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Maybe it’s because I’m a film and video buff, but I just read an article that rocked my world a bit, and I recommend that you read it, too. By Ken Weissman, a member of the LoC since 1982 who has overseen film restorations like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Maltese Falcon, his…
If you transported Apple’s website back to 1993, I have no doubt it would end up looking exactly like this. Especially that beige menubar. HyperCard, anyone? The mock-up is the work of RetroMacCast listener newtonpoetry, who’s really nailed the details—as he did in his re-imagining of Apple’s 1983 website. Just look at how magical and…
I grew up wearing Swatch watches, so completely understand the sentiment and reasoning behind this scratch-proof Swatch concept from designer Allan George. Those plastic faces are just too soft for their own good. The Swatch concept looks pretty sporty with its plastic-rubber coating, but it’s the redesigned watch face which really does the trick for…
Google’s time machine is called Recorded Future. It won’t allow Sergei, Larry, and Eric to go back in time, but it will let them to search into your future. Nobody has any real details yet, but here’s their about box: Recorded Future allows financial analysts, intelligence analysts, and predictors to organize and aggregate future observations…
Sprint will charge $25 a month for its new plan, Beyond Talk, debuting next week, which will offer unlimited texting and web browsing but just 300 minutes of calls a month. [Reuters] UPDATE: It’ll be under Sprint’s Virgin Mobile brand.
It’s got the potential to go down in history as the ugliest BlackBerry ever, but at least the photo quality is decent enough for us to make out a QWERTY keyboard and curved, almost pebble-esque design. It looks to be running BlackBerry OS 6.0 too, if I’m not mistaken. Other rumors about the 9670 include…
An innocent copy of Microsoft Office, left lying on the pavement? You’d pick it up wouldn’t you, dreaming of eBay riches. This is what happens if you pick that bloody yellow box up. Let it be a lesson for you all. [YouTube – Thanks, Daniel!]
June 6th or the 13th have been two dates earmarked for a potential launch of the HTC EVO 4G at Sprint, but a leaked photo of RadioShack’s inventory system shows it’ll be available for pre-order this month. Finally. https://gizmodo.com/htc-evo-coming-to-sprint-in-june-4g-service-to-cost-1-5511859 After being announced late March, we’ve heard nary a detail of how or when people will…
Unless, of course, you happen to be the current world record holder, who can solve a cube in under 20 seconds. This Lego Mindstorms ‘bot was built by ARM, and managed to solve the cube in 25 seconds flat. The Mindstorms robot was programmed using a Motorola Droid, which runs on an Arm A8 processor…
Cold, hard proof that Nintendo needs to pull its head out of its arse and release some new hardware (not just relying on a 3D novelty to work wonders): they sold 21 per cent less Wiis last year. In fact, they sold just 20.53m units from April 2009 – March 2010, a pretty large decline…
The November 20, 1930 Muscatine Journal and News-Tribune (Muscatine, IA) ran a short blurb announcing that Televox — a robot you might remember as the husband of one Mrs. Katrina Van Televox — would be making an appearance at a local Iowa high school. “Televox,” the mechanical man, one of the outstanding miracles of modern…
Click to viewSpending $75-$85 million on marketing isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth it in the case of Yahoo’s “It’s You” campaign. After all, the video highlighting it is a blatant attack on Google. Oh yes, the gloves are off again. [WSJ]
The ClamCase concept is advertised as an “all-in-one keyboard, case and stand for the iPad,” but what really matters is that it lets you turn your iPad into a decent-looking pretend laptop. The keyboard connects to your iPad via Bluetooth and the whole setup means that you can once again look like an ordinary laptop…
The folks at 2K Sports offered $1 million to the first person to pitch a perfect game in Major League Baseball 2K10—a supposedly difficult task. 24 hours after the game was released, they had to write a check. https://gizmodo.com/pitch-a-perfect-game-on-your-console-and-get-1-000-000-5459248 Using Braves pitcher Kenshin Kawakami as his avatar, 24-year-old Alabama resident Wade McGilberry was able to…
At the beginning, it looks like Windows 3.1 Starfield screensaver. Then you realize what’s going on: Those are not stars—they are galaxies. By the end, when the heart of the galaxy cluster is revealed, your brain explodes. This trip into Abell 315—a galaxy cluster located about two billion light-years away from Earth—was taken by the…
In the future, people looking for “holistic, ultra-green lifestyle” will live in dreamy wonderlands like Lace Hill—a beautiful, elvish-like, completely self-suficient gigantic “biomorphic spatial surface”. Good. I’ll keep surviving on cocktails and pizza in Gotham City. I’ve to admit, however, that the 900,000-square-foot Lace Hill, designed by Forrest Fulton for the city of Yereman, Armenia,…
In 1909, wealthy French banker Albert Kahn set out to create “a photographic inventory of human life on Earth.” His teams took 72,000 autochrome photographs in over 50 countries, comprising the largest collection of early color photography in existence. Ovation, one of those TV stations in the 200s you might not realize you subscribe to,…
Woodpeckers must be one of the most irritating birds around, so goodness knows why anyone would want to wake up to the sound of a woodpecker doing its thing. Taptaptap. Tap-tap-tap. I feel angry and tired just thinking about it. It’s the clock which has no time—instead, telling you when to go to bed, and…
WiMAX hasn’t even been deployed properly and Clearwire could ditch it for LTE standard. According to a Clearwire executive, a change in the terms of an agreement Clearwire has with Intel will allow “either party to exit the agreement – which had until now forced Clearwire to use WiMAX through Nov. 28, 2011 – with…
A mock-up of a weapon from Bioshock 3? A radioactive steampunk fish tank? The glowing engine of a recovered Area 51 spaceship? The answer may shock you. Actually, it almost certainly will. What we have here is a mercury arc valve rectifier, a device that became prominent in the 1920s and 1930s for converting alternating…