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I wonder if they make tourist go down the Eiffel Tower if there’s a lightning storm approaching to Paris. After looking at this lightning engulfing its metal structure, I know I’d instantly get the hell out of there. If you enlarge the image, it looks like the electrical beam is getting in and out the…
This seems lifted from The Onion but it’s not. According to the WSJ, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate uses a ‘Waffle House Index’ to help him determine how destructive a hurricane has been to an area. If a Waffle House is closed, you’re probably screwed. Specifically, in Fugate’s interpretation: Green means the restaurant is serving a…
Our soldiers just got one more enemy in Afghanistan: their own pants. It seems their pants—which are completely new and supposed to be more durable than previous models—can’t survive the rigors of the desert. They’re ripping apart seemingly at random. The new pants seemed perfectly fine. They use tightly stitched flame-resistant Defender M fabrics and…
Droid Bionic, where have you been? You’ve been teasing us since January, and now that you’re finally coming, will people care or will you be out-shone by others who got to the party sooner and look at least as pretty? https://gizmodo.com/the-best-new-phone-is-from-our-wacky-sci-fi-dreams-5730820 Droid-Life has scooped up a bunch of docs that show the Motorola Droid Bionic…
It all seems a bit for naught, with the earth in obvious upheaval, spawning one natural disaster after another and careening toward a horrible, fiery, and certain end next year. But until that happens, there are some pretty cool gadgets to play with! Here’s the best of bunch from August. For the full list of…
How many times have you seen the generic vacation auto-reply e-mail that says “Hi, I’m going on vacation with limited access to e-mail and won’t be able to respond to your message. Please contact such and such.” You know damn well they’re lying. Instead of choosing vanilla, why not get a little creative. Like what…
The 5.3-inch Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Tab 7.7 come in shapes that make them hard to classify. Is the Note a phone? Or a notepad? Or a tablet? Genius, right? Or, uh, foolish? The Galaxy Note is the more unusual choice of the two. With a 5.3-inch screen, it’s kind of in a weird…
Sammy’s got a triple blast of cameras today, and the kookiest release is the MV800, with an AMOLED screen that flips around for perfected self-portraiture. No more MySpace arm extension! The 16 MP MV800’s not particularly thrilling beyond its shape-shifting frame—although touch controls are the capacitive screen are nice. Really, unless you want to take…
According to the police, this guy is one crazy drunk suicidal bastard who grabbed a live power line struck down by Hurricane Irene and attacked another driver in the middle of the storm with it. How in hell? The alleged nutter is 32-year-old Richard Bialczak. The police says he chased 28-year-old Derek Edwards on a…
Google’s new Chrome extension allows you to +1 any page on the Internet, reporting it on your public profile. It also sends every URL you visit to Google “to retrieve +1 information.” Riiiiiight. Further analysis at TechCrunch, extension’s here.
A tinier, cheaper X100 this is not. Most significantly, the X10’s 12-megapixel sensor is a smaller 2/3-inch chip and the lens is zoomy, not an ultrasharp 35mm prime. But that doesn’t mean Fuji’s not built a damn fine pro point-and-shoot fighter. https://gizmodo.com/fujifilms-x100-camera-is-all-leica-y-in-both-looks-and-5754622 More designed to go against high-end point-and-shoots like Panasonic’s Lumix LX5 or Nikon’s…
I have no taste in art—if you tell me a piece is good, I’ll have to take your word for it. But I know how good Like This is because it tells me exactly how many other people like it too. Built by German artist Mario Klingemann and on display at the Ultra Social exhibition…
The Wikileaks security gaffe earlier this week that resulted in the distribution of a quarter million unredacted cables, like any sufficiently-sized SNAFU, will progress in phases. Today, it entered the second phase—finger pointing. https://gizmodo.com/wikileaks-accidentally-released-dangerous-unredacted-ca-5835410 It’s believed that the Twitter user that posted a link to the unredacted files gleaned the password and location of the…
I love my Leatherman, but it’s completely useless if right when I need a tool I don’t know where the heck I put it down five minutes before. The Guppie is always right by your side when you need it. When the Guppie came out last year, we were psyched that you could potentially kill…
The full curriculum for the Yale medical program—if stacked—stands roughly four feet tall and costs the school $100k annually to copy, sort, and collate. But, starting this Fall, Yale Medical is replacing the stack with Apple’s top-of-the-line tablet. The Yale initiative provides first through fourth year medical students with complete access to the entire year’s…
We’ve seen creepy fools messing around with stolen laptops before. But what if you didn’t know the laptop you were doing a striptease on was stolen? It would be kind of messed up if the cops came to door, naked pics of you in hand, right? https://gizmodo.com/is-this-a-laptop-thief-in-action-5807175 That just happened to Ohio substitute teacher Susan…
This bodes well for Iraq’s post-war recovery: the once-and-kind-of-still-ravaged nation is now doing well enough to boast counterfeit haute electronics stores in its malls. This one looks a little… off, though. https://gizmodo.com/fake-chinese-apple-store-looks-amazingly-real-5822918 For one, there are virtually no Apple products to be seen. Does the sign outside count as one? Why are they selling Ray-Bans?…
My musical tastes, if you can call them that, are largely mainstream and boring. And that’s how I first came across Explosions in the Sky: I was watching a mainstream movie, and I was bored. Thank goodness. Have you seen Friday Night Lights? Not the excellent television show. The slightly less excellent 2004 movie. Or…
If you’re a Verizon customer with an “New Every Two” upgrade coming, start checking your email. Big Red might have just bumped you to the front of the line. Verizon’s already begun sending out email notifications to many of its customers, alerting them that they’d be receiving an early upgrade. Normally, subsidized upgrades are only…
So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn’t possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn’t worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case. Rock-Throwing Kid Meets Crossbow Vengeance It’s not that we didn’t kind of love this story—I mean, what’s…
