Wacko Rappers Das Racist Drop 8-Bit Videogame

Brookyln rappers Das Racist released a new videogame to promote their single “Who’s That Brown” Thursday. The retro-styled game finds the hipster rappers on a quest to find their hype man “Dap” when Justin Bieber and Jay-Z are waylayed by a limo accident and the duo are asked to fill in onstage. Their journey takes the pair [...]

Gamer Icons Talk Trash in Poker Night at the Inventory

A gamer, a rabbity-thing, a heavy-weapons expert and a Mexican wrestler walk into a casino … Telltale Games will release an all-star poker game built around just such an unlikely mix of videogame characters, the publisher said Thursday. Poker Night at the Inventory will seat Tycho from Penny Arcade, Sam of Sam & Max fame, internet celebrity [...]

NASA Footage Sets Scene for Quantum Quest Movie

Footage from seven ongoing NASA space missions provide hyper-realistic scenery for the 3-D animated film, while the voices of multiple Captain Kirks and Darth Vaders play the parts of space explorers.

‘Earth-like’ Exoplanet Could Have a Comet’s Tail

When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet. In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics [...]

Setting Fires With a Giant Electric Blower

This weekend, I’m going to be sparking up the grill with the Looftlighter, an electric firestarter that looks like an oversized curling iron, sounds like a hair dryer, and gets a good-sized pile of charcoal briquettes ready to grill in just a few minutes. I’ll admit I was skeptical about the $80 Looftlighter, which comes from [...]

Poll: Best iOS Music Apps

Traditional MP3 players have pretty much the same buttons that portable cassette players had back in the ’80s — play/pause, fast-forward, rewind and volume. But when you put music on a smartphone that has more processing power than desktop computers had back then — with a touch screen to boot — the possibilities for [...]

PAX 2010 Photostream – Updated All Weekend

GeekDad is at PAX all weekend, and we’ll be adding pictures as we take them.

In Defense of Google, Or Why Consumer Watchdog is Full of It

The self-appointed Consumer Watchdog activist group is running a Times Square jumbotron advertisement lambasting Google as a massive invader of your privacy, caricaturing its CEO Eric Schmidt as a creepy, high-tech ice cream vendor who profiles children. The video (above) is just the latest from Consumer Watchdog, a foundation-funded group that partial to [...]

Hands On: Duke Nukem Forever Lives Again at PAX

SEATTLE -- You can take that toe tag off Duke Nukem Forever: The game, presumed dead after developer 3D Realms pulled the plug on it last year, is alive and kicking at Penny Arcade Expo. Some hands-on time with the demo makes it obvious Duke will be just as obnoxious as ever.

Hands-On With HDR Photos in the Next iPhone Update

A software update for Apple’s mobile operating system is due for release next week, and Wired.com has had hands-on time with a major new feature of the OS: high-dynamic range photography. HDR, an automated processing feature aiming to deliver a “dummy-proof” photography method,??will be included with the camera app on all iPhones running iOS 4.1 when [...]

Behind the Scenes at IndyCar

Glint of Starlight Could Reveal Liquid Oceans on Exoplanets

The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes. “A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student [...]

By Losing Weight, Tennis Pro Quickly Gains Ground

At 28 years old and approaching the downside of his career, a rib injury kept American tennis player Mardy Fish out of last year’s US Open. A few weeks after the tournament, nursing two bad knees, he had the left one surgically repaired and realized his chronic pains and slipping world ranking weren???t merely a [...]

Electric Airplane Flies Over Paris

The newest electric aircraft to take flight is a tiny airplane from a big airplane company. The Cri-Cri, developed by Airbus’ parent company, EADS, made its first flight Thursday at Le Bourget airport near Paris. The Cri-Cri is based on an existing design that uses two small gasoline engines. EADS swapped the gasoline engines with four [...]

Steve Jobs: iTunes 10 Icon Does Not ???Suck???

