Items tagged with Misc
If you’ve been on Facebook for the last several days, you’ve been inundated with your friends’ Lookback videos. In honor of its 10th anniversary of existence, Facebook created a nifty little tool that automatically creates a one-minute video looking back on your life on Facebook. As we noted, some of what Lookback pulled...
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Car maker Renault took the wraps off of a new concept car called the Kwid. The crossover is immediately noticeable for its bold gray-and-yellow color scheme and gull-wing doors, but if you look closely, you’ll notice another prime feature: A drone. Yep, this car is designed to have a little drone buddy that...
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DARPA, a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, has developed quite a few technological innovations for the military that wind up trickling down to us civilians, and now the agency is open sourcing some of its projects with an eye toward fostering even better R&D. The DARPA Open Catalog is a “curated list...
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Chromecast is great. It lets you stream just about anything to your TV from the Internet, and it does so in a unique, simple, and brilliant way: instead of streaming directly from your smartphone or tablet, your device tells Chromecast to do the streaming. A group led by a pair of ex-Google employees has essentially...
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Human adaptability is a hell of a thing, and one needs to look no further than quadriplegics who refuse to miss out. There are many quadriplegic gamers out there, and thanks to the work of Ken Yankelevitz, they’ve been able to enjoy a great deal of gaming for decades with his specially-designed joysticks...
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Prepare to retrieve the tissues, because Facebook is virtually guaranteed to make you feel something today. As we mentioned earlier, today is Facebook’s 10th anniversary, and to let everyone commemorate the occasion together the company is automatically creating a special video made from your timeline’s...
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Google has been building a secretive barge/showroom/interactive/art installation out of what amounts to giant LEGOs in San Francisco Bay for months, but the company has reportedly been told to move it or lose it. The issue at hand is that Google did not acquire the right permits for the work its been doing. Larry...
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After much speculation and a churning rumor mill, Microsoft has named Satya Nadella as its third CEO, effective immediately. The only other two people to sit in the big chair at Microsoft have been Bill Gates himself and Steve Ballmer. “During this time of transformation, there is no better person to lead Microsoft than Satya Nadella,”...
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If you can believe it, Facebook turns 10 years old tomorrow. That seems completely wrong until you realize that February 4th, 2004 was indeed 10 years ago, even though for anyone over 30 or so the year 2004 seems more like 10 minutes ago. Facebook’s influence on the world is undeniable, with its 1.2 billion users and inspiration of a...
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The two teams of Tesla drivers that set out to complete a cross-country road rally driving electric Model S sedans and using only Tesla’s Supercharger stations to recharge have completed the trek in an impressive 76 and a half hours. It’s a Guinness World Record for the fastest cross-country journey via...
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That cool, creepy abandoned island fortress from the latest James Bond movie “Skyfall”? That wasn’t a movie set. It’s a real place called Battleship Island, and it’s located off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. And Google sent a couple of employees (who we presume have nerves of...
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John Glenney and his daughter Jill were the first people to complete a cross-country trip in a Tesla Model S electric car, and their experience is perfect PR for Tesla, which just completed its coast-to-coast network of Supercharger stations. “The father and daughter had covered a distance of 3,400 miles through...
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It’s becoming more tedious to be a Yahoo! Mail user these days. The Gmail-ish redesign a few months ago was supposed to bring many attractive changes to the email service, but it launched with an annoying auto-forward bug, and anecdotally, performance has been slow and buggy from what I’ve experienced...
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Amazon is testing the use of drones to make deliveries in populated areas, but the Lakemade Beer Company of Stevens Point, Wisconsin is testing the idea of drones in decidedly unpopulated areas--namely, ice fishing shacks. “Our tests are on vast, wide-open frozen lakes free of trees and power lines. Our drone...
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Although it’s not exactly on par with the completion of, say, the first transcontinental railroad, Tesla has completed a coast-to-coast network of Supercharger stations to allow drivers of the Model S electric sedan to road trip across the country--for free. It’s a rather circuitous path, not at all a...
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Google has received a patent that essentially takes the incentive for a consumer to visit a business up a notch--or several notches. Traditionally, the tactics brick-and-mortar businesses have had to use to get people through the door have involved advertising sales, coupons, and offers for validated parking, not to...
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Much has been made of the NSA’s domestic spying program and how the agency has culled data from major Internet companies, and rightly so, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says that his company is having none of it. In an interview with ABC News, Cook was emphatic. “Much of what has been said isn’t true,”...
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Our apologies in advance for telling you about something that you can waste your entire day on, but this is, frankly, just really cool. Microsoft created a huge 20-gigapixel image of Seattle around which you can scroll and zoom around, but the company also enlisted the help of the Seattle art community to set up...
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Google missed its mark of the end of 2013, but the company got close: Residents of the second city to get access to Google Fiber--Provo, Utah--can now sign up for the service. Google says the gigabit Internet service will come online in waves, starting next month in the North Park neighborhood (er, fiberhood that is)...
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Just yesterday, a report emerged that TiVo was laying off much of its hardware design team, leaving only a skeleton crew to support existing devices, and getting out of the hardware business altogether to focus on the cloud. According to comments made by TiVo VP of corporate communications Steve Wymer to The Verge, the notion that TiVo is...
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As if GIFs weren’t taking over most corners of the Internet already, popular social site Pinterest officially supports them. Starting now, you can post GIFs to Pinterest and play or pause them in their spot on a board or on the main page. “The well-timed GIF may be the greatest thing to have happened to the internet since emoticons,”...
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The papacy can seem anachronistic with the rapidly-evolving world of the Internet, but Pope Francis seems to be rather in tune with the digital age. He offered some keen wisdom about the Internet and our lifestyle of digital communication in a statement today. But among the many quote-worthy bits, the best one is that he called the Internet...
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