really

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Rare full recording of 1983 Steve Jobs speech reveals Apple had been working on iPad for 27 years.

- "Steve Jobs" spotted on the back of a truck in Xi'an, China.

- Machine Gun Kelly gig at Microsoft Store cut short by police.

- Capcom opens "human meat" butchery in London for the launch of Resident Evil 6.

- New York Times smears use of "really," but Jerry Seinfeld rebutts.

Bathroom break video: Videos of people posing for still photos

Twitter's hoping to conjure up a new revenue stream with @earlybird, its take on the limited-time-only online deals craze. And the company announced Wednesday its first @earlybird deal: a limited two-for-one ticket deal for the new Disney live-action flick "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," which just hit theaters. It's Twitter's second edgy ad partnership with Disney, after a "promoted trend" in sync with the Pixar film "Toy Story 3."

Unfortunately, Twitter might not want to be launching @earlybird with this turkey, an over-the-top Jerry Bruckheimer action-fest that stars Nicolas Cage. To put … Read more

High-end audio prices are getting crazy lately, but this $1,000,000 speaker--the Ultimate--may be the most expensive speaker in the world.

Please understand that $1 million buys one speaker, so you'll need to shell out $2 million for stereo, and at least $5 million for your Ultimate home theater.

The Ultimate is a rather large speaker--each one consists of six, seven-foot tall panels. Each Ultimate houses a total of forty 15-inch subwoofers, twenty-four 8-inch woofers, and massive arrays of 2-inch wide and 1-inch wide ribbon tweeters. All of this is for a single channel/speaker, double those numbers for stereo! A pair of Ultimates are nearly forty feet wide!

That pretty much rules out my chances of getting the Ultimate for review in my Brooklyn apartment, oh well.

Each Ultimate speaker comes with its own power amplifiers, with an output of 31,000 watts, and the manufacturer claims the Ultimate can generate up to 146dB SPL, that's a lot louder than a jet plane taking off. And just because it can play that loud, doesn't mean it has to. Just because a Ferrari can go 200 mph, doesn't mean it can't cruise at 55.… Read more

Only one thing looks worse than Winnie the Pooh having his face sandpapered off, and that's any gadget covered in Swarovski crystals.

For some reason unbeknownst to us, Swarovski crystals seem to share certain properties with acne--they appear to crop up on everything at some point in its life, and no one suffering from them ever appears to be happy.

Click on the gallery below to see the five crystal-clad abominations that have stood out most over the last few years, starting with one that's only just hit our screens: Elton John's "Starburst" iPod nano. … Read more

Keeping up with multiple RSS feeds can be tough. Yeah it's really simple, but that syndication bit is what always gets me. Google has introduced a fresh way to analyze both when blogs you subscribe to are posting and when (and if) you're actually reading them.

The data is represented with simple colored bars, with the blue being post time and the red as the time you typically get your reading done. You can dig down even deeper and split up the monthly data by the time of day, or day of the week. The results can be … Read more

Designed by L. Paul Hales to produce concert-level sound in the home, speakers from Professional Home Cinema dare to go where no audiophile manufacturer would: PHC speakers play loud enough to duplicate live concert volume levels. For real, no kidding.

Take the SCR-12 ($4,000 each), it's a medium format "Screen Channel" loudspeaker capable of reproducing the awesome dynamics and unrestricted volume levels of a commercial cinema or concert PA system in your home theater. It uses digital signal processing (DSP), high-resolution frequency response shaping, and time-alignment to produce a maximum output exceeding 130 decibels. That's really, really loud! … Read more

Next to the ability to light up and roll away, there are two features seen increasingly in computer keyboards: waterproofing and silence. The "ReallyCool Keyboard" manages to accomplish both at the same time.

And really, why shouldn't it? In this day and age, these should be standard specs for all models. Many are aimed specifically at such professional settings as courtrooms and medical facilities, as Dvice notes, but there's really no reason that they shouldn't be used everywhere. The ReallyCool Keyboard even has backlighting so you can type in the dark while spilling coffee on … Read more

Anyone who trolls eBay with regularity has probably gotten used to seeing the odd object up for sale now and again. But the Saturday story of a German pair offering their 8-month-old for purchase on the site may end up topping more than a few creepiest-ever-on-eBay lists.

A police spokesperson in the Bavarian town of Krumbach said law enforcement is investigating the couple for possible child trafficking, even though the 23-year-old woman of the duo insists the post was a joke. Authorities, not appreciating the parents' apparently twisted sense of humor, have also put the unnamed baby into state custody. … Read more

The Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein recently reported that the FBI went trawling through grocery store records in order to track down Iranian terror cells. In his article, he writes, "like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists." The program, however, was short lived and was quickly "torpedoed by the head of the FBI's criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, … Read more