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Mechanic Darren Nixon recently got a rude awakening when he was arrested at gunpoint because a bystander and a team of British police both mistook his 4GB Phillps MP3 player for a pistol. Amazingly enough, the ordeal was not cleared up with a simple “It’s an MP3 player stupid”—in fact, Nixon was taken back to…
$500 million. Says Om Malik, who’s about as reliable as they come. A lot for the assimilation, but nothing compared to what they’re throwing at Yahoo. [GigaOM] https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-absorbs-sidekick-maker-danger-inc-354998
You know those noise-canceling headphones that make it so you don’t hear engine noise while traveling? Well, they might just make you sick. Really sick. Bad news for Bose! Check out this Q&A from today’s Wall Street Journal: Q: I was recently given a pair of the Bose QC3 headphones [smaller earphones at top] with…
If you’re going to wear one of those wired handsfree headsets for your phone, why not go all out and make it a fashion accessory? This Hands-free Tie does just that, with an embedded mic on the “tie” part and convenient gestures for you to answer your phone. We say “convenient,” but they’re actually kind…
It’s been a long summer day tending the garden and you need to sit down, but there is no chair in sight. If only you were using the S(tool), then you wouldn’t have to worry about finding one. Designed by Langton Stead, the S(tool) is a bent wood handle with two garden forks on either…
If you enjoy rock climbing, snowboarding, or base jumping, you need a backpack that fits in with your hardcore lifestyle. Designer Teo Song Wei believes that his QuickShell backpack concept could be the answer. Instead of packing and repacking your gear, the QuickShell allows users to simply snap on the appropriate module. For example, you…
This week at TreeHugger: A dynamic duo of electric car stories had our motors running: some lucky high-schoolers are plugging in, converting a 1995 Saturn SP1 into an electric car; if you dig electric cars but aren’t a geeky high-schooler, not to worry. You can have an all-electric Miles XS500 (top speed 80+ mph, range…
DARPA’s brain-on-a-chip project (cleverly titled SyNAPSE, or Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) sounds straight out of Cyberdyne’s portfolio: They want to “develop a brain inspired electronic ‘chip’ that mimics that function, size, and power consumption of a biological cortex.” That whole neuromorphic adaptive business sounds a whole lot like the T-800’s neural net…
We received many, many fine entries for our HDTV and Media Center contest, but sadly for all the contestants, there can only be one winner. This time that winner is James Cahoon, who sent in this lovely entry of his girlfriend posing seductively next to a fully-functional GE portable 8-track player. Congratulations to James and…
Vanessa of DVice has a video up of her learning how to use these crazy jumping stilts with the people who are selling them. The stilts are definitely cool and let you get a little bit more jump than man was intended to, but things get a little tricky when you fast forward to about…
In the light, this sippy mask by Jennifer Maestre gives me Darkman vibes, like there’s some horrible disfigurement underneath. But, under a black light, the whole thing glows, including the little drinkie tube, so I could definitely see more of a Star Wars chillin’ at the cantina type of look, especially with some more “in…
Buy.com is practically giving away the $100 Zune Home AV kit—which includes a dock and cables to hook your Zune up to a TV, stereo or PC, plus remote—for $20 a pop, plus $7 shipping. If you’ve got a Zune, it’s not a bad little deal. [Buy.com via Crave]
If you’ve ever considered getting a tattoo, it’s probably for aesthetic purposes. That’s all well and good, but in the near future getting a tattoo might be the best way to deliver vaccines, so if you go in for a new ink job you could also protect yourself from any number of diseases, including some…
Although surveys can pretty much ask anything (would you like to see George Wendt eating beans in a movie?), this survey from Netflix that asks whether you’d like to stream Netflix movies to your Xbox 360 seems pretty plausible to us. Here’s why. First, you have the MyNetflix plugin for Windows Vista Media Center PCs…
You know, the thing about scrappy underdogs like the Giants is that they’re fighters. They bite back. HD DVD has apparently totally lost the will to win, or hell, even to live. Here’s their timid response to Netflix and Best Buy’s two-fister snub yesterday. https://gizmodo.com/hype-sheet-hd-dvds-plight-in-a-nutshell-353564 “We have long held the belief that HD DVD is…
This video, found on the VMWare Fusion Site, illustrates not only that Sinbad hasn’t passed away—as many of us previously thought—but he’s a gigantic nerd on the caliber of Gizmodo readers. Just listen to what he says regarding how he runs Windows and OS X simultaneously and marvel at how much more he knows about…
The second generation AppleTV software is now available, so feel free to update your units as soon as you can. In return for your time, you’ll get a whole bunch of new features such as movie rentals, Flickr and .Mac support, and the ability to work the thing without connecting it to a computer. [Apple…
HG, or Head in the Game Controllers, had a brilliant idea to mod Xbox 360 controllers by duplicating some front face buttons onto the back. Why would you need this? So you won’t have to move your thumb away from the stick—which usually controls aiming or camera movement—in order to hit the action buttons. This…
That three hour outage in your BlackBerry email service yesterday may have just been an inconvenience to you, but it’s a mystery to RIM, who still can’t figure out exactly what went wrong to cause your messages to dribble off into the land of lost dinner invitations instead of shooting off to their proper recipients.…
Despite the high sales of the LG Chocolate*, anyone who’s actually used it knows that its touch controller is one of the worst UIs to come out in the last several years. The KF600 is LG’s new 3MP cellie with a slider keypad. It has the same electrostatic chocopad the Chocolate has, but with an…