Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
If you can sit through this Theramin-tinged cacophonous din, you might just start to appreciate this pile of junk and household detritus playing the erstwhile wonderful Gnarls Barkley song, “Crazy.” Brooklyn’s Ranjit Bhatnagar created this junkbot and Theramin combo, whose sound felt almost to us like some sort of hypnotic Indian chant. We’re especially fond…
One of the ideas submitted to the Next Generation competition featured in Metropolis Magazine was this Kinetic Energy-harnessing battery charger by Yael Miller. The concept is to take something we’re already doing—such as working out, flopping around in a baby rocker, vacuuming, or flushing the toilet—add the piezoelectric effect, and come out with batteries that…
Blogger (and early iPhone adopter) Jordan Golson just got this text message on his iPhone this morning: AT&T FREE Msg: Good News, your messaging package now includes text, picture & instant messages all for the same price of $19.99 per month. No action required Could this mean we can finally send pictures via MMS (multimedia…
Rumors abounded today that British Telecom was interested in buying Sprint Nextel. The company’s stock price has been sagging due to poor customer growth rates. What does this mean to us? Not sure yet, but in this case, the change might do them good. [Reuters]
Behold the Climb@tron Robot, sucking up to a window and walking its way up and down as if it’s defying gravity. It’s looking a lot like that “Brainzord” window-climbing robot that we told you about earlier this month, made by the same company. But wait a second. There’s some fast and footloose video editing going…
Google is not leaving anything to chance, and according to an Australian newspaper is now planning to span the Pacific Ocean with its own undersea fiber optics cable to blast the world with its do-no-evil goodness. Owning a fat pipe like this will make Google the Big Dick of the high seas, making it cheaper…
iLounge got their hands on the soon-to-be-released iHome iHC5. This clock radio has decided to branch out from the iHome’s comfortable iPod market, and instead is trying to attract media cellphones. While it does do some interesting things like stream music from your cellphone or PC using Bluetooth, it does have a couple of problems.…
It’s thanks to our sponsors that we can build giant robot versions of ourselves to help keep up the blogging and do housework. Thanks Annie Lennox, Ask.com, AT&T, Audi, Bank of America, Best Buy, The Bionic Woman, Cazadores Tequila, CNN, Chargepod, Crown Publishing, Comedy Central, DLO, Energizer, ING Direct, Mio, Netgear, Pioneer, Ricoh, Sprint, TiVo,…
Who says Hillary’s a ballbuster? No, she’s a nutcracker. Here’s proof. Just in time for the Christmas season, shell out $29.99 and remove the shells from your walnuts with style. When she’s done cracking nuts, Hillary stands up on her own, lording over you as she awaits her next opportunity to bust a few nuts.…
We’ve known Furutech to build some crazy home theater accessories like the DeMag, so it doesn’t surprise us that they also make the DFV-1, a vinyl LP flattener that relies on precision heating and cooling to get the job done. For $1,480, it might be overkill for repairing my now unplayable Christmas in the Stars…
Here’s a wild-ass looking portable DVD player (PDP) that reminds us a lot of that player we showed you last month that looks like a butterfly knife. This concept takes that design a few years into the future, looking like it’s about the size and unpocketable shape of that crazy iPhone clone Intel was flaunting…
Click to viewHere’s the broomstick arcade machine again, now in some spellbinding hot witch video action. Although the pottertastic nature of the game is too niche, the controls look even better live: watch as she throws spells drawing signs in the game touch-sensitive screen while riding the broomstick. Maybe it’s just me, but I find…
Acer announced today another product in its hook-up with Ferrari: a pocket PC with GPS that includes the latest Navteq maps, and a feature called Powerful Trip Planning, that even shows you Ferrari Points of Interest, like Ferrari dealers and museums. Full specs below. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity 122 grams 58 x 108 x 16.8…
Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, and Nokia have agreed to use micro USB as a charging-plug standard for phones. Your days of buying a bagful of accessories every time you switch phones have come to an end. Well, not quite. You will still have to toss out all your mini USB chargers, as this decision…
We told you the other day about Dan Rather’s TV blather about how the Boeing 787 Dreamliner “could be unsafe” because of its carbon composite airframe, but now there are lots of experts disagreeing with that report. Aaron Rowe at Wired Science calls it “a cheap shot at Boeing,” and chides the mainstream news media…
In a fresh UK poll taken by 3,000 readers of Computeractive magazine, 62% reported that their broadband performed at less than half of their provider’s advertised speed. Do you find this to be the case, or are you perfectly happy—or even pleasantly surprised—by your broadband performance? [BBC News] Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re…
After the iMac revamp, the fantabulous and always-about-to-happen slim aluminum MacBooks may be around the corner. That if you believe 9to5Mac.com, of iPod nano spyshots and touch rumor fame, the new models could be much slimmer, lighter and probably with an even smaller footprint than current ones —which incidentally is what you always would expect…
A few days ago, veteran Mac software developer and Apple community gadfly Wil Shipley published a tirade against Steve Jobs and Apple for limiting development on products like iPod and iPhone. He says what motivates the company now is not quality assurance, the usual excuse, but profiteering: Why is iPhone locked and exclusive to AT&T?…
Here’s a Portuguese Airbus A310 doing an extremely low flyby at the Evora 2007 Air Show last week. Not only does it show there are commercial pilots as daring as Typhoon and Russian fighter pilots, but confirms they are as crazy too, if not more. https://gizmodo.com/typhoon-strike-fighter-closing-dangerously-on-hercules-283575 One thing is for sure, I would rather fly…
The HomeHero is a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm system that uses wirelessly interconnected nodes. The network can automatically warn anyone around the house, using both beeping and bilingual voice alerts that will tell you about the nature of the event, being it fire, carbon monoxide on the loose or fusion reactor core meltdown, so…
