ie8 fix

topics

Nobody wants to buy Steve Wozniak's old house

After a several months-long lull, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's old house is back on the market.

The six bedroom, seven bathroom, Los Gatos, Calif., home, which Wozniak built in 1986 though sold off years ago, is back on sale for slightly lower $4.395 million. It's even having an open house this weekend, notes the house's real estate agent over at the San Francisco Chronicle, which spotted the listing on real estate site Redfin.

This is the latest sale attempt of the house, which last changed hands in 2009. Records show that the house originally sold back … Read more

Thirst brings you the news from around the Web with an easy-to-browse interface

Thirst for iOS had already been out for a few months, giving us a new way to view Twitter by organizing tweets into categories so you could read them in a sort of digest. But the latest version takes this news aggregator to a whole new level, scouring the entire Web for content, then displaying it in categories that are easy to browse.

What makes Thirst a compelling alternative to other newsreaders like Flipboard is that it doesn't just give you the latest story to hit a particular RSS feed. Instead, it uses a complex algorithm to perform a … Read more

Fleetwood Macintosh: #FailedTechBand names on Twitter

The top Twitter trend yesterday, #FailedTechBands, is a hilarious play on words that includes some clever imaginary band names.

According to trend-tracking site Topsy, the trend started with a tweet from Mashable features writer Christine Erickson that read "Fleetwood Macintosh #FailedTechBands."

Click through this CBSNews gallery to see more of these creative musical monikers. … Read more

Google reveals what's hot in user searches

If you go to Google's "Hot Searches" list, you'll find that the top three searches today were Apple, Robin Roberts, and the LA Kings. You'll also see how many times each has been Googled; for example, Apple had more than half a million searches in the past few hours.

All of these features are new with Google's revamp of its U.S. Hot Searches, which it rolled out today.

"With Hot Searches in Google Trends, you can see a list of the fastest rising search terms in the U.S. for a snapshot … Read more

Dutchman flies like a bird with homemade wings?

Editors' note, March 22 at 1:14 p.m. PT: It seems the skeptics may have been right on this one. Gizmodo is now reporting that the purported birdman confessed on Dutch TV that this was indeed a hoax. Our original story follows, with some earlier updates.

If Red Bull doesn't actually give you wings, maybe this guy can.

Dutch mechanical engineer Jarno Smeets recently posted a video of what he says was his first successful flight with his homemade bird wings. Smeet's efforts take cloud computing to a (literally) whole new level, as the wings purportedly rely on an Android-powered HTC Wildfire S smartphone to process arm acceleration and compute the motor output.

The phone is connected to a microcontroller that is, in turn, connected to a Nintendo Wii Remote to measure acceleration and other flight parameters. … Read more

This engineering 'freeware' isn't free in our calculation

Eptsoft offers Electrical, Mechanics, and Maths as educational freeware. It includes a wide range of scientific and engineering formulas, calculators, and other tools in a series of clearly illustrated pop-up windows. It also has the most annoying and frustrating nag screen we've ever encountered in so-called freeware. It pops up every 20 seconds or so, obscures the entire screen, and must be closed manually to continue our "evaluation." You have to pay ("donate") to remove the ads and actually use the program. It's cheap, but it ain't free. Did we mention it's … Read more

Twitter looks back at the top topics of 2011

Twitter's year in review series is back, and this time, the company has decided to examine the hot topics that bounced around the social network this year.

Twitter's top hashtags were a mix of news and memes. According to the company, "#egypt" was the top hashtag this year, reflecting the interest users had in that country's uprising. However, the next three hashtags--"#tigerblood," "#threewordstoliveby," and "#idontunderstandwhy"--were memes that, as most Twitter users know, were just about everywhere they turned during different parts of the year.

Twitter also divulged … Read more

Top Twitter trends of 2010

Justin Bieber is the only living human on Twitter's list of top trends of 2010. The young singer holds the No. 8 spot behind Google Android and Apple iPad.

The top three terms are, unsurprisingly: Gulf oil spill, FIFA World Cup, and "Inception," referring to the Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster film.

We interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about the list on Friday.

Other top trends included the vuvuzela and Pulpo Paul, the World Cup-predicting octopus. Stone said that nothing was particularly surprising. But when it comes to Twitter trends, he has learned not to be surprised.

Twitter breaks … Read more

YouTube to test smart 'topics' on videos

SAN BRUNO, Calif.--YouTube thinks it has found a better way to help its users find exactly which videos they're looking for on its site: smart tags.

At some point tomorrow evening, YouTube will turn on an experiment in TestTube, its lab, in which users will be able to see what the company is calling "topics" above videos they find through search results or that are shared among friends. These topics are sort of like tags, but are the product of sophisticated analysis of comments, viewing patterns, and other signals that will automatically appear above videos, said … Read more