In a fevered mash up of blockbuster films directed by James Cameron, DARPA is looking to put soldier controlled bi-pedal robots on the battlefield. Think Terminator meets Avatar. The agency has set aside $7 million of it’s $2.8 billion 2012 budget to develop an “Avatar program” that will “develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a [...]

Building a kind of "web business card" for yourself doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. There are several professional nameplate sites that give you the tools to build a page you can put on your business cards or in your email signature that anyone—employers, friends, and business partners included—can visit to learn more about [...]

The release candidate version slipped out a few days ago, but those waiting for the final release will be glad to know that version 2.0 of the open source VLC media player is now officially available for download. It’s being dubbed a “major” release of the software, and with good reason. In addition to some [...]

Tower defense games have been done in damn near every way possible: on consoles, mobile apps, and online flash-based games. However, there’s a new Kickstarter project, called Doodle Defense, that’s putting a new spin on that simple gaming idea using some open source algorithms, a whiteboard, computer, Kinect and a projector. The game works by [...]

There are apps that turn your photos into tilt-shift photos, but they pale in comparison to actually having a tilt-shift lens. If you don’t have the budget to buy one, but you do have an old shower head, a rubber glove, and you’re willing to disassemble a 50mm/1.8 prime lens, you can build your own [...]

We were admittedly cynical last summer, when Nevada’s state legislature passed a law regulating the safety of driverless cars. But maybe we shouldn’t have been, because it looks like they’re actually serious about it. The state has now begun fleshing out its campaign with new regulations for testing these robocars, which, of course, are still [...]

Verified accounts on Twitter and Google+ are supposed to build trust, and allay your fears that you may be following an impostor. Facebook only announced this week that they were getting into the verified account game, but for different reasons—they want to make it easier for you to find and subscribe to interesting people. Let's [...]

Traditionally, creating presentations requires using an app like Powerpoint and can cause various compatibility issues, but with the free, open source tool deck.js, you can create an elegant set of slides that can run in any browser either online or off. All it takes is minimal knowledge of basic HTML, and we’ve created a starter [...]

Microsoft is making plenty of big changes with its Windows 8 operating system, and that has now also extended to a new logo. As explained by Microsoft’s Sam Moreau in a post on the official Windows blog, the logo was created with the help of the design agency Pentagram, which posed a simple question when [...]