Paper pellets make great projectiles ¿ just ask any schoolkid. Paper Shooters, rifles made primarily out of cardboard, can fire those paper pellets up to a distance of 75 feet, lending a degree of professionalism to a pursuit that is usually more of a hobby.
Steve Carell and James Gandolfini announced today that they¿ll be producing and starring in a new HBO film,
Filling out online forms and keeping track of passwords is hard enough without a tiny mobile keyboard complicating things. Google's latest version of Chrome for Android can help ease that pain thanks to new sync features that let you access your saved passwords and form fill data across devices.
Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting. Check back Fridays for the continuing series, and feel free to make recommendations in the comments, by Twitter, or by e-mail.
The University of Michigan's solar car team is legendary, but new regulations for this year's competition across Australia put their skills to the test.
After a three-year hiatus -- a period of semi-homelessness featuring pop-up museums and storage in an office -- the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design reopens Saturday with displays from artists Michael Cooper, Arline Fisch, and Rebecca Hutchinson.
Hands-on with Facebook Home shows the best mobile Facebook experience to date. The problem is in figuring out who wants it.
Someone pimped Sergey Brin's ride in the most ostentatious way possible to celebrate All Fool's Day.
There¿s no indication the ocean plans to stop littering Southern California¿s shores with the tiny bodies of starving sea lion pups any time soon. After three months, roughly 1,100 pups have entered marine mammal rehabilitation centers in the area. Now, scientists are asking what's going on with food supplies and ocean conditions.
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There have been a slew of great new images of volcanoes taken from space this year. Here are some of the best.
Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna gets to the bottom of the scary new bird flu emerging in China and tells you how to keep up with the new information.
Mozilla wants future versions of Firefox to take advantage of tomorrow¿s faster, multi-core devices. To make that happen Mozilla is developing a brand new browser engine dubbed Servo. But Servo isn't just about speeding up the browser, it could also help pave the way for a whole new class of more powerful web apps.
Given that literary fame is so fickle, it might make more sense to anoint a work that's mutable -- an all-encompassing text that changes at the pace of society itself. Today there is such a work. And that is why, in 2013, the Swedish Academy should award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Google. The idea isn't as implausible as one might think.
While Google and Facebook might be transformative internet technologies that mint their inventors money, your consumer internet startup is more likely to hit that billion-dollar mark if it's in the business of digital transactions.
Some things are solids and some things are liquids and never the twain shall meet. Except for when they do. Physicists are taking a closer look at these two phases of matter and perhaps redefining how we think about materials in the natural world.
Stellar flexibility and strong design pedigree are the A1's main selling points, but there are other, better-sounding wireless speakers that are less expensive.
This week President Obama announced a big new brain research initiative. Both supporters and opponents of the project have compared it to the Human Genome Project. That project was once controversial too, and there's a similar ring to many of the arguments for and against the two projects. See if you can guess which quotes below refer to which project.
In a world of DVRs, HBO Go and Netflix,
This week on the Gadget Lab Show, the gang goes over absolutely everything Facebook Home.
Whoever said you can't buy friends was dead wrong. Here's our guide to the not-so-underground friend market.
High above the Arizona desert in 2010, after a day of photographing housing developments, Christoph Gielen looked down from the helicopter upon Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence. The hexagonal arrangement of the prison buildings, to him, replicated the six-sided concentric order of suburbs he'd shot previously. That chance observation kickstarted a three-year project called
When you absolutely, positively have to destroy everything within 300 square meters, accept no substitutes for this upgraded Russian flamethrower tank.
Without these brave ads, the cellphone's 40th birthday party wouldn't be nearly as fun.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Elon Musk is bathing in a claw-foot tub of praise.
Google isn't the only one leaping to the defense of Hadoop, the open source software that underpins so many of the biggest names on the internet.
Imagine if the growth in the sticker price of Pentagon hardware were a sovereign nation. That nation would spend more on defense than any other besides the U.S. and China.
Roger Ebert, one of the most well-known and well-respected film critics of the last half-century, has passed away at 70 following a battle with cancer.
Clear your calendars, brush off your cutoffs, and queue up ¿The Final Countdown¿: Arrested Development producer Mitch Hurwitz has announced the date of the season 4 premiere!
Tepid enthusiasm for Windows 8 is bad news for Microsoft, but it's good news for laptop shoppers. . That price, which includes 6GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive, is $100 less than the best deals available during last year's Black Friday weekend. Many of the Windows 7 laptops still available are priced higher than their Windows 8 equivalents, an examination of several online retailers reveals. At the 10-month mark in their lifecycle, Windows 7 laptops with Core i5 Sandy Bridge processors and 15-inch displays were selling for around $400, a 34 percent drop from their introductory price, DealNews reports. By comparison, the price of similarly configured Windows 8 systems have dropped a whopping 46 percent at their 10-month mark.
