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Even Google is forced to mow the lawn once in a while. But instead of burning diesel to get the job done, they’ve enlisted the power of goats. Yes, goats. From their blog: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do…
Wrap rage—one minute your trying to open a new gadget and the next someone is in the ER with a pair of scissors in their chest. I’ve seen it countless times. ZipIt can help. Unlike the Open X or the Plastic Surgeon before it, the ZipIt is battery operated, so it should be able to…
I’m stuck indoors. First it was the Swine Flu, and now it’s raining. Oh well, I’m still going to equip my iPhone with apps that’ll be perfect for when the world is safer and warmer. Doodle Jump: Kind of like a backwards Fall Down (calculator game) meets Space Invaders, this application is another mindless, yet…
If you were envious of Nintendo fanboys’ WiiXploded t-shirt, here you have the Exploded 360 t-shirt. Garry Booth designed it after taking apart a real Xbox 360, which is now dismembered in a bag. https://gizmodo.com/nintendo-spills-its-guts-in-the-wii-exploded-tee-5210297 You can get it for $17 plus shipping and handling at Exploded 360.
CrackBerry has the first real pictures of the BlackBerry Curve 8520, aka Gemini. It’s the first BlackBerry with an optical mouse, RIM’s next-gen solution to gunk-loving trackballs. No, there’s no 3G. [CrackBerry] https://gizmodo.com/samsung-epix-aka-blackjack-iii-first-smartphone-with-5066527
AMD, the other chip company, is 40 years old today. It’s the scrappy underdog to the Intel juggernaut. Today, it’s not in great shape, but at one point, it was actually beating Intel on innovation. • AMD tried to kill the megahertz myth before Intel. During the Pentium 4 days Intel kept pushing clock speeds…
Lifehacker has a great tutorial on how to Set Up Comment Reply Notifications, and if you missed their post a few days ago here it is again. https://lifehacker.com/set-up-comment-reply-notifications-for-this-site-5231206 The LH post explains: When you’re done with this little walkthrough, you can either grab an RSS feed that contains only replies to your comments (which you…
It’s going to be a rainy weekend here in NYC. Time to snuggle up indoors with some new gadgets, a free Xbox LIVE weekend, and my good pal Wolverine. Computing and Peripherals: • Dell Inspiron 15 Dual Core 15.4″ Laptop for $449 plus free shipping (normally $549). • Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 1.66GHz 15.4″ Notebook for…
The Official Amazon Kindle Forum has a thread called the “Average Kindle Owner’s Age.” Someone counted up all 1,387 responses and found that 70% of respondents were over 40. Keep in mind, the data is by no means scientific. There were no controls in the polling process, meaning that it’s quite possible for the average…
io9 tarted a Flickr group called “Sarah Connor Made Me Do It.” Post pictures of yourself with products that sponsored Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles there, and they’ll make sure the folks at Fox and Warner Bros. see it. [io9] https://gizmodo.com/its-not-too-late-to-save-sarah-connor-5236443
The first meaty rumors of the Xbox 360 using full-body motion controls—without a controller—are pretty interesting, since Microsoft showed us their “write in the air” tech a couple months ago, complete with Xbox logo: https://gizmodo.com/rumor-xbox-360-getting-full-body-motion-sensing-contro-5236060 Microsoft showed off a “Write in the Air” system developed in China. You can write with a gyro controller or…
While Apple keeps bragging about one billion iPhone apps sold, some developers are fed up with their outrageous payment delays. Some cases are dramatic, deeply affecting indie developer’s families in the middle of the crisis: https://gizmodo.com/apple-hits-one-billion-apps-5225101 30 something year old family man with bills to pay owed 1,000’s (soon to be 10’s of thousands if…
Afterglow uses a USB camera to track the motion of a laser dot—effectively turning it into a drawing tool or a mouse. Now that is something every boardroom needs. At the heart of the system is their special software that can automatically compensate for geometric distortion and track the movement of the pointer even when…
This is kind of a wild one: The Xbox 360 is going to one-up the Wii and PS3’s motion controls with full-body motion sensing. https://gizmodo.com/rumor-motion-sensing-ps3-controller-to-debut-at-e3-5235434 The picture looks a little weird—the Xbox and sensor bar do seem a bit Photoshoppy to us—but it definitely sounds intriguing. The sensor bar supposedly has a built-in camera and…
Having a robot-building hobby just got a lot more dangerous to fingers and wieners now that the RX-64 Smart Actuator is on the market. According to the product page, these beasts can provide “888 oz*in of torque, and it can traverse its entire 300° range in under 1 second.” Plus, up to 254 actuators can…
The very cool Ask a Ninja iPhone game called “I am Ninja” is out now, and you can grab it here. https://gizmodo.com/ask-a-ninja-iphone-game-preview-5224897
The Daily Show asks a very good question about the Large Hadron Collider: “Why the f*** would you want to recreate the Big Bang?” I know I’m scared. [The Daily Show]
If you’re gonna be a hobo, you might as well be a hobo with the sweetest hobo house on the block, right? This hobo hutch, discovered in a homeless camp along a river in Tokyo, is outfitted with a solar panel to power the goodies inside, such as TV and radio. The guy who lives…
Just how do some of gaming’s famous consoles make their way into an x-ray machine? We can only assume that while some poor boy with an unconfirmed fractured tibia had to wait i excrutiating pain for a hospital’s only x-ray room to open, Flickr member Reintji had locked the doors from the inside as he…
With the Windows 7 release candidate now out in the open—partly, anyway—Microsoft has released the final minimum system requirements. If your computer doesn’t meet them, I feel sorry for you. https://gizmodo.com/windows-7-release-candidate-1-publicly-available-may-5-5226877 • 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit) • 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit) • 16 GB of available disk…
