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The trifecta is complete: Best Buy and Circuit City’s Black Friday ads are weak, disgustingly disappointing sauce, leaving it up to Walmart to save Black Friday. CNN Money gives us the first peek at the ad Walmart plans to reveal Nov. 24, and reveals that there’s still hope since it’s happily gadget heavy, with perhaps…
Ars discovered that the upcoming Nintendo Wii Speak peripheral—a microphone that finally lets you communicate to other Wii users online—comes with a 16 character code to download the “Wii Speak” channel. This is a one time use code, which cannot be replaced if lost. What does this mean to you? It means you can NEVER…
Out with the old, in with the new. Course, if you’re okay with the old, you can usually pick it up for cast-off prices. Like the previous-gen MacBook Air, which MacMall is dumping for $1150 after a $100 mail-in rebate with free shipping. To sweeten the deal, you also get Parallels for free after rebate.…
As some of you have probably noticed, things look a little different inside posts. Like, bigger. It’s not your imagination, or your new contacts. We’ve bumped up the font size to be a bit more readable, and stuff now sprawls across a lot more of your monitor—800 pixels of it, actually. We’ve also moved metadata,…
Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics have developed a matchbook-sized motor that can spin faster than any other machine in the world—over 1,000,000 rpm. In order to keep it from falling apart at such high speeds, the researchers employed a titanium shell, ultra-thin copper wire for the windings and a mysterious top-secret iron…
If you have enjoyed using the built-in iPhone application on WowWee’s three-wheelin’ Rovio robot, then head on over to the App Store because “Rovio Driver” looks like a major upgrade. The free app adds head position / rotation controls and the camera view appears to be much larger than the standard version. Damn, I might…
ATI has been hitting Nvidia hard with its 4000-series big guns like the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and they’re starting to feel it, with ATI successfully clawing away marketshare from Nvidia. Which has Nvidia skurred. So, sources say, Nvidia’s readying a barrage of price cuts to keep the territory loss to a minimum. If it…
According to a recent analyst study, we are on pace to lose 180,000 tech jobs this year—the most since 2003. Even without the figure, we could have assumed that things are epically bad. You can’t get through a day’s worth of news without hearing about some big tech company layoffs. In this month alone, Circuit…
Hey Brian, Are you excited? I’m excited. Why am I so excited? Because we’re getting ready for our Gizmodo vs. Wired match in Gears of War 2, which you’re going to be participating in. Maybe. If we can’t find someone better at video games that is (just kidding). I’m also excited about finally getting Wii…
You may be wondering why every netbook we write about seems to have the same Intel Atom processor. Some of it has to do with Intel’s prominence in the entire processor market at the moment (which makes competition from Via little contest), and some of it has to do with AMD not stepping up to…
According to a recent survey conducted by Nokia, 53 percent of Americans have taken a work-related call or email in the bathroom. Although the data has been lost, we conducted a survey in the past that found the percentage could be even higher. So what does this all mean? I think the answer is clear…we…
I can’t tell you how bummed I am that Circuit City’s Black Friday ad this year is a black hole of suck, just like Best Buy’s. Last year, Circuit City’s was fantastic, way better than anyone else’s—I dropped like $500 on all kinds of great stuff. This year, I’m totally skipping the big boxes, for…
Holy. Crap. Just when you thought Ginsu was done, that they couldn’t top slicing not only shoes and pennies but their own Ginsu knives, the company reveals the secret project that they’ve put millions billions trillions of R&D dollars into: The Outdoor Electric Fillet Knife. Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy crap.Let’s paint the…
I usually don’t get excited about home appliances unless you can cook with them or they vibrate, but this Miele S7’s video has actually amazed me. Not only because it looks like it came from outer space thanks to the front LEDs, sensors, and LCD screen, but because of its smart design, which allows it…
The finicky, rubbery controls of the Atari 2600 were as much part of its charm as the classic arcade ports it’s known for. And now, for a mere $15, those bittersweet memories can come to your Windows, Linux or OSX system through this faithful-looking USB recreation of the original Atari 2600 joystick. The peripheral promises…
It’s been four months almost to the day since iPhone 2.0 came, and we’ve been hitting the App Store hard every week ever since to sift through what’s new in iPhone App land. This week, we’ve decided to hold back for a second, take a breath, and compile a different kind of list: the apps…
I’ve used Wii Fit exactly 6 months. Since the review, I didn’t use it every day, or even every week, but since the very first time the game told me I was fat, it never really left my mind. Every meal, every time I passed on exercise to eat a little more ice cream, every…
The Zon is the latest in Nooka’s line of variously confusing and interesting (for a given value of beauty) timepieces: Its 35 x 45mm dot-matrix display either displays the minutes of the day dotting into nothingness like a digital egg-timer that’s counting down until tomorrow, or a proper numeric time readout. It also has a…
Obama is officially the first YouTube president—you know, if you doubted it for some reason with 1800 videos uploaded and over 110 million views. He will be the first president to post videos of his weekly fireside coffee talks on YouTube in addition to the traditional radio format, which goes back to FDR, who used…
Future optical computers that use light instead of electricity will need nano-scale pipes to transfer photons—analogues to the individual transistor’s in a traditional circuit. And for that, scientists for the first time have used human DNA to build the smallest fiber optics cables yet created. And as is typical with organic computers, said cables are…