Motion Artist 1.0 generates interactive HTML 5 video presentation of comics and more. This full release offers more customization of animation files, tighter recording controls, and better asset editing compared to the . Motion Artist ($60, buy-only) makes animating images and text relatively easy for comic artists and web designers with imported files. Unlike with Flash, you can't draw in the program and then animate their creations. The focus is on animating existing image files from other sources. Motion Artist opens to a default project designed by Smith Micro, showcasing various animation techniques. However, comic artists unfamiliar with using an animation program or film terms might find all the controls tricky to animate their comic pages. Imported PSD files maintain their layers for animation or the user can composite the layers into a single layer. JPG, PNG and Motion Artist vendor Smith Micro's Anime Studio are other supported file types. Motion Artist has three different views: Director, Camera and Panel. Animators will recognize the toolbar and scene list, and the timeline setup with its default of 30 frames per second. Thanks to GPU acceleration, users can play working files back in real time, which assists in editing the video. In addition to using your own video, you can animate panels, text and speech balloons with various effects in Motion Artist. Comic artists can use difference scenes to cut between comic panels or pages. For example in film, opening credits can be the first scene, followed by the next one of the characters walking into camera view. In comics, it can be moving from one panel to the next or page to page. Motion Artist is set up for multiple scenes, so comic artists can animate individual pages or panels and then cut them together for a single presentation.
The recent release of the . For one thing, the BlackBerry 10 OS is distinct from any previous BlackBerry OS in that it provides a way to separate out personal ) trend by allowing employees their personal space on BlackBerry, too. And although this BlackBerry Balance dual-partition capability for BYOD is not available for Google Mobile, he says. Management capabilities include features such as lock, track and wipe. BlackBerry is also working on what's known as a "containerization" type of technology for applications that could also be used for iOS and Android that would allow IT managers to place something akin to a container wrap around an app based on IT-based policy decisions.
Outlook.com's Calendar is designed to match the visual style of Windows 8. It's a much-needed makeover, and it even includes some features you won't find in the all-too-basic Calendar app that's actually baked into Microsoft operating system. has the same flat design and sharp edges found on the Web apps for SkyDrive and Outlook mail. Events are color-coded according to the calendar they're on, and you can easy switch between month, week, day, and agenda views. The Website also includes a decent number of bells and whistles beyond the basics. A calendar for national holidays is built-in, and each of the next five days includes a weather icon, which pops up a forecast when you tap on it. There's also a built-in task list that you can edit by clicking the View button near the top-right of the screen and selecting . The Calendar includes some handy Facebook and LinkedIn integration for Microsoft accounts that are connected to the social network. You'll automatically see a calendar with friends' birthdays, and you can also start a Facebook chat in a sidebar view.
Windows RT users have a hard life. Not only are they locked out of the Windows desktop ecosystem thanks to RT’s ARM-based processor architecture, but they face a limited supply of great app choices on the Windows Store are limited. Sure, we’ve seen a few nice additions lately—a there, and Nokia Music. But if you bought your RT device to get some work done, your app choices remain few and far between. , but that client only covers the basics such as folder management and flagging messages. Power user features from Outlook like working with notes and tasks, color coding, and easy calendar integration are non-existent. Beyond Microsoft’s built-in app, the Windows Store currently suffers from a dearth of mail clients. If you have a Yahoo account, you can get the official Yahoo Mail client, and there’s a smattering of third-party Gmail apps. For generic IMAP/POP email clients, there’s nothing worth your time. Business users requiring an Exchange client can get for $20. But TouchDown for Windows 8 and Windows RT has so far earned a three-star rating on the Windows Store; user reviews there cite complaints about poor functionality and slow response times. So what’s an RT user to do: Use nothing but Web apps? Not for long, if the latest rumors are to be believed. Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott on Thursday reported seeing with his own eyes during a recent trip to Microsoft’s campus. Thurrott’s sneak peek at Outlook RT was unofficial and came via representatives from Microsoft third-party business partners who were given early access to the app.
International travel is enough of a hassle without having to worry about insanely high roaming charges, which is exactly what you'll pay if you try to check e-mail, use maps, or pull down some Web pages. . The company sells prepaid SIM cards you can pop into your smartphone or tablet for flat-rate data access in any of 54 countries. that went into effect in January. Best bet: ask your carrier if they'll do it for you. AT&T and T-Mobile reportedly will if you're an existing customer and your device is out of contract. Alternately, a little Web searching will reveal lots of services that will sell you unlock codes, usually for under $10. (I recently used one to unlock an iPhone 4, and it worked perfectly.)