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A professional chess player from India has earned himself a nice, hearty, 10-year ban from national chess tournaments because he was discovered to be cheating. He cheated by using a small Bluetooth device in a stocking cap. With the Bluetooth device linked to a cellphone, the player, Umakant Sharma, communicated with an outside source who…
Our friends at Lifehacker favor us with their Download of the Day, a Windows-only application called SpamFighter. Master blogger Rick Broida tells us he installed this free app for his wife over the weekend and it’s doing “a bang-up job.” The drawback? Ironically, it inserts its own breed of spam—an ad at the bottom of…
This one is for you, ladies (or purse-carrying men). The cellphone is placed within a small pocket inside the purse, upon receiving a phone call (via ringing or vibrating) the purse will recognize it and begin flashing its red LED and vibrating itself to ensure that you don’t miss that call from your long lost…
Dr. Gizmodo: What is the law? Sayer of the Law: Not to buy $20 electronic monstrosities, that is the law. Are we not men? Readers (in unison): Are we not men? Dr. Gizmodo: What is the law? Sayer of the Law: Not to buy multi-colored wriggling, singing, flashing, mewling I-DOG, I-FISH, and I-CAT that is…
Here’s the audio equivalent of a flipbook: it’s a thin strip of plastic with tiny ridges that talk when you run a fingernail over them. Oddly enough, you can’t really hear the tale of the tape unless you scratch it while holding one end of the strip between your teeth. Or, you can hold it…
If you’re not too bothered by the idea of an iPod transmitting its signal into your car stereo via staticy-sounding and hissy FM, Trinity has devised its DS-CHFMT dock, formed in a shape that fits into almost any cupholder. Hey, looky there—it conveniently positions the iPod’s controls at your fingertips. All you have to do…
We’ve already gotten a taste of what Vista’s Sideshow feature can potentially do (both on remotes and on laptops), but now Korean manufacturer Soundgraph is hoping to beat MS to the punch with its own Sideshow-like feature called Front View. Front View consists of a front-mounted display on your Media Center PC that shows local…
PC Mag has teamed up with the Princeton Review and figured out the techno-pecking order of universities, citing the Top 10 Wired Colleges in the United States. There are lots of reasons to pick out a school, such as male-to-female ratio, reputation for serious partying, and oh yeah, there’s that academic thing. But then there’s…
You’ve gotta be one hip grandma to be caught rolling one of these ghetto blasters. Created by Classen & Partner, the Mskyo (which stands for Momma Said Knock You Out) is an old-school shopping cart with a built-in speaker and auxiliary jack that lets you blast out your tunes while cruising the aisles at the…
Of all the Brando products I’ve seen this is the one I’d be most inclined to use. The Brando USB MP3 Player has a tiny memory card slot that can read music stored on your MMC or SD card. Depending on how big a card you insert, you can also use the player as a…
If you can figure out front from back in this cab-forward next-gen vehicle, the next thing you can do is figure out what sort of fuel to put inside. It’s called a “tribrid” car because it can run on any combination of regular gas/bio ethanol (that’s kinda like french fry grease), natural gas, or electricity.…
How many people would get a tattoo if it didn’t come with a lifetime commitment? I certainly would seriously consider getting inked if I didn’t have to worry about being happy with my choice in 50 years. Scientists at a company called Freedom-2 LLC have developed an ink that can be removed with a single…
Samsung has been making a lot of noise about fuel cells lately, developing a charger for cellphones it says will be available in 2009, and now rolling out a high-capacity battery for its Samsung Sense Q35 notebook. The company says the fuel cell will run that laptop for eight hours a day, five days a…
Because everything looks better in flat-panel form, the Square CD is sure to turn on everyone who loves their tech to be flashy and conspicuous. It mounts on the wall and looks unsuspecting ’til touched, then it lights up and starts playing your music. Perhaps the designers, Matteo Bertanelli, Michele di Monte, Chiara Cremona, and…
Best Buy has decided to make home automation easier by offering its ConnectedLife.Home package, a $15,000 box-o-fun including an HP Media Center PC controlling an Xbox 360 as a media extender, along with a dozen Insteon remote light switches, a RCS networked thermostat you can control from that PC and a couple of Panasonic surveillance…
We tend to poke fun at the New York Times’ David Pogue a lot around here, but we want to make it clear that we kid because we love. David is like the wacky yet dorky uncle of the tech journalism world, how could we not like him? Pogue recently complained about the lack of…
The big day has come and gone. You’ve shared what you wanted for Christmas, now tell us what you got! Were you lucky enough to get an iPod or a Wii? Or did you get coal’ed with a lousy photo frame? https://gizmodo.com/what-do-you-want-for-christmas-224060 Feel free to brag as much as you want if you’ve made out…
Here are pictures of the Dubai iPod building set to be finished sometime in 2009. And the lean, designed at the same angle as a docked iPod, just beats out the Tower of Pisa’s lean: 6 degrees vs the Tower of Pisa’s 5.5 degree slant. More photos: https://gizmodo.com/the-ipad-223970 Dubai iPad Photos [Skyscraper City via The…
If you’re looking for a sexy USB gadget, you can forget that USB Pole Dancer and grab the MagMag-HOLE instead. By combining the MagMag-Hole with the Virtual-STICK, you can have teledildonic USB pleasure no matter where the other party is—be it across the country, across the planet, or even across the Dust Plains of World…
If you’ve ever dreamed of jamming FM, cellphones, cordless phones, GPSes, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or various other RF stations, the Wave Bubble is a small, Creative Commons-licensed design that you can build together yourself. This isn’t an easy project, so if you’re not familiar with SMT soldering, you may want to hop down to ITT Tech…