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Do you ever stop to realize that another human being carefully conceived and designed every object you will touch today? It’s a pretty amazing thought, and after Objectified, you’ll be thinking it more often. And that’s exactly the point. Like Helvetica, director Gary Hustwit’s previous documentary triumph about the most prevalent typeface on earth, Objectified…
This unique Anglepoise lamp from the designers at Fresh West may have been inspired by old Far Eastern bamboo scaffolding—but it looks more like something that could hurl a projectile over a castle wall. The Brave New World Lamp, as it has been dubbed, stands at nearly 6-feet tall using a combination of oak and…
If you happen to live in or around the city of Pittsburgh, you still have until May 3rd to visit the Andy Warhol Museum at catch a glimpse of the Vader Project. The concept is simple: 100 of the best underground artists and designers working today were given a scale Darth Vader helmet to customize…
With the series over, Battlestar Galactica will make its way to Blu-ray for the first time in a massive, 20-disc set that will be released July 28th for an MSRP of $350. I loved the series…even if the controversial ending, in which we discover an autistic child had simply dreamed up a galaxy full of…
Someone asked that question when the tiny shuffle came out, so we tried it. Well, we didn’t, but we found someone who did: The very sweet sword-swallower Heather Holiday, from the Coney Island Circus. https://gizmodo.com/ipod-shuffle-review-2009-5169174 Heather is a professional sword swallower. Someone with no gag reflex—or better said, trained to suppress it while swallowing 36-inch…
The first episode of Caprica premiered last night (did you buy it on DVD or iTunes?), so if you like what you saw, Zune has a 90-minute Q&A session for you on April 28. Who’s on the panel? · Magda Apanowicz (Lacy Rand, “Caprica”) · David Eick (Executive Producer) · Jane Espenson (Executive Producer) ·…
9to5’s “favorite Apple source” says that WWDC will bring “minor” updates to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. The source mentioned speed bumps and “3G hardware built-in.” I don’t know about you, but 3G hardware built-in seems like a pretty big deal to me. The source also speculated with non-removable batteries for other laptops than…
The Putt Up or Shut Up Rug Kit doesn’t include windmills or water features, but it’s not a horrible way to work a mini golf course into your office. The somewhat ordinary $140 green rug includes eight rearrangeable tiles of “rough.” Bundled plans include design variations ranging from a simple par 3 to a rigorous…
There’s a general rule with hard drives: spin faster, get better performance, use more power. “Green” hard drives take the opposite tack: they spin slower, and use less power, like Seagate’s new Barracuda LP. Its RPM rating is a rather odd 5900rpm—between the a laptop drive’s standard 5400rpm and a standard desktop drive’s 7200rpm (performance…
I used to want a Super Talent Pico flash drive, but now I want an EagleTec Nano. Even though they take a few steps back on the metric naming scale, this thing is small. https://gizmodo.com/super-talent-8gb-flash-drive-is-worlds-smallest-377165 Now that every press release anyone gets handed comes on a USB flash drive, I’ve found it hard to actually…
You haven’t seen a traffic accident until you’ve seen Blu-ray in your car. The Panasonic CY-BB1000D, announced for the Japan market, is a (I call it a car stereo, as dated as that term may be) with GPS, 1seg TV tuner, 7-inch HD LCD, Bluetooth and 40GB hard drive. But the system’s biggest claim to…
This is Cady, who died at age 10 in a car accident. More recently, Dr. Panayiotis Zavos infused her DNA into a cow’s egg to study human cloning. Dr Zavos assures the public that this human/cow hybrid model for study only—he’d never implant anything but human to human tissue, even though Cady’s mother would allow…
Okay, for $699, you might not be able to buy the best laptop in the world. But for $500, you can build a PC that plays Crysis at a solid 40 frames per second. https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-marketing-team-now-exclusively-advised-by-int-5186672 Except for the RAM, I’m actually fairly impressed with the components Maximum PC picked out: an ATI Radeon HD 4870…
It may not be in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and, looking at it, you don’t have to wonder why. But this rusty Korean restaurant is special: It’s the first commercial 747 ever flown. According to some urban explorers, the restaurant is the plane above these lines, the second 747 ever made and the…
According to an iSuppli teardown, the Kindle 2 costs $185 to build—or about half the device’s $360 sticker price. That’s $176.83 in parts, $8.66 in construction costs. Here’s the major component breakdown: E Ink Display (by E Ink) $60 EVDO (by Novatel) $39.50 Baseband Processor (by Qualcomm) $13.18 8-Layer Printed Circuit Board (by Multek) $9.83…
JJ Abrams may want mystery, but reading the last issue of Wired made me realize that I don’t want mysteries. I want to know. Which is why I used to love their future Found gadgets. https://gizmodo.com/the-jj-abrams-issue-of-wired-5220590 Found was my favorite part of Wired because of that. Concepts for gadgets of the future that were in…
This zippered earbud concept might not truly solve the eternal tangling problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fantastic. The YI Sound earbuds wrap left and right cables in opposing sides of a zipper, letting wearers easily adjust the point at which they split. The stated purpose of the concept is to reduce cable tangle,…
At first, the organizers of the Shanghai Motor Show probably thought Porsche was joking when they suggested holding a press conference for their Panamera sedan on the 94th floor of an office building. They weren’t. An assortment of winches, dollies, and something not unlike courage helped these workers send the car on its 1394-foot journey…
Q1 results are in for the processor industry’s #2, and they’re ugly. This news, combined with recent spinoffs, makes the company look kind of sick—and its executives’ obvious lack of optimism doesn’t really help matters. Processor sales were down 21%, and graphics chips a full 15% for $416m in losses, getting 2009 off to a…
While scientists all over the world strive to create a mechanical equivalent to the human brain, one guy is getting kind of concerned about these posthumans’ power bills. They’re pretty high! At least, at first. Anders Sandberg has run a few back-of-the-napkin calculations on what it might take, power-wise, to sustain a theoretical mechanical brain:…
