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In Icons, the company responsible for the freaky-awesome Steve Jobs action figure, is stopping production because of legal threats from Apple and Jobs’ family. In a statement, Tandy Cheung, the Hong Kong businessman behind the doll said: “Though we still believe that we have not overstepped any legal boundaries, we have decided to completely stop…
Woz never fails to impress me. If the man has opinions, he doesn’t mind sharing them, whatever the consequences. I just didn’t expect him to openly admit to preferring many Android features over those of his iPhone. Speaking to The Daily Beast, Woz openly chatted about the pros and cons of Android. “My primary phone…
Aside from True Grit there hasn’t been a decent Western movie in years. No, Rango was neither a Western nor good. But Little Tombstone, made by students at ESMA Toulouse, makes me long for the days of the Spaghetti Western and shows, once again, why being an Undertaker is the superior career path. [Little-Tombstone via…
Strokes and Parkinson’s Disease can cause irreparable damage to your grey matter. However, one controversial experiment aims to replace the function of those damaged areas with neural microchips. For the experiment, a microchip is implanted under the skin of the rat’s skull with electrodes running a centimeter into the rodent’s cerebellum. The chip receives an…
Michelangelo spent only three years carving David. Da Vinci’s depiction of The Last Supper required just three. This giant model of the Rila Monastery by Bulgarian artist Plamen Ignatov demanded 16 years of dedication. Officially known as the Monastery of Saint Ivan of Rila, it is Bulgaria’s largest Eastern Orthodox monastery and the second-largest temple…
Ahead of Thursday’s NYC education event, Ars Technica reports via a leak source that Apple plans to announce a simpler way for authors to create and publish e-books as well as the iBook app’s adoption of the ePub3 standard. The WSJ also names publisher McGraw-Hill as a project partner. All these developments suggest Apple’s gearing…
The military’s UAV fleet will soon be getting a small addition—DARPA’s hummingbird-shaped covert surveillance drone. Dubbed the Nano Hummingbird, this Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) is built by AeroVironment. It’s designed for urban surveillance missions and has just passed DARPA’s Phase II technical milestones. It mimics more than just a hummingbird’s looks, mind you. By copying…
The USSR has a rather frightening history when it comes to photo manipulation. Over time they’ve decided to use their photo manipulation skills for good instead of, well disappearing people. In 1987 Glasnost and Perestroika were in full effect. So the tools that would have been used to remove an “enemy of the people” like…
While I have my home’s wooden floor covered in Chinese, Persian and Turkish rugs, I’d love to exchange them all for digital interactive rugs like this. One of them full of swimming crocodiles. [Buzzfeed]
In an ideal world, there’d be no surge protectors choked with chargers, or knots of cables behind bookshelves. This USB wall plate charger from RCA is an elegant solution to the madness around your wall outlets, and it doesn’t require an engineering degree to install. By elegant, this frustrated geek means that this wall plate…
Last Saturday, a hacking group calling itself “The Lords of Dharmaraja” claimed that it had obtained the confidential source code of Norton AntiVirus and that it would release the full code on Tuesday. Wait, that’s tomorrow. The Lords of Dharmaraja claim to have infiltrated secure servers belonging to Indian Military Intelligence and pilfered the code…
My nerd dream came true: 1) Open your Terminal in Mac OS X or Windows or Linux or whatever the hell you are running your toaster on. 2) Type telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu. 3. Enjoy an endless nyancat loop in glorious ASCII. If it doesn’t work, make sure your terminal is in the correct mode (just select…
The chances of me getting eaten by a shark while surfing are slim. The chances of me getting pounded by a wave while surfing, that happens all the time. Fortunately I’ve never had a wipeout as bad as the guys in this video. Surfer Magazine posted the video for the Worst Wipeout of 2011 poll.…
Gone are the days when a rolling toolchest only held tools. At CES Craftsman (which really should be updated to Craftsperson) unveiled its new Contour Powered Series Tool Storage that adds a charging station and a Bluetooth connected sound system. A set of 220W speakers lets mechanics pipe their music from an iPod or Bluetooth…
Eating Mexican is inexpensive and convenient—just walk outside and find the nearest purveyor of Mexican food. What a world! But protecting your photography gear? That’s usually neither. So wouldn’t it make sense to turn your lens into Mexican food? The Photorito lens wrap by Photojojo isn’t edible—at least not according to their lawyers—but it might…
Despite rumblings from Capitol Hill that the recently-defanged SOPA legislation not see the light of day, Wikipedia has announced that “the Internet must remain free” and that it is joining the blackout protests scheduled for January 18th, nonetheless. Founder Jimmy Wales made the announcement via Twitter today. The English-language Wikipedia site will be unavailable for…
There’s no better way to say “I truly hate you” than by giving someone a gift that requires them to wear 3D glasses. But this lazy gift wrap is a brilliant way to show someone you actually care, a little. I can barely wrap a gift, let along tie a fancy bow on a package.…
Worried about blowing a buckle the next time you binge at your local buffet? Best Made’s belts are made from the same material as the harnesses that allow smokejumpers to safelty parachute into a raging inferno. So with 10,000 pounds of tensile strength, an 800°F melting point, and buckles load tested to 2500 pounds, I’m…
This is exciting. If everything goes well, we may get the first-ever photo of a black hole really soon. A big number of astronomers are getting ready to achieve this feat using a global network of telescopes: Given the rapid pace of technical progress in the field of (sub)mm Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the…
Many people have profited from the Titanic tragedy, but movies and touring exhibitions don’t seem anywhere near as tacky as Romain Jerome’s efforts. In addition to watches and pens, it’s now releasing cufflinks made from metal recovered from the wreckage. The company’s new Titanic-DNA wrist adornments are made from “stabilized oxidized steel” salvaged from the…
