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1969 From Apollo 11‘s Command Module, now on final approach to the Moon landing site: “We’re getting first view of the landing approach. Looks like pictures but difference of watching a real football game and watching it on TV.” https://gizmodo.com/first-new-images-of-the-apollo-landing-sites-in-40-year-5317057/ Remember, Apollo 11 lands later today, July 20, about three hours from now. Follow the…
[xkcd via Anna Grimm]
I said it before, and I’ll say it a million times: I hate iPhone cases like I hate grandma’s plastic sofa cover. But I love this beautiful NES felt case—with buttons made of actual ruby red buttons. $25 is the only thing standing between plastic tackiness and Nintendo retro class. [Etsy via Geeky Gadgets]
If you own an iPhone, you’ve probably noticed lately that voicemails randomly show up a few days after they should have. The Visual Voicemail system is basically broken for people, and it’s AT&T’s fault. Why aren’t they acknowledging it? At this point, the problem is more than just a few scattered instances. Literally every single…
One cross-eyed Googler has been spending his 20% on a 3D video display system for YouTube, which is open for experimentation/testing/goofing off right now. It’s a little rough right now, but it’s already plenty of fun to play with, at least until your inevitable migraine sets in. The interface lets you switch between a fairly…
At last, Neil Armstrong will be able to wear his “Been There, Done That” t-shirt with pride. After all, we never saw his face through the solar visor in any of the lunar walk photos. Until today. This weird and never-before-seen photo was taken by the top camera of the Eagle. As Armstrong walked his…
Here’s something nobody wanted: commercials with sound showing up on the Xbox 360 dashboard. As you can see by this video, the ads show up in the normal content windows, but with sound when you scroll past. Annoying! We’ve already been assaulted with ads in the 1 vs. 100 beta, which is annoying as it…
It’s a $2000 router, actually. Oh sorry, an outdoor $2000 router. That’s because Ruckus Wireless’s ZoneFlex 7762 uses dynamic beam forming and adaptive meshing with wireless N. Dynamic beam forming, you say? Why yes. Ruckus says that its dynamic beam-forming antennae automagically find the best way to shoot the internet waves, so it has 3-4x…
Toyota is planting giant 18-feet Solar Flowers all across major cities in the United States. It’s all a Prius marketing campaign, but as long as they give me free power and Wi-Fi, I’m game. I don’t know if they are going to retire the daisies when the campaign is over, but I hope they don’t.…
Old-line filesharing services can’t seem to switch sides fast enough: Now Kazaa, leading purveyor of illegal MP3s and maliciously mislabeled pornography for a few years in the early 2000s, has been reborn as a legal, paid music download service. $20 a month gets you unlimited downloads, 2005-style: in WMA format, wrapped in tons of DRM.…
As many collector’s editions DVDs as I’ve bought, I’ve never watched the special features. Which might be why Universal is turning them into apps for your iPhone, and letting you use it as a virtual remote for your Blu-ray player. Fast and the Furious on July 28 will be the first Blu-ray movie to go…
A June 29 job listing indicates that Palm plans to eventually rectify the Pre’s lack of gaming of powah—they’re looking for someone to “design, implement, debug, and optimize frameworks for game development” who has “knowledge of 3D graphics, including hardware graphics pipelines and programmable shaders.” https://gizmodo.com/palm-webos-mojo-sdk-sadly-impotent-badass-games-are-im-5317216 The bad news is that it suggests their gaming…
Here’s your cold, bitter, daily dose of hardware obsolescence: Just a month after passing the already-ridiculous 128GB barrier, Kingston has released the 256GB DataTraveler 300. It isn’t available in the US, but if/when it is, it’ll run around $900. [Kingston] https://gizmodo.com/kingston-launches-worlds-first-128gb-usb-flash-drive-5292392
Surprise, Apple and RIM actually make a lot of money despite selling only 3 percent of the world’s cellphones. Together, they pull in 35 percent of the industry’s operating profits. An analyst suggests that if iPhone and BlackBerry’s marketshare climbs to 5 percent, they’ll rake in something like 58 percent of the industry’s operating profits.…
One of the more interesting, ways to keep your precious Time Machine backups safe: Time Warp is a $25 app (free while in beta) that compresses and encrypts your backups, then uploads them to your Amazon S3 account. Amazon S3 runs 15 cents per GB to store, 10 cents per GB to upload, and 17…
Say what you want about the Gateway LT3100‘s AMD processor and operating system options, but at least it had an angle. The $300, Atom-based 10.1-inch LT2000, on the other hand, is as predictable as netbooks get. https://gizmodo.com/gateway-lt3100-netbook-runs-an-amd-athlon-processor-le-5300552 Just see if you can guess what the spec sheet looks like: It’s got an 1.6-GHz Atom N270…
Verizon has outlined a plan to loosen its handset exclusivity deals, limiting their lifespan to six months. The announcement’s caveats are massive and Verizon’s motivations aren’t pure, but it’s nonetheless a step in the right direction. In a letter to lawmakers, the carrier announced intentions to institute a six-month limit on handset exclusivity, allowing competing…
The bionic eye’s inexorable advance continued this weekend, as doctors reported they were able to implant tiny telescopes (telescopes!) into the eyes of patients suffering from macular degeneration. Better still, for squeamish emergency room pansies like myself, this is a “brief” outpatient procedure, say the inventors at VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies. Just pop a telescope in…
1979 was the beginning of Lego as we know it today, the year when they took over the world, the year of the Galaxy Explorer. I photographed all the classic sets in my Lego trip. Here’s the never-released gallery: The Lego bricks were invented a lot earlier, but 1979 was the year of Legoland Space,…
An obscure company has filed suit in a patent infringement-friendly Texas district against Apple and several other companies it for what it contends is—wait for it—patent infringement related to touchpad technology. The iPhone and iPod-related lawsuit, filed Wednesday, also includes Microsoft (Zune), Cowon (Curve), iRiver LG, high end speaker firm Bang & Olufsen, Philips and…