While winding down from Wednesday’s iPod announcements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs appears to have taken some time to respond to an e-mail criticizing the new look of the iTunes icon. Joshua Kopac, who oversees design work for advertising firm ValuLeads, sent Jobs an e-mail blasting the new iTunes icon (right) ??? a blue bubble containing a [...]

Travelling Around the World in a Gadget-Filled Ford Fiesta

Last weekend Jeremy Hart — Wired.com contributor and a global traveller with 120 countries under his belt — left Los Angeles for a 60 day, 21 country, 15,000 mile drive around the world — in a Ford Fiesta. Jeremy will be filing occasional updates here and on our sister blog Autopia. Here, he’ll be [...]

Video: Monster Truck Makes Monster Crash

Joe Sylvester wants to set the record for longest jump made by a monster truck. Doing so will require beating the 202-foot jump Dan Runte made at the wheel of Bigfoot in 1999. Clearly he has more work to do, as a practice attempt on Tuesday in his truck Bad Habit did not go well. Sylvester [...]

NASA Flies First Drone Over Hurricane

Hurricane Earl is waning as it moves northward up the east coast of the United States. Some of the first researchers to notice the weakening had front row seats, watching the eye of the hurricane via drone flights. In addition to the usual cadre of satellites, NASA is using a small fleet of unmanned aircraft into, [...]

EA Simulates 2010 NFL Season, Predicts Super Bowl Champs

Brett Favre may still be gunslinging up in Minnesota, but it’ll be his longtime fans in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that will celebrate a Super Bowl win this February, according to Electronic Arts. EA Sports, publisher of the Madden NFL videogame franchise, has taken its latest game iteration (Madden NFL 11) and run through the upcoming 2010 [...]

Six Apart Shuts Down Vox

Six Apart is shutting down its Vox blogging service. Users have until Sept. 30 to export their data to other services, including Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service. After that, Vox will be gone. If you’ve got a Vox blog, there are several export options — Six Apart has instructions for moving to TypePad, Posterous and WordPress. [...]

Baby Lion Cub Live Webcam Launched

The Smithsonian National Zoo has just launched a live webcam of the zoo’s four new baby African lion cubs and their mother. The cubs were born during the late night and early morning of Aug. 30 and 31 and will remain indoors until late fall. The litter is the first for 5-year-old mother lion Shera, and [...]

Gadget Lab Podcast: iPods, Apple TV and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience602079690001', 'anId');brightcove.createExperiences(); This week’s episode of the Gadget Lab podcast is heavy on fruits. High on vitamin A, Dylan Tweney gushes over the pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid, while yours truly dishes out this week’s announcements of brand new Apple gear. Apple’s iPod family all scored major [...]

Six Apart Shuts Down Vox

Six Apart is shutting down its Vox blogging service. Users have until Sept. 30 to export their data to other services, including Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service. After that, Vox will be gone. If you’ve got a Vox blog, there are several export options — Six Apart has instructions for moving to TypePad, Posterous and WordPress. [...]

One Ring Zero Reboots Holst’s Planets, Keeps Pluto in Mix

Brooklyn brain-popper One Ring Zero’s latest album Planets is a reboot of Gustav Holst’s legendary orchestral suite The Planets for the 21st century. But its view on Pluto’s demotion from planetary status is purely 20th century. “Pluto will always be a planet to me,” One Ring Zero multi-instrumentalist Michael Hearst told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. [...]

The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It’s Not What You Think)

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out [...]

Petraeus Quietly Disses ‘Human Terrain’

Did Gen. David Petraeus just call the Human Terrain System worthless? With a few choice sentences to the Wall Street Journal, the top commander in Afghanistan highlighted the disconnect between what the Army’s social science program is supposed to be doing — and what’s actually happening in the field. “We have never had the granular understanding [...]

PAX Primers: Come to the GeekDad Panel Saturday at 11:00!

