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Wikipedia went down for a couple of hours yesterday. The reason? Some dumb ass managed to sever the fiber cables connecting the site’s servers in Florida. https://gizmodo.com/wikipedias-main-page-is-down-and-other-entries-are-load-5932103 The Telegraph reports that Wikipedia is adamant the incident isn’t a result of foul play. More likely, it was an inept laborer who managed to accidentally cut two…
Microsoft’s in-app purchasing will be limited to WinPho 8. Ballmer and co can’t stop screwing people. [Microsoft]
Screw comfort. At least, that’s Stefan Zwicky‘s take on furniture design if his concrete chair is anything to go by: five pieces of concrete held together by steel rebar make for a striking, if numbing, piece of design. A play on the iconic Corbusier LC-2 armchair, it is perhaps designed to make us reflect on…
You might not be good enough to compete at the Olympics, but if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably adept when it comes to button tapping. So, make the best use of your skill set by playing Google’s new Olympics doodle, called Hurdles 2012. Left and right arrow keys to run, space bar to jump……
You know what’s fun? Watching the Olympics right now is lots of fun. You know what else is always fun? Shots. A group of dedicated fun-havers over at SmartThings has devised an ingenius contraption that will automatically dispense a shot of liquor each time a medal is awarded to an Olympic athlete representing team USA.…
Pretty much everyone shops online, these days. Be it Amazon or eBay, Sephora or Staples—online retail is often your best bet: you can find great deals, shop full inventories (rather than go into a store only to find an item out of stock), and often you’ll find some online exclusive or another. Plus, the number…
Over the weekend I attended a concert in Jones Beach—the Deftones opening for System of a Down—which I was hell bent on documenting, thoroughly, using my iPhone. All through the Deftones’ set, I snapped pictures and took video. Then it started to pour, with thunder and lightning very nearly canceling the rest of the show,…
Fistful of Rupees—The Zelda Western Needs more violin medley. [Kotaku] https://gizmodo.com/the-stoner-channel-octopipes-hobbit-pipes-and-the-fo-5931712 Bipartisan Effort Introduces National Hemp Legalization Bill While it may look suspiciously similar to its stonifying cousin, getting you high is pretty much the only thing hemp can’t be used for. That’s why three US senators believe that the American people deserve the opportunity…
How to have fun on the Internet: when a friend takes a picture with a picture of a girl inside a monitor, you take a picture of that picture and you make someone else take a picture of your picture and keep going on an endless loop that’ll be like a picture in picture in…
For me, signing up for any new social network goes something like this: Hear about it and ignore it. Hear about it again and then make fun of it. Hear about it again and wonder if I should sign up. Sign up. Do nothing until I hear about it again and remember I have an…
Originally composed for Robert Wilson’s play “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović,” this Antony and the Johnsons song is melancholy, maudlin, and will make you feel emotions. Beautifully bleak. The new video—directed by Nabil and starring Willem Dafoe, Marina Abramović, and Carice van Houten—is rather like a supershort film against which the song, “Cut…
With the highly anticipated next generation iPhone—iPhone 5—only a couple more months away, now is a pretty silly time to throw down a few hundred bucks for Apple’s smartphone. No sense in buying something that’s about to be outmoded; if yours was recently broken or snatched, use a burner and wait it out. Then again……
Gizmodo alumnus Mat Honan got hacked this weekend. It was bad. But that’s not the worst part. Worse is that Apple knows exactly how easy this is, and hasn’t done a thing to stop it. And Amazon accounts are in just as much danger. How It Happened Honan has a chilling account of Apple and…
This video covers the last two and a half minutes of Curiosity’s descent from her point of view. It’s made of 297 frames captured during the landing. You can see the thermal shield being jettisoned and the wheel of the rover as it’s being dropped by the skycrane. There’s a lot of dust at the…
Here you have it. It’s not the super-HD panoramic image that everyone is eagerly awaiting for, but this is the first high(ish) resolution image of the 3-mile-high Aeolis Mons, commonly known as Mount Sharp. These photos are being taken not by the main cameras, but the hazard cams (Hazcams), which will help scientists to drive…
It may look like a joke played on passengers, but it’s not: an Alaska Airlines’ maintenance crew servicing a Boeing 737 cut out part of its wing and then wrote “We Know About This” next to it. Then, they sent the jetliner on a flight. Imagine being a passenger on that plane and noticing the…
We asked you last week to tell us what the one kitchen utensil or gadget you can’t live without. Most of you agreed—you must have a nice chef’s knife. Now you have another option with a new six-piece set from Wüsthof. https://gizmodo.com/whats-the-one-gadget-tool-or-utensil-you-absolutely-ca-5930299 The Precision Knife Collection has slanted bolsters that give it a slightly different…
If there’s one advantage paper, magazines, and softcover books have over high tech alternatives it’s that they aren’t rigid and can take a little bending here and there. Flexible batteries like this one might help even the score. Created by Professor Keon Jae Lee at the Korean Advanced Institute Of Science And Technology, this flexible…
After being dominated by weaponized trojan horses on two different occasions, nuclear loudmouth Iran says it’s had enough: it’s unplugging from the Internet, hiding, and making its own. The Telegraph reports Iran’s telecommunications minister has had enough of all this US/Israeli nonsense—he wants an Internet free from Stuxnet, Flame, and all the cyber weapons sure…
Election day is still three months away, so if you haven’t picked your pony, it’s almost time to put your money on either Obama or Romney. Just in time to help you decide, the incumbent has released a new app. And hey! He didn’t even misspell America! https://gizmodo.com/mitt-romneys-new-app-misspells-america-twitter-goes-wi-5914154 What does it do? It discusses the…
