Associated News.net

#heavyhardware It doesn't matter if the machine you are using is a massive crane or a tiny smartphone: You will always curse in the same way when it crashes. The deafening noise, however, won't be the same. More »

#imagecache It's hard for a lot of us to relate to what goes on in fashion, but Alexander McQueen, recently deceased, strode across some familiar territory in his final works. Shots like this are as sci-fi as they are high-fashion. [BoingBoing] More »

#lego You really have to suck a whole lot of Lego Star Wars minifigs to do what this girl is doing: Identify the characters by putting them inside your mouth. Somehow, I find all this strangely arousing. [Youtube via Boing Boing] More »

#plastics Earlier this week, IBM researchers announced a discovery that could lead to plastics made from plants instead of petroleum. The new plastics will be more energy efficient, more versatile, and infinitely recyclable (until we move to our space colony). More »

#diy Once upon a time being alone meant you were unable to play a decent game of rock-paper-scissors, but now you can finally amuse yourself with just your own hand. Granted you'll have to actually make a glove like this first. More »

#imagecache That's not the sun. But for a brief period, in a small Arctic town in Canada, in the dead of winter, it was the next-best thing. More »

We thought that Google's Reader Play is perfect for tablet computers, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton has other ideas. He thinks that the feature is perfect for TVs and other larger screens. [NYT] More »

32GB, 64MB cache, and read and write speeds of 25MB/s and 70MB/s aren't terribly exciting when it comes to a solid state drive, but the OCZ Onyx still caught our eye because it's among the first SSDs to slip below $100. [Hot Hardware via CrunchGear] More »

#interactivity What's more terrifying than a call coming from inside the house? The call coming from inside the theater. That's the thought behind Last Call, an interactive horror film in which the main character calls a random audience member for help. More »

#hands Hand models have it pretty good, don't they? Show up, hold something for a few hours, collect checks, repeat. It's such a sweet gig, there's gotta be something wrong with them, right? Wait... they're all attractive, too? Well nuts. More »

#playstationmove Sony's finally put a name to their motion controller, and it's called PlayStation Move. Updated with hands on. More »

#film It's one thing to shoot an entire short film on a Canon flatbed computer scanner. It's another to do it well. With Memoirs of a Scanner, Mindfruit Films pretty much nailed it. More »

#cars The most fuel efficient hybrid for sale in the US gets 51 MPG, but a startup called Transonic Combustion claims they can improve that. They claim their fuel-injection system will get 64 MPG. More »

#iphone $13 dollars. Whole package. Must. Resist. More »

#wtf Next time someone complains about your habit of using a cellphone in the movie theater, just casually tell him this story of a man who got stabbed with a meat thermometer after making a similar complaint. More »

#science In yet more research funded by Bill and Melinda Gates (and Intellectual Ventures), Stanford University's Ken Caldeira explores a mechanically simple ocean pump that could significantly diminish the power of a hurricane. More »

#google The mad scientists at Google Labs have unleashed their latest concoction: Google Reader Play, a new way to look at your feeds one Google-suggested site at a time. It's actually pretty neat! And would be perfect for the iPad. More »

#iphoneapps It's not that Brizzly's perfect, or that it does justice to its source material (the unassailably pretty, wonderfully lean Birdfeed)—it's that it comes close enough, and it's free. More »

#asus ASUS calls the Cine5 "the world's most compact five-channel speaker," but who cares about that when the thing actually looks good and supposedly provides ultra-realistic surround sound? Sadly we don't know when it'll be available or for how much. [Asus] More »

#rant The App Store censorship horse may have been beaten to death, but mainstream German media—whose iPhone applications have been censored by Apple because of its content—are not surrendering. I'm glad. In fact, I hope they win this war. More »