Thus speaketh the PAX Prime schedule: Saturday, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM, Wolfman Theatre Raising Geek Generation 2.0: Roll For Parenting Ability How young is too young for The Hobbit? Why is LEGO Star Wars the best console game for your child? What’s the best way to deal with bullying? How can I control my disgust if my [...]

Professor McChrystal’s Lectures: ‘Navigating Politics, Media,’ Irony

We know Stanley McChrystal has a sense of humor. Starting this semester, we’ll find out how advanced his sense of self-awareness is. McChrystal handled his firing from the Army by poking fun at his big mouth during his retirement ceremony in July. That was McChrystal’s only public appearance after his team carped about his bosses in [...]

Feds Push ‘Active Transportation’ for Healthy Communities

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on a mission to help create a transportation system that makes us fitter, not fatter. The agency, which promotes and protects public health and safety, is pushing active transportation systems in a big way, and it’s fitting in light of the undeniable fact that the United States is [...]

Dork Tower Friday

Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.

DIY Friday: Make an Altoids Mini-BBQ. Perfect For S’Mores!

This is adorable: a tiny charcoal BBQ grill using an Altoids Sours tin, two metal computer fan guards, and some sheet metal screws for legs. It looks like it fits one regular-sized briquette. As one of the commentors notes, this is great for marshmallows, but you could also cook a shrimp at a time. Making it [...]

Heroscape Proves Fun For All Game Types

I picked up the Dungeons and Dragons Heroscape Master Set: Battle for the Underdark not long ago and finally had a chance to play with my son.I was surprised to find a game that we both enjoyed and has my friends (which are my age) scrambling to buy their own sets. The basic game comes with [...]

Review: Save the Humans???6th Mega’s Puff Pufffor iPhone

Some people are fond of saying that it isn’t the Earth that needs saving???the Earth will be around long after we’re gone. No, it’s we humans who need saving from ourselves. (Need evidence? Look no further than the Gulf, where another oil rig just caught fire.) 6th Mega is a new indie game developer dedicated [...]

Top 10 Obscure Superheroes Who Deserve Their Own Movies (GeekDad Wayback Machine)

For every Batman, there’s a Matter-Eater Lad. For every X-Men, there’s a Legion of Super-Pets. There are comic book characters and groups who make it big, and there are those who never find a lasting audience. Only now and then do the obscure characters get noticed, and even more rarely do they get the [...]

Pentagon Bulks Up Yemen’s Arsenal as Shadow War Grows

Yemen is the new Pakistan — well, at least it is to many in the Pentagon, the White House, and the intelligence community. U.S. spies think al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate is the most likely terrorist network to attack us, And just like last year’s $400 million U.S. “counterinsurgency fund” for Pakistan tried to get the Pakistani [...]

Best Exploitation Flicks: Machete’s Over-the-Top Ancestors

Machete strikes a bloody blow Friday when Robert Rodriguez unveils his gore fest for Labor Day Weekend moviegoers. To celebrate the new season of low-brow cinema, Wired.com is giving away two humongous DVD collections. Courtesy of Shout Factory, each prize consists of 15 DVDs from the Roger Corman???s Cult Classics/cite> series encompassing cheap genre thrillers like Slumber Party Massacre and Big Fat Momma.

From Washington to Mexico on 12.4 Gallons Of Diesel

Craig Henderson drove 1,478 miles from from Blaine, Washington, to Mexico without stopping to refuel, burning just 12.4 gallons of diesel for a stunning 119.1 mpg. And he did it in a car he originally designed in 1984. Henderson rolled into Chula Vista, California, at the wheel of the Avion four days after he left home. The [...]

The JVN Design Challenge: VEX Marvels

My co-worker, Director of Product Development for VEX Robotics?? John V-Neun, has proposed a challenge on his blog. John is looking for a marvelous VEX robot that is cool, fun, and either autonomous or intuitive to control. It does not have to be all VEX but the key components should be VEX. I’d also suggest making [...]

