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Announced at CES and delayed because it was receiving “enhancements,” the Motorola Droid Bionic has appeared on Amazon, safely swaddled by a desktop dock and car dock. https://gizmodo.com/the-best-new-phone-is-from-our-wacky-sci-fi-dreams-5730820 According to the Amazon listing, the desktop dock is actually “a station with an extra sense. With ESP technology, you decide which apps and short cuts to…
Taking a page from 19th century American robber barons, the managers of a Chicago Hyatt decided to whip together some old fashioned strike breakin’ fun with the help of ten large heat lamps, the Tribune reports. USA! USA! USA! The lamps were switched on against the picketing workers at 7 am—at which point it was…
Gizmodo reader Tal Ater agreed that Facebook’s new chat system is a clusterzuck of confusion, so he created a little program to fix it! It will take off the list anyone who’s offline. Here’s how to do it: https://gizmodo.com/facebook-why-did-you-screw-your-chat-system-5822759 • Drag this bookmarklet and drop it on your browser bookmark bar: Fix Chat • Open…
There’s few things worse than a glass of flat Coke. OH WAIT, a glass of Pepsi is far worse. But anyway! An incredibly bored person wanted to find out exactly when Coke went flat so he timed it. His method, which is completely unscientific, was to pour a glass of Coke and then count the…
One of the most immediate (and valid) criticisms of the Android bonanza is its fragmentation problem. Too many versions! It’s confusing! So what could Google do to rein in the software panoply? Allow multiple versions of apps? Hmm. The initiative has good intentions—instead of having one version of an app (APK) that might not be…
Just when the snarkbot in me wanted to giggle at Borders like a great big jerk, they go and send this genuinely heartfelt farewell message. In summary: they got their butts kicked, and they’re sorry. So am I. Who pulled the trigger? Borders tells it straight up: The fact is that Borders has been facing…
While the staff of the Kunming make believe Apple Store have no problem at all with their illegitimacy, their customers aren’t taking it in stride. In fact, they’re pretty angry, Reuters reports. https://gizmodo.com/fake-chinese-apple-store-looks-amazingly-real-5822918/ It appears many of the store’s patrons bought shiny goodies under the belief that the store had been ordained by Mr. Jobs,…
Yesterday, Adobe wrote of its suspicions that OS X Lion has had Flash Player hardware acceleration disabled, which could be why Flash is proving to be a bit buggy. They’ve since retracted what they said, writing: https://gizmodo.com/os-x-lion-might-disable-flash-hardware-acceleration-5823388 “The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration…
While Obama and colleagues have admitted to owning iPads, it’s the BlackBerry PlayBook which the US government has chosen to be the first certified for governmental use, under the FIPS 140-2 certification. Presumably for security reasons, and not because of its apps. [BGR] https://gizmodo.com/if-obama-really-has-an-ipad-why-wont-he-just-show-us-t-5796852
Terrible drawers of the world, unite—and arm yourselves with a 3-axis CNC machine that’s been outfitted with a Sharpie pen for converting a vector image file to a tangible drawing in seconds. MWM Graphics, aarn and Paper Fortress Films did just that; the artworks of which you can purchase for—gulp—$175 each. [Vimeo via What Katie…
One of the James Dyson Award entrants, Stefan Zwegers, thinks it’s the latter, which is why his Sensible Music invention turns bass into vibrations when listening to music through headphones. This is achieved by placing two vibrating motors in the headphones’ cord, located around the user’s chest. Like listening to live music at a concert…
Smart packaging is always appreciated, particularly when it’s for a product that we all use several times a day. Well, I hope you do anyway. Moving the paste-opening to the corner reduces packaging, and increases paste usage. Very smart, Sang Min Yu and Wong Sang Lee. [Yanko via Technabob]
I’ve been awaiting the eight season of Entourage like Eminem’s been awaiting a proper dueling-sesh with Vince (no spoilers, honest!), but if you want to see the special Hollywood Sunset: A Farewell Tribute to Entourage before it hits DVD and HBO, the only way to get it is through iTunes (for now.) This is notable…
Google+ is hot, hot, hot. According to ComScore, the social network has pulled in 20 million unique visitors in a mere three weeks. Leading the way is the US with 5 million and India with 2.8 million uniques. It’ll be interesting to see if Google can expand the service fast enough to keep up this…
Today’s Google Doodle is a mesmerizing geometric mobile that slowly spins above the search box. The Doodle commemorates the 113th birthday of Alexander Calder, an American artist and sculptor famous for inventing the mobile. Calder was a life-long artist who studied in New York and Paris. As his artistic talent flourished in the early 1930s,…
Lensbaby’s Portrait Kits are filled with camera accessories that can make any blemished-faced teen beautiful. They’re perfect for portrait photographers tasked with the difficult job of photographing people’s not-so-perfect faces. The lower-priced Portrait kit costs $470 and includes a standard composer lens with double glass optic and a soft focus optic for blurring those blemishes…
The new Mac Mini is a roomy little bugger. Inside its aluminum body, there’s an extra SATA connector and room for a second hard drive. You’ll need to find a SATA cable, but iFixit is on the hunt for one. https://gizmodo.com/mac-mini-line-padded-out-with-three-thunderbolt-packin-5822973 And there’s even more upgrades you can do. You can easily replace the existing…
You guys hear that? That’s the folks at Apple chillin’ and one hundred dollar billin’. Just a day after they announced comically massive earnings, OS X Lion sold more than a million copies in its first day of sales. https://gizmodo.com/apple-made-silly-gobs-of-money-selling-over-20-million-5822778 By comparison, it took Snow Leopard a full weekend to sell two million copies, and…
Yep, that’s right. Justin Bieber has joined Instagram and tweeted his first image. Yay? Within minutes, Bieber started gaining 50 followers a second and six comments a minute. And yeah, this first photo already accrued 300 likes. One piece of good news for the geek crowd — Instagram is holding up under the strain of…
So you’re out in the woods, repairing your bicycle, digging a tiger tooth from your friend’s shin, whittling sticks into ornate toothpicks. But how are you going to keep your camera steady? This multi-tool-plus-tripod hybrid could help! The $65 Gerber steady is topped with a screw for standard camera mounts—though smartphones will need an adapter…
