video. When your stomach is empty, it produces an hormone called ghrelin, which interacts…

Red Bull Racing’s F1 Car Sings the National Anthem Better than You

Anyone who’s ever been to a sporting event knows how easy it is for someone to completely butcher our national anthem. But Red Bull Racing’s F1 car does pretty much the exact opposite of that. The F1 team is demoing the high-revving vehicle around NYC this week, and it sounds like it has quite the…

The Miracle Cure That’s Hiding in Plain Sight

You’ve maybe never heard of Bacillus Calmette–Guérin—it sounds kinda French after all, so why would you? But scratch a little deeper and you’ll find that BCG, as it’s commonly known, is one of the most overlooked wonder-drugs of our time. BCG is first and foremost the world’s most common tuberculosis vaccine, and was first used…

HP’s webOS team has been rebranded as Gram—but it’s still not clear what it’s supposed to be doing. [Engadget]