Alt Text: Make a Nasty World Nice With Virtual Rewards

MTV and foursquare are teaming up to provide a virtual reward for people who get tested for sexually transmitted diseases — a little “Get Yourself Tested” achievement badge that tells the world you enjoy both disease-free nethers and little green circles. If being certain you don’t have a potentially life-threatening illness that you could pass on [...]

Wii Party Gets Physical

We often talk about the balance been real (as in physical) games and electronic entertainment in our household. The Wii has helped blur this divide somewhat, but there is still no getting away from the fact that most of the action is on the screen. Having enjoyed Wii Play, Wii Fit and Wii Sports in our [...]

September 3, 1976: Viking 2 Lands on Mars

1976: Viking 2, the second mission to Mars, lands on the planet and begins transmitting pictures and soil analyses. The Viking mission went to Mars to look for signs of life, to study the soil and atmosphere, and to take pictures. There were two launches of paired orbiters and landers, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets. Each orbiter took [...]

“Impossible” Soccer Kick Leads to New Physics Equation

By Alasdair Wilkins, io9 In 1997, Brazilian soccer player Roberto Carlos scored on a free kick that first went right, then curved sharply to the left in what looked like a physics-defying fluke. We’ve finally discovered the physics equation that shows it was no fluke. The amazing goal — which left French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez too stunned [...]

New Circuit Unveiled for U.S. Grand Prix

The organizers of the United States Grand Prix have unveiled the design of the all-new track in Austin, Texas. The Formula 1 circuit will host the USGP beginning in 2012 and is scheduled to continue until 2021. The new purpose-built race course is 3.4 miles long with more than 20 turns winding through a 900-acre site [...]

New ARG Tasks You With Tracking Down Mythical Canadian Creatures

Animism: The Gods’ Lake is an alternate reality game designed to explore aboriginal Canadian legends through a contemporary setting. The game launched at the Toronto Fan Expo with a presentation by one of the game’s characters and a scavenger hunt for QR codes hidden throughout the Expo. Michael Andersen received an envelope in the mail [...]

Shopping Site ‘Thefind’ Finds Its Facebook Way, Carefully

The increasingly popular online shopping site Thefind has finally found a way to connect with Facebook — without being creepy. It’s not a technical breakthrough — plenty of sites now work with Facebook to let users log-in — but Thefind has been grappling with how to integrate with Facebook in a way that’s relevant and privacy-respectful. ‘The [...]

‘Evil’ Eric Schmidt Debuts in Video Targeting Google Privacy

A creepy??caricature??of Google CEO Eric Schmidt drives an ice cream truck in this video produced by a consumer group targeting the search giant for its data collection practices. The video is part of a lobbying effort by Consumer Watchdog to get the government to create a so-called “Do Not Track Me” list “to prevent online companies [...]

Video: Museum Teases Battlestar Galactica Exhibit

To hype Battlestar Galactica: The Exhibition, opening in Seattle on Oct. 23, organizers have rolled out a video featuring prime assets from the show: the spaceships. Three full-size prop spaceships — a Viper Mark II, a Viper Mark VII and a Cylon Raider — will be featured at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum along [...]

Murdoch Reporters’ Phone-Hacking Was Endemic, Victimized Hundreds

A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted, according toThe New York Times. Andy Coulson, currently media advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is accused of having encouraged the hacking during his tenure as editor of Murdoch’s News [...]

Video Artist Transforms YouTube’s TOS Into a Paranoid Nightmare

This extremely odd video, titled “Iterating My Way Into Oblivion,” features a guy listening to a computer voice reading YouTube’s terms of service. It slowly drives him insane. It’s actually an ongoing, auto-generative piece of digital art. According to the artist, Carlo Zanni, the basic narrative is filmed, and whenever YouTube changes its terms of service, [...]

Why You (Still) Can’t Cut the TV Cord: It’s Not Technical, It’s Just Business

This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and [...]

