Gadgets

Reports coming out of Taiwan are that Apple has shown interest in upgrading their next iPhone model to a 4-inch display.

Living amidst a cornucopia of products that aren't products, we're learning that cultivating our gardens means working together. The final post in a series of chats about the Chrome notebook, with blogger Adam Rothstein.

If I were to equate gadget blogging to some occupation in a slice of modern cinema, the film that most immediately comes to mind is The Human Centipede: First Segment. That 2010 parable, directed by Tom Six, focuses on the misadventures of three people who, through a wacky series of missteps, are each sewn... shall we say... input-to-output to one another. Gadget blogging, you see, is primarily an act of chain digestion.

A sleek, design-fictional robot railway inspector promises to make costly train derailments a thing of the past. It's a harbinger of the ambient, automated infrastructure to come�and a reminder that the future lies in the inevitable and necessary failure of beautiful ideas. Video after the jump.

Precorder provides a buffer interface for iPhone video, letting you choose your shots after they've happened. Or seen another way, it's a reticle for aiming special effects at points in space and time.

You bought it? You own it; don't let esoteric screwheads take it away from you. Video after the jump.

More domestic style than you or I can hope to amass in a lifetime�displayed in ten seconds. We might want to think about what that says for style... We so badly want to be our things. Video after the jump.

Even before the viewer catches a glimpse his first Mogwai, Joe Dante's Gremlins establishes the link between the titular goblins and malfunctioning technology by way of Randy Peltzer and his many incompetent inventions. It's a film very much of its time, with many fascinating things to say about the way Reagan-era Americans looked at technology. It's also a movie that would be impossible to remake today, for one big reason: the smartphone is our Bathroom Buddy.

French-Canadian kids doing anthropology in the midst of our broken future, contending with the vague stirrings of paleotechnology. Video after the jump.

Breaking new ground in the age-old technology of thumb drives by adding a bouquet of handy, fold-out tools.