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Apple pushed a small Apple TV update to users last night, many of whom awoke to find their lovely, Hulu’d-despite-it-all Boxee installations brutally murdered. Again. Lesson: turn off automatic updates. UPDATED https://gizmodo.com/how-to-max-out-apple-tvs-potential-with-boxee-5082130 UPDATE: Right on cue, Lifehacker has posted a helpful guide to protecting your Boxee from those that wish it harm (and a new…
Old, grizzled veterans of the browser wars (Blood! Honor! W3C Standards!) will remember OmniWeb, an expensive, Mac-only überbrowser that always seemed to be slightly ahead of everyone else. Well, it’s free now. A little background: OmniWeb is based on a slightly modified version of WebKit, but used to differentiate itself from other browsers with novel…
The proposition: You and a bunch of strangers are live streaming mobile-phone video of some event or disaster. A server stitches it all together and instantaneously publishes a rich, immediate patchwork of the action. I love this system, but not necessarily for the same reasons that its developers at Microsoft Research do. I want to…
ASU’s Flexibile Display Center and military partners have developed the very first display with a flexible touchscreen. Mainly designed for military applications, the screen is made out of glass strong enough to withstand the battlefield. Instead of using solid glass for the touchscreen, the device incorporates special material from DuPont Tijin Films in order for…
Some family out in Missouri decided five years ago to purchase a cave and build their house in it…literally. This 17,000 sq.ft. house not only has three bedrooms, but a secondary party room and a performing stage (!?). Apparently, this property used to be some sort of musical venue called “Caveland” where the likes of…
Nadya Vessey was a child when her legs were amputated due to an illness. When asked about them, she said that she was a once mermaid; now with her prosthetic tail, she finally is one. Infatuated with the idea of being a mermaid, Vessey contacted Weta Workshop—the special-effects team that worked on the Lord of…
CirculaFloor—360° autonomous floor tiles—reposition themselves to make walking in virtual reality one step closer to being more realistic. However, walk a little too fast, and you’ll fall flat on your ass. Designed in 2004, CirculaFloor will let you walk everywhere from left to right, diagonally, forwards and backwards—it will even lift you up, simulating the…
Wayne Burdick just wanted to watch the Chicago Bears game. Using the Slingbox he had set up, he slid in his AT&T wireless card. Two and half hours and $28,000 later, the Bears won. Burdick was just waiting for his cruise ship to arrive, when he decided to watch the game via his Slingbox (which…
Last week, Spokane-based engineer Adam Chronister posted a Youtube video, where he cracked open a government-subsidized DTV converter box, only to find a hidden camera. Turns out, the whole thing was a hoax. Threat Level says that conspiracy theorists jumped all over the video, which racked up 200,000 views since going up. However, Chronister simply…
When an IT technician looked inside a dying computer with malfunctioning processor fan, he discovered what had caused the machine to crash: A worm—not a bug or a virus—an actual 5-inch earthworm. When Mark Taylor’s computer had crashed, he had thought it was due to a worm in his computer. He kept getting error messages…
In rural Africa, electricity is hard to come by. That’s why Dr. Cedrick Ngalande has developed the Green Erg Generator—a dynamo that produces electricity from friction generated with the ground while walking. “This is basically a dynamo which is being driven as a result of friction between the ground and the blocks. The small yellowish…
The game has 100 bulbs, 10×10. Each row and each column has a switch that turns off bulbs that are on, and turns on bulbs that are off. Can you turn off all the bulbs? The answer, even if you do attempt every possible combination, is no. But according to Microsoft Research, there’s a way…
Hershey’s has teamed up with Jazwares to develop a line of consumer electronics that will do nothing to curb the fattening of desk jockeys across the US. Expect 1-4GB USB drives modeled after your favorite Hershey treats along with digital cameras, earphones and speakers shaped like everything from Kisses to Jolly Ranchers. Prices are expected…
It sounds like a dream, but the circumstances here are not quite so fantastical—those that must cross a collapsed bridge to get to work have been using a zip line since last year’s earthquake. [WSJ – photo: San Lang/European Pressphoto Agency]
The Evangelion Clock App hit the App Store today, and it’s a pretty damn good clock app (as far as clock apps go) if you’ve ever seen Evangelion before. The app, which goes along with the new Evangelion movies, looks like the power countdown whenever one of the Eva robots goes on battery mode. Normally…
Once again, the guys at ifixit have gotten their hands on a shiny new gadget just to tear it apart. However, they did discover some interesting bits of information about the build. •The Kindle 2 sports a 532 MHz processor, clocking in faster than an iPhone 3G. Amazon used a 90nm ARM11-based Freescale MCIMX31L multimedia…
Here’s a neat trick: This Microsoft Surface table projects an image on its screen, but hold a piece of paper or glass over it, and you see a secret second layer of user interface. The trick that Microsoft Research figured out for SecondLight make sense, when you hear it: The screen is an LCD that…
The eternal problem of keeping teeth away from penises has been solved by a dentist (naturally). It’s called the BlowGuard. How does it work? It’s essentially a mouth guard—you know, like the ones boxers use—that you use while performing oral sex. On a male. It retails for $28 and contains a pack of strawberry flavored…
If you have been kicking the tires on Safari 4, you might be interested in Random Genius’ list of basic preference tweaks for people looking to disable some of the new features. [Random Genius] https://gizmodo.com/safari-4-first-impressions-5159327
Microsoft showed off a “Write in the Air” system developed in China. You can write with a gyro controller or in thin air, using a camera. Is it next for the Xbox? You can’t help but notice the giant Xbox logo there on the screen, and the researcher I talked to said that it would…