Plan For Nationwide Free Wireless Broadband Finally Shot Down

For four years the Federal Communications Commission tossed the idea around like a beach ball: a coast-to-coast free wireless service across the low end of the 2GHz “AWS-3″ band. The service would pay for itself via advertisements and by selling commercial access to various portions of the license area. The company that [...]

Clustered Networks Spread Behavior Change Faster

Unlike infectious diseases and news, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it. “There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior [...]

Exotic New Mars Images From Orbiting Telephoto Studio

See Also: Strange Places on Mars: What Do You Want to See Next? Weird Oblong Crater Deepens Mars Mystery This Summer’s Sexiest Images From Saturn Saturn’s Most Habitable Moon Offers Ice, Water, Killer Views

Why Bomb-Proofing Robots Might Be a Bad Idea (Updated)

Five years ago, troops in Iraq were lucky if they had a bomb-stopping jammer in their Humvee. Now, one company wants to outfit robots with the electronic countermeasures, to keep the machines safe from remotely-detonated explosives. But you’ve got to wonder whether outfitting the ‘bots with another $100,000 in classified tech kind of undermines the [...]

Decade-Old Easter Egg Unearthed in GameCube Wave Race

A fan of the 2001 GameCube game Wave Race: Blue Storm found a long-buried Easter egg in the racing game this week. The code, posted to the NeoGAF message board by user “Raoul Duke,” unlocks a sardonic commentary track that insults the player at every move. “You don’t have an inferiority complex,” the announcer quips. [...]

Exoplanet Shows Gas Giants Start as Dusty Behemoths

By Alasdair Wilkins, io9 The atmosphere of a young exoplanet didn’t fit any of our existing models for what gas giants should look like. But when astronomers added huge dust clouds, it was a perfect fit, perhaps revealing a larger truth about gas giants. The planet in question is HR 8799 b, a gas giant about seven [...]

Mobile Devices Need Custom Maps

GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot? Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian [...]

Earth’s Magnetic Field Flipped Superfast

Just north of a truck stop along Interstate 80 in Battle Mountain, Nevada, lies evidence that the Earth???s magnetic field once went haywire. Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa. Such ???geomagnetic field reversals??? [...]

Ford Focus EV Will Use Liquid-Cooled Battery

Small but interesting nugget of news out of Ford, which says it will use a liquid-cooled and heated battery in the Ford Focus Electric we’ll see late next year. Ford is still developing the car, but the prototype we drove had a 23 kilowatt-hour lithium ion pack, which makes it about the size of the air-cooled [...]

Mass Extinctions Change the Rules of Evolution

A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution’s existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life’s preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths. Some scientists have suggested the former. Rates of species diversification — the speed at which groups adapt and fill open [...]

First Look: Official Twitter App for iPad Feels Smooth as Butter

The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that’s significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we’ve tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck). Formerly called Tweetie, Brichter’s popular iPhone app impressed the big wigs at [...]

Chrome 6 Arrives, Just in Time for Cake

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of a new, improved version. Chrome 6 arrives with an updated user interface, better syncing tools that include support for web form data and extensions, and — as should be expected with every new browser release these days — increased speed and [...]

Chrome 6 Arrives, Just in Time for Cake

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of a new, improved version. Chrome 6 arrives with an updated user interface, better syncing tools that include support for web form data and extensions, and — as should be expected with every new browser release these days — increased speed and [...]

How Apple Just Disrupted the Cable Guys

People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that’s a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set-top box. He’s actually created a new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone. You need [...]

Two-Wheeled Zerotracer EV Is a Wild Ride

We’re jealous of the folks who get to drive the Zerotracer. It’s a sporty, two-seat, enclosed motorcycle that weighs less than 1,400 pounds, can do zero to 100 km/hr (62 mph) in less than 4.5 seconds and has a top speed of 150 mph. The Oerlikon Solar Zerotracer is among the cool zero-emission vehicles competing in [...]

