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That’s not the sun. But for a brief period, in a small Arctic town in Canada, in the dead of winter, it was the next-best thing. This 100,000 lumen artificial sun lit up the town of Inuvik, giving them long days during a winter that’s mostly shrouded in darkness. It was sponsored by Tropicana, which…
We thought that Google’s Reader Play is perfect for tablet computers, but the New York Times’ Nick Bilton has other ideas. He thinks that the feature is perfect for TVs and other larger screens. [NYT] https://gizmodo.com/google-prettifies-rss-with-tablet-ready-google-reader-p-5490460
32GB, 64MB cache, and read and write speeds of 25MB/s and 70MB/s aren’t terribly exciting when it comes to a solid state drive, but the OCZ Onyx still caught our eye because it’s among the first SSDs to slip below $100. [Hot Hardware via CrunchGear]
Hand models have it pretty good, don’t they? Show up, hold something for a few hours, collect checks, repeat. It’s such a sweet gig, there’s gotta be something wrong with them, right? Wait… they’re all attractive, too? Well nuts. Slate’s got a very fun roundup of the faces behind some of the most famous hands…
Sony’s finally put a name to their motion controller, and it’s called PlayStation Move. Updated with hands on. Sony will have multiple packages. A standalone Move controller, or a package with PlayStation Eye + Move + a game, or an entire console solution. The Eye and Move and game combo will be less than $100.…
It’s one thing to shoot an entire short film on a Canon flatbed computer scanner. It’s another to do it well. With Memoirs of a Scanner, Mindfruit Films pretty much nailed it. It’s a short short—just over a minute—but Memoirs covers a lot of ground: an office fling, in-fighting, getting fired. And it makes me…
The most fuel efficient hybrid for sale in the US gets 51 MPG, but a startup called Transonic Combustion claims they can improve that. They claim their fuel-injection system will get 64 MPG. Transonic’s fuel-injection system is supposedly better because it “uses supercritical fluids and requires no spark to ignite the fuel. The supercritical fluid…
$13. Whole package. Must resist. I can’t. Clicking buy. [Jailbreak Toys via LikeCool]
The May 9, 1897 St. Paul Globe (St. Paul, MN) ran an interesting article titled, “Strange Ships That Sail In The Skies.” The article describes proposed flying vessels of the future, as well as newspapers around the United States that had were printing questionable accounts of flying machines already in use. Many of the illustrations…
In yet more research funded by Bill and Melinda Gates (and Intellectual Ventures), Stanford University’s Ken Caldeira explores a mechanically simple ocean pump that could significantly diminish the power of a hurricane. Note: This post is an update to the patent spotted a while back. https://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-patent-could-save-us-from-another-hurricane-5312045 Click to view The basic science behind the pump…
In honor of Comedy Central’s new show Ugly Americans, let’s see the ugliest messes you encounter this St. Pat’s. Send photos to [email protected]. The ugliest will be posted here for a vote. Winner gets a $300 AMEX gift card. Woot! [Rules]
The mad scientists at Google Labs have unleashed their latest concoction: Google Reader Play, a new way to look at your feeds one Google-suggested site at a time. It’s actually pretty neat! And would be perfect for the iPad. Google Reader Play is a full-screen treatment that shows you an image, video, or text from…
The multi-touch language is getting complex. In addition to the iPhone conventions and the long press we saw at the keynote, the new iPhone 3.2 Beta 4 is adding the triple tap. [9to5] https://gizmodo.com/the-ipads-interface-and-gestures-whats-actually-new-v-5459873 Update: Actually, this already exists in the iPhone. We thought it was triple tap as in three taps on the screen,…
It’s not that Brizzly’s perfect, or that it does justice to its source material (the unassailably pretty, wonderfully lean Birdfeed)—it’s that it comes close enough, and it’s free. First, a quick lesson in the history of iPhone Twitter apps! Once, there was an app called Birdfeed. It was clever, fast, and visually distinctive. In fact,…
ASUS calls the Cine5 “the world’s most compact five-channel speaker,” but who cares about that when the thing actually looks good and supposedly provides ultra-realistic surround sound? Sadly we don’t know when it’ll be available or for how much. [Asus]
The App Store censorship horse may have been beaten to death, but mainstream German media—whose iPhone applications have been censored by Apple because of its content—are not surrendering. I’m glad. In fact, I hope they win this war. The censorship problem is not only about the 5,000 titillating apps that fell down in flames after…
In today’s Remainders: Efficiency. Get out of your house and watch the Final Four basketball games in 3-D; treat yourself to some Chilean wine while supporting their relief effort; start choosing the color for your Dell Mini 5, and more. Final Four In Three Dimensions If actually going to the NCAA tournament isn’t quite in…
A few pieces of shelving. A PC fan. An air filter. A shower curtain. Some lighting. Combine, and you have a budget space fit for swapping lenses and analyzing moon rocks. [I Heart Robotics via MAKE]
I spoke to Imagination Technologies—maker of the PowerVR chip that powers smartphones like the iPhone, Droid and many others—and they said, definitively, that you’ll have graphics comparable to the PlayStation 3 in 3 years. They know this because these are the chips they’re designing right now. The way the development process works for phones is…
With a single candle, your photos were stupendous. So for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we’re tying a different hand behind your back: color. https://gizmodo.com/133-photos-lit-by-a-single-candle-5488484 The Challenge Capture a photo with either a single color, or very few colors within the same family. Just do us one favor and avoid traditional B&W photography known as monochrome…