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Yeah, 911 is a joke in your town, so it’s nice to know about family emergencies at home when you’re away. Ooma‘s new notification service helps make that happen that, pinging you remotely when your home phone calls 911. Ooma (that Internet phone service Ashton Kutcher was trying to sell you until it Punk’d him…
The preferred way to think about the intersection of science and food lately is like this or this, when the reality is more like what’s going on deep inside of PepsiCo, the largest food company in America. https://gizmodo.com/what-its-like-inside-the-sous-vide-kings-kitchen-5645420 The mission? To basically reinvent the way we taste food, with chemistry, biology, and even psychology. John…
LG’s pinched Layar’s idea and made it 3D, though I suppose Wikitude is partly to blame/thank too. They’re calling it the world’s first 3D AR browser, and it’ll only be available on LG’s Optimus 3D phone for starters. You can probably expect it to roll out onto other 3D handsets later, once LG gets some…
Like an app store for jailbroken iPhone apps, Planet-iPhone’s Cydia Search lets you check out apps before downloading them on your smartphone. You can browse using different search criteria, such as category or author, but unlike ModMyi it presents the search results in a much more Apple-esque interface. [Cydia Search via TUAW]
Just the one it appears—but it’s a great big bloody one. Designer Steffi Min added a metal base to the oversized clothspin, so it reacts to the light bulb’s electrical contacts and lights up. Just like a real lamp! [Steffi Min via GadgetReview via OhGizmo]
I think we can ascertain that yes, this leaked image of what’s purported to be the HTC Puccini does indeed look like a tablet—according to leaksters, this 10-inch model will debut on AT&T’s LTE network this June. Though considering that’s next month I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to wait longer. Unless it’s being…
The first three Adobe Photoshop iPad apps are now available at the app store. I’ve been using them for a while (full review to come later) and they are really really good. https://lifehacker.com/these-are-the-first-three-adobe-photoshop-touch-apps-fo-5790662 The price is right on the mark too: Adobe Eazel, my favorite both because of the media simulation and the five finger…
At $8.5 billion (or $7-$8 billion), it’d be Microsoft’s hugest acquisition ever. Supposedly, the deal’s going to be announced tomorrow. I can think of 100 reasons this could work, and like 101 reasons it’s a terrible idea. [Dealbook, WSJ, Boomtown]
The NYTimes reports that Google’s Music service, which we’re expecting to be launched Tuesday morning, will be called Music Beta. And unlike Amazon’s service, which holds 1,000 songs that you already own for free in the cloud, it will hold 20,000 songs. 20,000 songs! https://gizmodo.com/googles-music-service-will-be-announced-tomorrow-and-is-5800231 The service will be invite-only to start—available to Verizon Xoom…
The European shipping pallet turns 50 this year. It’s easy to overlook shipping pallets as an amazing innovation because it plays no direct role in any of our daily lives. But we shouldn’t dismiss them so easily. Shipping pallets make heavy cargo loads movable with a forklift and transportable in cargo containers. They’re the unsung…
Where does technology go when it dies? If it’s lucky, designer Paola Mirai snaps it up and incorporates it into her Cirkuita collection, a mix of jewelry that combines circuits and transistors and other gear ephemera with a material called orotransparente to create wearable pins, rings, and baubles. Beats the junkyard afterlife, that’s for sure.…
Google is kicking off its I/O developers conference Tuesday and the search giant is gearing up for a rousing keynote and a two-day conference filled with hardware and software announcements. In previous years, Google announced its location tool Gears, previewed Android and unveiled the now defunct Wave online collaboration tool. Here is what we expect…
Technology. An ever-changing beast! So much so, that the sinfully thin iPad 2 packs the same power as the jumbo-sized four-processor version of the Cray 2, a supercomputer, which was the world’s faster computer in 1985. But duh! 1985 was a helluva long time ago, it’s sorta expected that we’d be moving at that pace.…
Air traffic control horror stories are popping up left and right these days, but few stories have a description as vividly nerdy as the one found in Mother Jones’ write up about the switchboard operators of the commercial flight world. One day after Christmas, our computer system got gummed up with too many flights, as…
Your iPhone can find a lot of stuff: taxis, toilets, cafés, nearby sexual partners. How cute! And pitiable. While you’ve been scouting the best place to poop, Harvard researchers are working on an app that finds landmines. Landmines detection is still surprisingly rudimentary: a human being waves a metal detector over the ground, and listens…
It would be so much easier if giant seafaring vessels could be built on the water. But that’s impractical, silly! Which is why, instead, we build those humongous ships on dry land, get them as close to the water as we can, give ’em a shove and hope for the best. And by “the best,”…
Google Translate has nothing on the Wild Dolphin Project which is developing a two-way communication system for dolphins. Crazy as it seems, the Florida-based group hopes to create a new language derived from the sounds of the animalsn in the wild. Communicating with dolphins is nothing new — dolphins in captivity have interacted with their…
San Francisco, you lovely place you. The city by the bay is installing at least 90 new charging stations in city-owned parking garages for electric vehicles to juice up…for free. The stations wil include both 110v and the fast-charge 240v options which people can just plug into with no worries. The idea is to get…
3D maps of Mount Everest is as old as 3D mapping itself. People see a big mountain and want to scale it…in 3D. But there’s now a 3D map of Everest that’s 400 times clearer than before. Details! How did they do it? The company DigitalGlobe teamed up with 3D RealityMaps and used a new…
Currently, my dashboard is used for three things: speedometer checks, radio, and arhythmic hand drumming. Pioneer would like to change that, thank you very much, with a souped-up in-dash augmented reality system that shows you where lanes are, recognizes cars and traffic lights, and even knows the identity of some of local stores. The system—which…