For Printers, ‘All-In-One’ Really Means ‘Way-Too-Much’

All-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines are so yesterday. Maybe the way to go is with better, single purpose devices: A compact, portable scanner combined with a fast, monochrome laser printer. I hate my all-in-one machine. It sits on my desk, filled up with its expensive color ink cartridges, mocking me. I never print photos or make copies, and [...]

String Theory Finally Does Something Useful

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments — but in a completely unexpected realm of physics. The theory has long been touted as the best hope for a unified “theory of everything,” bringing together the physics of the vanishingly small and the mindbendingly large. But it has also been criticized [...]

Super Mario All-Stars Gets Budget Disc Release on Wii

Nintendo will re-release its 1993 Super Nintendo game Super Mario All-Stars on Wii in Japan to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series, according to reports. A news leak from a retail event in Japan, reported by the indispensable Andriasang, says that Nintendo will release a Wii disc containing the SNES game for 2,500 yen (about [...]

Earth One Reboots Superman’s Roots for the iGeneration

Superman is a surly noob searching for reality in the digital age in DC Comics’ latest reboot of the superhero’s origin story. Who knew he’d miss the musty Daily Planet more than the rest of us? Writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Shane Davis’ upcoming graphic novel Superman: Earth One, arriving Oct. 27, irons the obsolete [...]

Sailors, Contractors Face Off Over ‘Hostage’ Network

Normally, it’s hard to get anyone but the geeks fired up about information infrastructure. But the Navy Marine Corps Intranet isn’t your normal network. With 700,000+ seats, it’s the world’s second-biggest network, after the internet itself. NMCI’s technical complexities and hiccups are the stuff of dark legend around the Navy. The fights it’s sparked between [...]

Harry Potter and the Return to Lego

It’s been a tough three years for fans of Lego and the Harry Potter stories. When the theme was discontinued at the end of 2007, many of us despaired of them ever coming back. When Lego and Warner Brothers announced earlier this year that six new sets would be coming out this fall, hope was [...]

Geek Cookbook: Recipes Wanted!

Whether you’re a foodie or somebody who feels like eating just takes up time that could be better used for important things (like playing games), if you’re here on GeekDad you’d probably appreciate any tips on making cooking geekier, right? We’ve mentioned the Star Wars Cookbooks before and last fall we had a round-up of [...]

Vets Get Ecstasy to Treat Their PTSD

A pair of psychiatric experts think they’ve got the answer to the soaring number of troops coming back from war with PTSD: have them undergo intensive psychotherapy — while they’re rolling on ecstasy. Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Anne Mithoefer, a psychiatric nurse, are the South Carolina pair who’ve been spearheading research into ecstasy, known clinically as [...]

Sept. 2, 1969: First U.S. ATM Starts Doling Out Dollars

1969: Six weeks after landing men on the moon, Americans take another giant leap for mankind with the nation???s first cash-spewing, automated teller machine. The machine, called the Docuteller, was installed in a wall of the Chemical Bank in Rockville Centre, New York. It marked the first time reusable, magnetically coded cards were used to withdraw [...]

Jeff Ma, Former MIT Blackjack Whiz, Riffs on Fantasy Sports, Statgeeks, Yahoo

Even if you don’t know Jeff Ma’s name, chances are you know the man. A 1994 MIT graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering, Ma was the de facto leader of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team that gained notoriety in Ben Mezrich’s best-seller book Bringing Down the House. (Wired magazine featured a prepublication excerpt in 2002.) Under [...]

Google Testing Full-Featured Google Apps

Google Apps users got a step closer to full Google-personhood this week, as the company sent invitations to select users to test out a version of Google Apps that includes all the features regular Google users get, including AdWords and Google Voice. Google Apps lets businesses and anyone who owns a domain to have Google power [...]

