Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Regular flares, while fun to place in sleeping friends’ beds, are smoky, poisonous, and dangerous. These flares, on the other hand, are small, rechargeable, and are strong enough to be run over by a truck. But what about flare wars where you and your drunk father throw flares at each other, you ask? Well, don’t…
The retail favorite of amateur bomb-makers and DIY electronics enthusiasts everywhere has just widened its cellphone market share considerably. RadioShack has signed a long ten-year agreement with Cingular, and extended its Sprint agreement for another 11 years. This effectively puts RadioShack in both the CDMA and GSM market, and if the Sprint/Nextel merger goes through,…
I’ve seen the 3D laptops that came out last year but this seems like an interesting twist. These flatbed displays make images pop off the surface of a flat screen like in Star Wars when Yoda was giving R2-D2 the love fist… or maybe that wasn’t Star Wars. Ultimately, this means fascinating no potential UIs…
According to anonymous sources at Wal-Mart—a company so powerful that even MS must bow to its whims—the XBox360 will be priced at $299.99 with standard $59 games. It is also apparently very hard to program for so the first games will be Snake, Tic Tac Toe, and an exciting game called Hello World featuring a…
Well, we’re all sitting around waiting for some great news to come out of Apple this season. What will it be? A media center? A cool video iPod? An amazing new software product? How about a white, shiny mouse. Now this is no ordinary shiny mouse. It is the Mighty Mouse—what about the original Mighty…
Need more space in your XBox chassis? Want your XBox to glow? Want to do something to help kill the hours until the XBox360 is released? Farmer Entertainment has two XBox mods, a glowy case and a LinuxBox mod that adds extra hard drive space to your hacked out and pimped up game console. Looks…
Ford, a company that makes cars, is now offering Sirius satellite radio in some 2006 vehicles. The system, priced at $195, includes six free months of satellite service and will only be available in SUVs and will trickle down to smaller cars when the coming global oil apocalypse comes and forces us all to use…
Folks at Defcon got to spend some quality time with the Kegbot, a Linux-based freedom-as-in-free-beer dispenser. The system uses a specialized board and iButton reader to dispense a perfect, frothy pint in every pour. It can even keep track of who drank what and when and the folks at Make Magazine even go their own…
Reader Jeff pointed out that we’re focusing too much on stupid stuff and therefore suggests we cover this glimpse of the forthcoming AV500. Specs? 4-inch screen, Plays For Sure compatibility, direct video line-in, and a next-gen Archos styling that screams “early adopt me!” Apparently it’s coming in 100GB model, which means I can store my…
Artist Jonathon Keats is taking one long photo. His project, a pinhole camera that is taking one continuous picture of a room in the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco, is a mixture of uber-low-tech and ultra-high concept geekiness. As a potential tourist to San Francisco who might want to stay in this room, I…
I never thought I’d say this, but I love the folks at AOL. After seeing my AIM problems here on Gizmodo, they were able to reinstate my old AIM account, change my password, and send me on my merry way. Thanks to Andrew and his excellent team. UPDATE – Not so fast, Batman. Since AOL…
I don’t quite get this one. It appears that there is some sort of powdered alcohol called Sub You—WTF?—available for KIDS TO BUY AND DRINK AND KILL THEMSELVES WITH but I don’t quite understand how or why it works. Can you “powder” alcohol? I mean, I don’t really care that people are up in arms…
So I’m going to tell a little story. I can barely remember this, but when I was about 10 my neighbors brought over their dog. It was big German Shepherd. A male. So this dog is running around the house and suddenly there’s this big pink crayon under him. I get very confused and then,…
Team PAD broke their own record—55 miles—yesterday by shooting a WiFi signal 125 across the arid wastes around Las Vegas aka The Las Vegas Suburbs. They used 12- and 10-foot satellite dishes to send a 12Mbps to St. George, Utah and were able to run SSH, VNC, and ping with reckless abandon. Now, if someone…
Tom’s Hardware is running a piece on Top 10 PSP hardware hacks. While some of them range on the silly—put a sticker on it!—many of them are pretty interesting. It’s nice to see all of the hacks in one place, including a system for creating an external battery and for installing old game emulators. Top…
I’m not quite sure what these are for but they’re quite handsome. I suspect Bono would look great in them belting out a few bars of “One” while he and the Edge count the money they could be sending to homeless orphans. Otherwise, I think they’ll make mere mortals look kind of short-bus-y, kind of…
I’ve always felt that I was gifted with a couple of pretty useful manual emotion indication devices: my middle fingers. But, when extending them in the general direction of people, I sometimes sigh in the shame that I don’t have a gadget to give the big FU for me, a dream I’ve held since seeing…
Well, we’ve finally reached the end of a long, hard battle. I can honestly say that some of these entries were pretty good and, thanks to my crack judges David and Scott, we can honestly say that the following five entries are some of the best “Give Grandma a Gadget” writing to come out during…
With fear of becoming known as “that VoIP phone guy”, I share the news that Skype’s got its own VoWiFi phone in the works, according to some guy named Jaanus (insert own joke here) on the company’s blog. He was glad to report “Calling worked!” on the prototype he used, and he hopes the rest…
Well, today is the day. Is everyone excited? I know I am. Before we post the top essays, we decided to post a few of our favorite essays which didn’t quite make the final cut but were worth sharing. These essays are special. They are special because the indicate a distinct and rapid decline in…