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There's no point in keeping a stash of emergency flashlights around your home if the batteries inside them just end up getting stolen for TV remotes and the kids' toys. So the folks who created the original LUCI, a dirt-cheap inflatable solar-powered rechargeable lantern , have tweaked its design for the new Luci EMRG so that it produces a more intense focused beam and can now double as an emergency flashlight.

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Note: Final product will not have the advertisement on the side encouraging people to test whether or not your hat is actually bulletproof. The BulletSafe Bulletproof Baseball Cap (currently an already funded Kickstarter project) is a $99 baseball hat with a bulletproof panel in the front crown. It can allegedly stop 9mm, .38 and .40 caliber rounds, although I'm pretty sure your head is still gonna take a beating even without a bullet in it. Also, getting shot anywhere but the forehead will still totally f***ing kill you. Keep going for the Kickstarter video.

Have you ever even touched an ASUS phone? I thought not. But two of the coolest Android smartphones at CES 2015 come courtesy of the Taiwanese computer company.

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Dead malls are in the news often lately, whether they’ve become self-aware, are being reduced to rubble, or are being turned into condos or houses of worship. Even teens don’t want to hang out there anymore. Why is it, though, that malls that once clothed and entertained the middle class are dying out? What, if anything, will take their place?

The New York Times has a sad take on the dead mall trend, now that the holidays are over and malls are emptier than they were a few weeks ago. We’re referring to the malls when saying, “What will take their place,” but could easily be referring to the American middle class instead. Malls that cater to very wealthy people are doing just fine, but it’s the malls anchored by Sears and JCPenney and filled with mid-range clothing retailers that have run into trouble.

It’s not just malls that are about to lose under-performing anchors that are in trouble. Experts have found about 60 endangered enclosed malls across the country. This issue isn’t even about the failure of specific retailers, but the general over-malling of the nation by developers in decades past. Those malls could transition from enclosed to open-air big-box centers, replacing the Gap and the Orange Julius with Walmart and a discount drink machine.

The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls [New York Times]

LG announced its new washing machine this week at CES in Las Vegas, and it's pretty exciting stuff.

The machine, called the Twin Wash System, is exactly what its name suggests.

It's a washing machine with a smaller machine that loads underneath, allowing the owner to do two loads at once. 

TechCrunch's Jordan Crook reports,

The Korean company also added a special new front-loading door that is tilted at a 6-degree angle and is positioned about an inch higher than most other washers, saving users from bending over as much to load and unload laundry. The new washer comes with a technology called TurboWash, using two high-pressure nozzles to spray concentrated detergent directly onto the clothes. It saves water and washes faster, which is good news for everyone.

If that's not enough for you, it also connects to wifi so you can control the machine and get alerts when your laundry is finished. 

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Among the products MSI will be launching during CES are a couple of notable new gaming laptops—and at the high end is the GT80, a beast of a laptop announced back in late October that sports an 18.4" screen (1920x1080), an 980M SLI GPU configuration, and a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches.

Though the GT80 has some impressive specs (and an equally impressive price tag—the configuration shown, which had a Core i7-4980HQ processor, 24GB of RAM, and a "super RAID" configuration of two 128GB M.2 SATA SSDs plus a 1TB 7200 HDD, was estimated at roughly $3500), more notable is just how much of a desktop replacement MSI has designed it to be. You'll be able to easily swap out most components on your own via the removable panels above the keyboard and along the bottom of the laptop. The only thing that MSI doesn't intend for users to replace on their own is the GPU; buyers instead will have to send their GT80s to one of MSI's partners (like iBuyPower or Xotic PC) to have that done.

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These days, you're more likely to see the works of great artists on a screen rather than in person. And that raises an interesting question: what are you really looking at?

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(940): This country song on the radio just had a rap break. What. No. Why.

Almost every time we've played around in virtual reality, be it of the Oculus Rift or Gear VR variety, we've had a game controller of some sort in our hands. It's necessary to navigate an environment, pop around and generally have a look about. The f...

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This cute cat reacts bizarrely when his human lets him sniff an empty can of olives.

[dmitry hilchuk/via dpf]

One minute, you see what you think might be the meekest man ever trying to sell you a keyboard from the 90’s, then he busts out his drum skills on said keyboard and you realize one of two things:

One, I need to own that keyboard.

Two, I vastly underestimated both that man and that keyboard, and learned a valuable lesson today about judging a book by its cover.

Oh, and I’d LOVE to see what that guy can do with a keytar.

[Via Digg]

The post Your Jaw Will Drop at This Man’s Keyboard Drum Solo… appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

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