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature

Want to start reading some science fiction, but aren't sure where to begin? This introductory sci-fi literature syllabus is just for you.

Using Microformats in HTML5

With all the attention being paid to HTML5’s <video> tag, few have clued in to what is perhaps the most useful magical pixie dust hidden inside the web’s next markup language: the new semantic tags. Rather than using <div> tags to wrap your page sections, HTML5 offers much more sensible elements like <header>, <nav>, <section>, <article>, [...]

Final Fantasy XIV Beta Begins, Belatedly

Square Enix will commence open beta testing of Final Fantasy XIV at 7 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday. The beta test of the new MMO was meant to begin on Tuesday, but was postponed when the Japanese gamemaker discovered “critical” bugs in the code. Final Fantasy XIV, due out September 30 on PC and in March 2011 for [...]

Christopher Lloyd Plays Doc Brown in Back to The Future Game

Christopher Lloyd will reprise his role as Dr. Emmet Lathrop “Doc” Brown in the Back to the Future videogame, publisher Telltale Games said Wednesday. This will be the first time the actor has portrayed the harried inventor of time travel since Universal Studios launched Back to the Future: The Ride in 1991. Telltale announced its intention [...]

Life in a Day Movie-in-Progress Goes Live on YouTube

The world’s longest rough cut starts unspooling this week on YouTube as producer Ridley Scott presents a sampling of 80,000 video diaries recorded July 24 by DIY filmmakers across the globe. The pieces are being scrutinized by director Kevin MacDonald and editor Joe Walker, who will stitch together select bits into a 90-minute documentary slated [...]

5 Reasons Why Apple TV Is (Still) Boring

We know — the new Apple TV is really small, and it finally focuses on renting rather than purchasing television shows, integrates iOS devices as remote controls, has an optical audio output for surround sound, and costs just a hundred bones. Additional coverage of Apple’s event on Wired.com: A Remote Shipping Without A Screen Ships Broken Hands-On With [...]

Vail’s EpicMix App Brings Location Tracking, Social Networking to Ski Slopes

The skiing industry – fairly or not – gets criticized often for being stodgy, slow, and resistant to change. And when it does change, the results are sometimes regretful. Bogner one-pieces! Neon Boll?? goggles! Hot Dog! (Wait, that last one is still pretty awesome.) It’s this perception that makes Vail Resorts??? new EpicMix application an intriguing [...]

Futurama’s Comic Cosmonauts Recall Best Bits From First 100 Episodes

???????????????The sci-fi cartoon's milestone 100th episode arrives Thursday, but the warm, weird remembrances of the show's creative team have come in early. ???Executive producer David X. Cohen and voice actors Billy West, Lauren Tom and David Herman share some of their favorite moments.

Sci-Fi Spoof Videos: Terminator 2: The Opera and RoboCop: The Musical

An Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator sings about the travails of being a Terminator in the extremely moving song “To Kill Someone Again” from Terminator 2: The Opera. It’s not the only classic sci-fi movie spoofed by Jon and Al Kaplan: Check out the “Murphy, It’s You” remix from RoboCop: The Musical below. [via GameAxis] Follow us on Twitter: [...]

Police Kill Hostage Taker Who Besieged Discovery Channel

After a daylong standoff, authorities shot and killed an armed man wearing an explosive device who had taken three hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia. Most of the hundreds of employees, including children at an on-site daycare center, had already been evacuated, police said. The station [...]

Firearms, Boots and Dirty Cars as Canvases

Editor???s note: Jeremy Hart, an occasional contributor to Wired.com, is driving around the world with a few mates in a pair of Ford Fiestas. He???s filing occasional reports from the road. The Wild West is still wild. As we pull into Scottsdale, Arizona, during Ford Fiesta World Tour 2010, we get word there???s automatic gunfire coming into [...]

Giant Skull Is Made of Thin Slices of Brain

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK An artist named Noah Scalin has built a giant skull made out of slices of brain encased in acrylic. What do you mean, “Why?” Scalin shot to fame a few years back when he created a blog that chronicled his creation of a skull every single day of a year. Since then [...]

