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Back in the day, some of us older codgers here at Gizmodo used to drop our jaws at whatever SGI would do. But now, Silicon Graphics Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and things aren’t looking good for the once-dominant giant of the techno-mofo workstation industry. SGI will restructure in an attempt to keep…
The Old Ballgame by Brian L. Clark I remember when I was a kid, my old man and I would sit on the back porch in Central Pennsylvania and listen to AM radio broadcasts of Phillies games. I won’t tell you how long ago that was, but the fact we weren’t able to watch them…
The Asustek PW201 does a purely logical thing, following Apple’s lead and placing a 1.3- megapixel webcam right in the top/middle of the bezel surrounding its 20.1-inch LCD. The PW201’s spec list isn’t too shabby, either, with 1680×1050 resolution, 800:1 contrast ratio and 300 nits of brightness. It has a full complement of inputs including…
We’ve been hearing about it for months, but now HTC finally launches its Star Trek handset, or as it will be hereafter known, the Qtek 8500 or STRTrk. It’s small, about the size of a RAZR at 16mm thick, and it’s light, around 3 ounces. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, and its 320×240 LED-backlit…
It’s E3 week and with E3 week comes the big announcements, the first of which was just revealed. Microsoft has officially announced the much-talked-about HD-DVD add-on for its Xbox 360 game console. Connecting to the 360 via USB, the HD-DVD add-on will usher in an extension to what Microsoft calls “the era of high definition.”…
Here’s a clever idea sent to us by our friends at Lifehacker: CompWave’s MiniHitch, a holder that lets your Mac mini hitch a ride behind an LCD display, where the little computer is held in place by mounting holes found on the back of most LCD monitors. In the pic on the right, the Mac…
When attending the next LAN party, why not be the belle of the ball and bring the Wolf Claw Devour gaming keyboard? You may remember the old Wolf Claw II from last year, but the Devour improves upon that design by being actually useful, which is quite a novel idea. Rather than try to cram…
What better way to let your animals know you love them—aside from feeding them, obviously, and not killing them—than by attaching an umbrella to them. Yes, for those of you for whom a Burberry jacket is not sufficient to keep little Shitheel warm and dry—the pet umbrella. You hook this thing to the pet’s collar…
The worst part about watching soccer football soccery-football is having to endure the 85 minutes of the game where GOOOOOOAL(s) are not being scored. 3 Mobile will be helping this growing concern by offering streaming video of World Cup highlight five minutes after the game is over. Unfortunately, they aren’t streaming the entire matches, but…
DaySwitch claims to reduce lighting costs by 30% by using a simple concept: when it gets bright in the room, turn off the lights. Why people can’t do this themselves, we don’t know, but it might have something to do with getting up off their lazy asses every once in a while. Researchers at Rensselaer…
We’ll be doing a hands on with the Series 2 dual-tuner TiVO and we’re still a little angry at the waste of natural resources involved in making one of the silliest, on-off TiVo upgrades in the known universe but we still love our TiVo and we know they wouldn’t do anything else stupid… wait a…
Overinflate these Cebop Pop speakers and you give new meaning to the term “pop music.” The idea here is that when deflated they’re nice and small, fitting into your bag so you can take them on the road, but when you inflate them to their full 8.5-inch height, theoretically you’ll get the bigger sound of…
University of Texas researches have created a form of “shape memory wire” that expands and contracts when cooled and heated. To make the muscles contract, they coat it in a catalyst that reacts to alcohol and begins to heat up. These muscles can be used in robots or in prosthetic limbs. Bender, it seems, wasn’t…
Perhaps you’re tired of seeing plant after plant die while in you were supposed to be taking care of them. Designer of all things fancy, Eva Solo has come up with a flower pot that automatically waters whatever plant finds itself in your possession. It’s actually a very simple concept: a plain ceramic pot containing…
Here’s a techno-concept that’s more like real origami than those overblown PDAs we’ve been ridiculing reporting about for the past few months—it’s an e-paper DVD screen that folds up into a tiny package that’s easy to carry around. Of course, this is not real; it’s a design concept from Inventables, a concept studio just north…
If we had to guess, we might wager that men outnumber women readers on Gizmodo. With that in mind, here’s a kitschy telephone bag aimed at members of the fairer sex, all ten of them on here. From La Pochette, maker of other fancy purses, this day purse is shaped like a 1970s telephone. Even…
If you need to take shots of big, wide things and you like to drop, sit on and otherwise abuse your digital camera, the 8-megapixel Ricoh Caplio 500G Wide is one that doesn’t seem to mind a good spanking. Its 28mm wide-angle zoom lens lets you fit more stuff into the shot, and its ruggedized…
An irate tipster notified us that the AOL call center in Jacksonville, Florida is shutting down and the company is cutting 1,200 employees this week. Why? Because the company has lost 3 million subscribers in the past year—a mere 800,000 in the past three months—and isn’t quite making the numbers, you know, to pay people.…
How thin can a cellphone get? Samsung has created a handset that needs to run around in the shower just to get wet with this SGH-X820, which is a nearly-invisible 6.9mm thick. Even though it’s so doggone slim, it still has a fat feature set, with 2-megapixel camera that records video, Bluetooth connectivity and an…
When the Beatles and Steve Jobs somehow both decided to call their companies Apple, someone would inevitably be singing the song “I’m a Loser.” In a court battle over whether iPods and iTunes will still be allowed to carry an Apple logo, a British judge ruled that Apple Computer has a store and a music…