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When China built their network of bullet trains nearly as fast as the trains themselves move, the quick turnaround time didn’t come with many safety checks, it seems. Those trains are struggling to operate at their promised speeds. According to the Washington Post, Chinese officials are slowing trains down to help solve safety issues: Last…
Last year, 77 year-old Iowan senator Chuck Grassley vowed to do anything for reelection—including picking up Twitter. We almost wish he hadn’t. Grassley’s 1,147 tweets are possibly among the most incoherent, confounding, mind-boggling text on the internet. This is perhaps the quintessential Senator Grassley tweet. Was it an accident? Was he actually trying to convey…
Shazam is one of those already taken for granted lifechanger apps—never be ignorant of a song’s identity, ever again. It’s great, but it just got greater—on Android. The new app not only streams full songs your friends have tagged, but will let you ID unlimited songs on your own, free until 2012. You’ll have to…
Everyone knows the cops have tools to get inside your phone. But what do they do? They suck your iPhone’s entire soul in 15 minutes. With one single click. This is what it looks like. Lantern 2 is an incredibly powerful piece of software. Plug your iPhone in. Click “Acquire.” Wait for a progress bar…
Three Foxconn workers were arrested in December and charged last month with leaking the iPad 2 design specs, proving yet again that nobody escapes the Apple Gestapo. [Digitimes via AppleInsider]
AirLocation in an app that sends your iPhone’s GPS signal to your Wi-Fi iPad. All you need to do is tether your iPad to your iPhone and flip on the AirLocation app on both devices. We’ve previously reported that the Wi-Fi iPad 2 gained GPS powers when tethered to an iPhone but we were wrong.…
Hulu Plus for the Xbox 360 is aaaaalmost here. It launches tomorrow, with the main Xbox perk being integrated Kinect controls. It’s gonna be free for the first week for all Xbox Live members, but then the usual Hulu Plus subscription fee will kick in. Here’s what’s what with the features: Hulu Plus on Xbox…
Watch out, trees! Those 4G lightning bolts are about to start striking again, as Verizon’s 4G network is back up after some downtime yesterday. Welcome back, buddy! Porn on the train! Hulu on my roof! Torrents on a boat! [Verizon] https://gizmodo.com/4g-reception-not-immune-to-outages-either-verizons-lte-5796158
Viewing the massive explosions inside the Fukushima plant was shocking enough—but up-close video, courtesy of robotic drones, give a more intimate view of the wreckage—and the perilous environment rescue workers have had to navigate. This newest footage was released just yesterday, making vivid the extent of the plant’s ruined condition. The video is both incredible…
If you’ve ever built a computer, this will be jarring: Nvidia’s agreed to license its SLI tech for use on AMD motherboards. (AMD, of course, bought Nvidia arch-rival ATI a while ago and buried the ATI brand in favor of a unified AMD front a few months ago.) https://gizmodo.com/the-ati-brand-is-dead-5625268 The deal makes sense for a…
Every marketing manager and his dog has dreamt up a little royal wedding cash-cow in time for the nuptials tomorrow. But which gift should you buy—either to send to the newlyweds, or to sheath in plastic wrap and bury under your bed for the grandchildren, who’ll only wrinkle their noses and toss it in the…
Drivers in the Netherlands who noticed that speed traps were a little too perfectly placed lately weren’t just being paranoid; turns out local cops have had a wealth of TomTom driving data—including historical speed—at their disposal. Because TomTom sold it to them. Et tu, satnav? TomTom has since apologized for the privacy breach, saying their…
The clincher in Pepsi’s new “social” vending machine platform is the ability to gift Pepsi beverages—and retrieve your gifted beverages—which is kind of awesome, putting vending machines at the same level of 2000s-era commerce as other electronic stores, say, iTunes or Amazon. The only problem? Pepsi sucks. Yeah, I went there. Coca-Cola forever. [Pepsi via…
A tiny village in Japan would’ve been wiped out by the tsunami had they erected their houses closer to the sea-views. However, they chose to abide by ancient tsunami-warning stones that carried the messages of their forefathers, and survived. Like an ancient message board. These 10 feet-tall tsunami stones are sprinkled all over the coastal…
The GreenDroid project presents a novel concept for smartphone users: a CPU custom-designed around the apps (or perhaps types of apps) you (and only you) use the most. Taylor and Swanson’s GreenDroid design sidesteps this by surrounding a processor’s main core-the part of a chip that executes instructions-with 120 smaller ones that each take care…
So you’re a prostitute, and your client won’t pony up the $200 to pay you for whatever you just did. In fact, he freaks out and flees the seedy motel room. Your next move? Jack his $2,800 MacBook, obvi. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning didn’t work out for 19 year-old Kandalaria Freeman (what a name!),…
The third anniversary is traditionally reserved for gifts of leather, but Sean Ohlenkamp had a much better idea: an intricate rabbit’s hole of desktop folders, filled humor and romance of the non-icky variety. I have but two complaints; this raises the bar too high, and I wanna see what’s in the rest of them folders!…
In a charming example of wordplay, Italian photography student Francesco Capponi took the Italian word “pinolo” (pine-nut) and turned it into Pinholo, the pine-nut pinhole camera. I could be wrong, but this could be the world’s smallest pinhole camera. Even smaller than this dinky little camera, and most definitely smaller than Capponi’s previous project, which…
You know when your body is crying out for sleep, or a square of food or even some warmth—but what about your transistors and chips which don’t have a voice? IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating little tale up about component ageing, and how manufacturers play it too safe by clocking the speed of them far…
Sure, Nokia’s making a tablet. But what’s it going to run? Windows Phone 7? Windows 7? Meego? Symbian? Android? Bueller? Whatever they choose, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop wants to take their sweet time getting it right: “We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things…