How to Speed Up Your Site With YSlow and Page Speed

We all want our websites to load faster, but speeding things up can be tricky. There are numerous tried and true tricks we all use to keep page load times down, but once you’ve done a few rounds of optimization, you tend to hit a plateau where it’s tough to squeeze any more speed out [...]

Electric Motorcycle Entrepreneur Killed In Crash

Matt Dieckmann believed the future is electric, and he died hoping to prove it. Dieckmann, the 29-year-old founder of Electric Race Bikes, was killed Monday following a collision with a car in his hometown of Santa Rosa, California. He reportedly was testing a new electric motorcycle at the time. We met Dieckmann, pictured above on the left, [...]

Ugly Vegas Carpets Want You to Keep Playing

Mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” This certainly rings true with Chris Maluszynski’s Las Vegas Carpets series, whose name explains it all. The photos draw out the psychology of Las Vegas through the simple observation of carpet. Years ago, while in Las Vegas [...]

Attorney: Army Disabled Manning’s Weapon Prior to Leaks

A civilian defense attorney hired recently by alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning says the Army was so concerned about his client’s mental health prior to the alleged leaks that supervisors removed the bolt from his military weapon, disabling it. Attorney David Coombs told CNN, however, that other than sending Manning to a chaplain for counseling, the [...]

A Month In, Pakistan Flood Relief Efforts Stuck at 1.0

A month after the Haiti earthquake, the U.S. government had over 20,000 troops on the ground, $450 million in assistance money earmarked, and an innovative web-based system to let troops and aid workers collaborate like never before. A month after the floods in Pakistan, the U.S. effort doesn’t compare in any way. And that’s a [...]

Spin War Shift: Military Now Bragging About Afghan Air Strikes

18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing insurgents from the skies. In a stream of press releases, the military alliance in Afghanistan is boasting about the air-induced demise to 12 insurgents in the past 10 days. It’s the latest move in a spin war with the Taliban about civilian [...]

Sept. 1, 1974: New York to London in Less Than 2 Hours

1974: On a flight to the Farnborough Air Show outside London, Maj. James Sullivan and Maj. Noel Widdifield fly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird from New York to London in 1 hour, 54 minutes, 56.4 seconds. The 1,806-mph flight still holds the transatlantic speed record between the two cities. Developed during the middle of the cold war, [...]

Browsers Turn Their Backs on Old Macs

Word is out that Firefox 4, when it ships at the end of October or thereabouts, will probably not include support for older, non-Intel Macs. Mozilla’s director of Firefox Mike Beltzner hinted at the change on a Mozilla developer mailing list last week: “I am gathering data on the number of PPC users we have, but [...]

White House: Iraq Troops Are Coming Home In 2011. Period.

When President Obama announces tonight that the remaining 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are going to all come home by the end of 2011, that endpoint for the Iraq war will be set in bureaucratic and diplomatic stone, according to a top adviser. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes waves off recent media speculation that the [...]

Matrix Fight Wizard Yuen Woo-Ping Feted at Fantastic Fest

Yuen Woo-Ping choreographed the epic, hypnotic smackdowns for The Matrix trilogy, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Now, the Chinese fight choreographer is getting his stateside due with a tribute at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. The Texas action film festival will honor Woo-Ping with a Lifetime Achievement Award on Sept. 25 at [...]

Pirate Bay Documentary in the Works

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK Notorious filesharing website The Pirate Bay is a long-standing enemy of the movie industry, but one Swedish filmmaker has plans to create a documentary called TPB AFK about the three founders of the site, and their reactions to being found guilty of being accessory to crime against copyright law and fined [...]

Review: Dead Rising: Case Zero a Bite-Sized Zombie Massacre

Let's not mince words. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is a demo that costs five bucks. It's still worth it.