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For some reason, an advertisement from the movie Crazy People comes to mind when watching this RoboPong 2040 commercial. "Robopong won’t just scare you; it will fuck you up for the rest of your life." Yeah, it costs $700. Yeah, it’s better at ping pong than you. And yeah, after it embeds a ball into…
The US Air Force wants a new cargo aircraft, a pressurized airplane capable of carrying 65,000 pounds for 1,500 nautical miles without refueling. They call it the Speed Agile Concept Demonstrator—it’s supposed to travel at a minimum Mach .8 at 30,000-feet—but they may as well have called it the UD-4L Dropship, because it looks like…
This week at Uncrate: We spend a night under the stars in the Marmot Aura Tent, give the local boating crowd goosebumps with the XSMG XSR48 Speedboat, and prepare our drink garnishes in no-time with the Perfect Peeler. We also store our modern gadgets in the retro-styled Samsonite Male Attache, explore NASA’s history with When…
While most of us wonder why planes aren’t built of the crash-proof “black box” flight recorder material, one modder has requisitioned a black box of his own to use as a PC case. While the package itself is quite large (and disappointingly red), the interior is so cramped that only a Mini-ITX motherboard could fit…
Ah, a digital watch with an LED display that’s not impossible to read… fantastic! Even better, the LEDs on these new watches from Diesel are a dot-matrix screen, and are hidden behind a mirror surface that makes the whole package look suitably sci-fi. Like something Luke would’ve worn on his cybernetic wrist. You can even…
A Don at Oxford University has come up with a novel way to measure the hotness of chilli peppers objectively. Using carbon nanotubes and adsortive stripping voltammetry, Professor Richard Compton’s idea could end up replacing the Scoville test, a subjective taste test created almost a century ago, that uses volunteers, and works on a “which…
You know Guitar Hero has gotten ridiculously big when the franchise gets its own Nintendo DS. Coordinated with the Guitar Hero: On Tour launch June 22, a silver and black Nintendo DS adorned with the Guitar Hero logo will be available in a limited edition bundle. The price is yet to be announced, but specially…
Remember the T-Mobile vs Starbucks lawsuit over the free AT&T Wi-Fi, because the former said the latter broke their exclusive contract? Yeah, me neither, but apparently it has been settled: “T-Mobile, AT&T and Starbucks have entered into a memorandum of understanding to resolve their disputes and are committed to providing a high quality Wi-Fi experience…
For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting the next Firefox but have been too scared to deal with release candidates, Firefox 3 will be released Tuesday, June 17th. (That’s just next week.) And yes, they’re trying to set a marketing ploy world record. Then again, it’s tough to blame a company for shameless self-promotion of a…
Palm’s savior Centro, long cozy on Sprint and more recently AT&T, has finally moseyed its way over to Verizon (as expected.) In blue. https://gizmodo.com/palm-centro-unboxed-and-reviewed-verdict-yep-definit-309196 That should give its march past a million sold new juice, even if your friends have already been playing with it for a few months. It’s the first Palm on Verizon’s…
This is what happens when you get a couple of cheap RC cars and add proximity sensors, extra batteries, robot brains, and name them Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds: totally-automated racing all around your house. These electric robocars can detect the walls around them and race against each other for as long as the batteries…
Click to viewGizmodo readers and conspiracy theory aficionados Nathan Ziehnert & Friends have spent a few hours analyzing the footage from the WWDC08 keynote like CSI agents investigating the Zapruder film. The result: they found what they believe could be a front-facing videocamera in Applemeister Phil Schiller’s demo iPhone 3G. Is this a prototype or…
Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has created this prototype physical 3D display that works a little differently than the other 3D tech out there. Those bright spots aren’t LEDs, but a complex array of lenses arranged on top of LCDs, forming the sides of a cube. By a kind of optical parallax…
Behold the Greatest Workstation of All Time: the Emperor. I mean, come on, anything that looks like it can control a turbolaser battery or fire a giant anti-matter death ray must be the greatest workstation of all time, period. But according to Patrick Laflamme Duval—business developer for manufacturer Novelquest—the name is not a Star Wars…
First I thought “ah… what a cute gimmick” about this Is.a.Brella thing, but then I realized the essential cleverness of the design. You’re in a rush to get on the train on a rainy day: furl your Is.a.Brella, leap aboard, slide it into the bottle cover keeping it compact and tidy, and stop all those…
Hot on the heels of the announcement that iPhone users in Spain and the UK will get their iPhone 3G for free zip nada gratis zilch if they sign up for an $88-a-month plan, let’s see what Vodafone Italy is planning for its countrymen. Pay-as-you-go fans will be able to buy an unsubsidized iPhone for…
A mugger who stole jewelry from a teenager on a tram has dropped himself right in it, after he clocked himself in the on-board security cameras. The victim, a 16-year-old boy, was traveling with two friends on a tram in Bromley, a South London suburb, when he was approached by another kid who, after admiring…
This concept from designer Kong Fanwen lies somewhere between minimalist Apple keyboards, and projecting laser touch ones. The No-Key is very simple: just a light source, a camera and an etched sheet of glass, showing the key positions. You just type, the cam sees your contact with the glass and sends appropriate commands to your…
Yamaha has teamed up with lighting experts Koizumi to create these home theater speakers with built-in lighting. Each unit has three 25W halogen lamps that are remote control-dimmable down to 20% brightness, designed to reduce the contrast between your TV picture and the wall behind to “ease the burden on your eyes.” So, a kind…
Over at Intel’s R&D fair, Wired got to play with a robot hand that is able to sense an object it’s about to come in contact with before actually touching it. Using electrolocation, the fingertips of the robot hand send out a weak electrical impulse, and approaching objects interfere with that impulse, which allows the…
