Joshua Gulick
Recent posts
The next time your spouse says video games are a waste of time, you can point out that a home invasion victim recently used his Xbox 360 to call for help. If that’s not a reason to rush out and buy a console (or three), I don’t know what is. In a pinch? Your headset may be the fastest way to call for help. According to reports,...
Read more...
If you live in Seattle and you’re a heavy bandwidth user, here’s some good news: you may be getting a fiber connection right to your house in the near-ish future. Seattle and the University of Washington have teamed up with Gigabit Squared to test a public fiber network that will bring high-speed Internet...
Read more...
There are plenty of great game trailers out there, but the one that just hit YouTube for Metro: Last Light will really make your trigger finger itch. Great graphics are to be expected, but they’re nothing without compelling imagery, and this game has that in spades. Subway tunnels that make you feel...
Read more...
Olive has big plans for a home music player that can connect to virtually any device, app, and service you have that might store or play music. The aptly-named ONE All-In-One Home Music Player is a slick, cylindrical device with a touch interface and support for a wide range of music formats and connections. Olive is looking for music/gadget...
Read more...
Just as Instagram finished making its dramatic exit from Twitter, Pinterest stepped onto the scene with Twitter Card support. The feature means that you can put Pinterest photos in expanded tweets. Twitter has been working to improve the way images appear in its famously short messages, leading to Twitter Cards. This is good news for...
Read more...
If it wasn’t for the Internet meme, you might not know that a well-dressed monkey was wandering the parking lot at Ikea in Toronto this week. Seriously, what did our parents do all day, without the interwebs? What about their cats? Anyway, the now-famous seven-month-old rhesus monkey, Darwin, went to Ikea with his owner, lawyer Yasmin...
Read more...
It seems that Barnes & Noble is serious about getting its NOOK under the Christmas tree this year. This morning, it chopped the price of the NOOK Simple Touch from $99 to $79. That has to gall people who have been picking them up in the past few weeks, but it’s good news for the procrastinators. The...
Read more...
If you’ve been biting your nails, wondering whether Apple would meet its self-imposed deadline of November for the release of its iTunes 11, you can cut it out now, for Pete’s sake. Apple beat the bell by a day, putting the download on its website along with plenty of information about the...
Read more...
For major players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the ongoing race to lock customers into their online services is intensifying. One benefit of the competition is that services are working to make their own tools work better together, and a recent example of that is Gmail’s new support for sharing files from Google Drive. Until recently,...
Read more...
What with disease, hunger, poverty, war, and other immediate threats that the world is grappling with, studying the risk of yet-undeveloped killer robots might seem like a waste of resources. Not so, says Cambridge University. The British college is launching a center to study the risks posed by climate change...
Read more...
If you’ve connected to a WiFi network at an airport, convention, or even at the mall around Christmas, you’ve probably experienced a common problem: an overloaded WiFi network. Get too many people on the same access point, and you end up with a slow, spotty connection. Researchers at North Carolina State...
Read more...
Although Microsoft is keeping DirectX 11.1 exclusive to Windows 8, it’s planning to make the latest version of Internet Explorer available to Windows 7 users (as well as Window 8, of course). Microsoft recently opened the preview of IE 10 to the public. Still, many of the features in IE 10 are really...
Read more...
Vimeo has earned a reputation for hosting quality videos from amateurs and professionals alike. For now, it’s relying on ads and memberships for revenue and lets visitors view the videos free, but the YouTube competitor is also working on pay-per-view options. Today, Vimeo is previewing the pay-per-view system with six hand-picked,...
Read more...
Maingear is rounding out its laptop lineup with the new NOMAD 15, giving you a 15-inch alternative to the larger NOMAD 17 gamer. Customization is key at boutique builders like Maingear, so it’s no surprise that the laptop is offered with several graphics, processor, and other component choices. And, of course, you can pick the color...
Read more...
Although you may not agree after getting off the phone with your bank, speech recognition technology really has come a long way in the past 20 years. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, however, and Microsoft has been working on technology that is making for some big changes in real-time speech recognition. Microsoft’s...
Read more...
The never-ending one-upmanship among warfighter titles has reached a new level: Seven Navy SEALs have been disciplined for allegedly giving secret information to the makers of Medal of Honor: Warfighters. EA, which publishes the game, has been touting its use of paid military consultants in the production of the new...
Read more...
If you woke up to find that your Twitter password wasn’t working, you’re not alone. Twitter accidentally reset the passwords for many of its users yesterday. If your account is one of those affected by the mass reset, you should have received an email alerting you to the situation and giving you an...
Read more...
If you’re a regular here, you already know that Valve has been working up a Linux-flavored dish of Steam for some time. You might’ve even been one of the reportedly more than 60,000 people who put their names in the pool for the upcoming Beta. Scratch that – the existing Beta. The Steam for Linux Beta is up today with...
Read more...
Battery life is a big deal for mobile devices from laptops on down to smartphones. One of the biggest drags on your smartphone’s battery life is the collection of power amplifiers involved in creating radio signals. Now, an MIT-based startup claims to have solved the engineering puzzle and can give smartphones...
Read more...
Do you laugh at the skills of other geeks? Do you have tech knowledge that would make the typical hacker whimper? If so, you might be a candidate for a new government program aimed at battling cyber enemies of the state. The so-called Cyber Reserve is being likened to the military reserve: a force of tech experts who...
Read more...
Although Nvidia's Tegra 3 has been taking tablets and smartphones by storm, there are other noteworthy mobile processors out there, including Qualcomm's dual-core, 1.5GHz 8060A. The Snapdragon S4 SoC appears in the Lenovo IdeaTab S2110, which is a 10.1-inch tablet that runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. That's not a bad setup...
Read more...
Windows 8 isn’t a week old and it has already attracted a lawsuit. Software developer SurfCast is taking issue with Windows 8’s Live Tiles, which it thinks, are too similar to a tile system that it patented in 2004. The Live Tiles make up the centerpiece of Windows 8’s new interface by providing...
Read more...
