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Hotel rooms tend to have locks that use magnetic swipe cards—something reasonably high-tech and innately trusted. Bad news? A piece of bent wire can defeat these locks. Good news? A towel prevents such low-tech break-ins. The tool shown in the video isn’t just a plain piece of wire, instead it’s a special “government only” tool,…
As you might recall, the booklet 2063 A.D. was sealed in the General Dynamics time capsule in 1963 and contains predictions about what advancements we will see in space by the year 2063. Today we have the (rather succinct) predictions of Dr. William H. Pickering, President of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: My…
Some colleges, including Tufts and the University of Chicago, have started allowing prospective students to supplement their applications with YouTube videos. This can only end well! At Tufts, for instance, 1,000 out of 15,000 applicants this year submitted one-minute videos about themselves. And apparently, they’re being taken pretty seriously: Lee Coffin, the dean of undergraduate…
The iPhone Perv App Wars of 2010 is over, with Apple firing the one and only round, killing off 5,000 tata apps. But, what do you, as a consumer, feel about it? https://gizmodo.com/forbidden-apple-on-the-death-of-iphone-sex-apps-5476484 There are two sides to the argument. You’ve got your one hand, which holds the fact that the market should police itself,…
Since switching from paid iPhone game apps to a free-to-play model with in-game purchases, iPhone game startup ngmoco has managed to raise $25 million in venture capital funding. That’s enough to buy up another top developer and expand even further. Freeverse, the company bought up by ngmoco, is is behind paid iPhone games such as…
File Mary Huang’s Typeface, a piece of software that analyzes your face in real time to create a custom font, in the “projects preceded by their puns” category. But unlike some things with that designation, Typeface is surprisingly functional. Stick your face in front of a webcam and Typeface will analyze it live to generate…
The compound sketched here is acetaminophen. Most wouldn’t know that offhand and might struggle through messy Google searches in an attempt to find out. But what if our computers understood the sketch and we just had to voice our question? Some folks at MIT figured out a way to turn what sounds like a sci-fi…
We often post items from our #tips box, but sometimes things are so weird that we can’t even stick them into our remainders. Things like talk of freaky ads on Craig’s List, free boob job offers, and pure flattery. We’re sharing all those silly things with you because you’re such lovely people. Doesn’t that feel…
This photograph, as incredible as it may sound, was taken more than a century ago. The photographer was Adolfo Farsari. The images he captured, of a bygone world, are breathtaking. Farsari’s story is nearly as interesting as the photographs he took. A former enlisted man for the Union in the Civil War, Farsari became the…
Click to viewThose “Windows 7 was my idea” ads only make sense if you assume the people with the ideas weren’t idiots. This take on the ads is more honest about what Microsoft would’ve gotten if they’d really crowdsourced their OS. [CollegeHumor]
Textbook publisher Macmillan is hip the ways of the internet, see! They’re rolling out a new product/concept/news item called DynamicBooks, which lets instructors change the content of online textbooks, even if they didn’t write them. And why not? The practicality of the DynamicBooks concept will almost immediately be overshadowed by kneejerk criticism, so let’s just…
In one short month in the dead of winter, lifelong archrivals Apple and Microsoft each unveiled world-changing new platforms. Here’s a quick jump to our most complete coverage of both the iPad and Windows Phone 7 Series. Apple iPad Apple might have passed on Macworld, but January 2010 was not without a big news break…
Christ, this is getting complicated. Mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses that promise near-DSLR quality without DSLR bulk are verifiably exploding. After the now-established Micro Four Thirds format from Panasonic and Olympus, Samsung jumped in with its Hybrid NX camera. Yesterday, Sony revealed its own spin, the Alpha concept. https://gizmodo.com/samsung-nx-series-cameras-have-compact-bodies-dslr-hea-5162590 And now, there’s Sigma, known for…
First we lost the ability to make boobs jiggle, then we lost most of our sexy iPhone apps (about 5,000 of them), and now we can’t even shop for swimsuits using an app-based catalog? Well, at least we still have Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit app to keep us amused. https://gizmodo.com/apple-removes-an-innocent-boob-jiggling-app-from-the-ap-5475270 As part of its crackdown on…
There’s something I love about CompactFlash cards—speed, and toughness—versus SD. The CompactFlash 5.0 spec takes them to a new level: 144 petabytes of possible storage, and exponentially faster transfer speeds (from 128KB per transfer unit to 32MB). I have to say, I can’t wait to get one of these inside a 1080p video-shooting DSLR. And…
I love weirdo concept designs as much as the next guy, but these “Curious Displays” seem a bit too far out of left field for me. Essentially, they’re hundreds of mini display blocks that can form wherever they want. So if you needed a reminder of where the remote was, a bunch could go form…
Two professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are going to pack a building to the gills with very expensive sensors that took a decade to create. Then they’re gonna burn that sucker down. You know, for science. If successful, the technology could be used by firefighters to detect when they’re one minute away from flashover—the moment…
Windows Phone 7 is a new beginning for Microsoft, and at the same time, an ending. The epoch of the “slap our software on any old hardware” open platform is dead. https://gizmodo.com/the-12-best-new-phones-you-cant-buy-5475748/?skyline=true&s=i There’s a spectrum of hardware and software integration. At one end, you have the likes of Apple, RIM and Nintendo who create software…
Vudu, despite being a swanky video service with delicious 1080p streaming, never made any money. So why did Walmart just drop $100 million on a failing service? Peter Kafka reports it’s because Vudu convinced Walmart its video compression was nigh-wizardry. https://gizmodo.com/vudu-hdx-1080p-movie-downloads-reviewed-insanely-shar-5058011 The standard assumption was that Walmart wanted Vudu’s baked-in deals with Hollywood studios, so…
Dear Apple, we get that you’re taking away our almost naughty iPhone apps, but why are you denying us the iTouch My Friends app? There’s no violence, no sexual content, and nothing sexy other than silly avatars getting dressed up. https://gizmodo.com/apple-removes-an-innocent-boob-jiggling-app-from-the-ap-5475270 You can see a demo of what the iTouch My Friends app does with…
