John Biggs
John Biggs is a writer, consultant, programmer, former East Coast Editor and current contributing writer for TechCrunch. He writes mainly about technology, security, gadgets, gear, wristwatches, and the internet. After spending four years as an IT programmer, he switched his profession and became a full-time journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Laptop, PC Upgrade, Surge, Gizmodo, Men’s Health, InSync, Linux Journal, Popular Science, Sync, and he has written a book called Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age.
He builds products, writes books, and consults with startups to help them make cool things.
John Biggs runs the BWL family of blogs, SlushPile.net, Audiomonger, and WristWatchReview.com. He also runs the HourTime Podcast with Ariel Adams at hourtimeshow.com. Born in 1975, he currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
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Latest from John Biggs
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Scientists weigh life
Researchers at the University of Basel and University College London have created a scale that can measure life. The scale, which can measure the mass of single cells lets and them “monitor how their weight changes over time … with a resolution of milliseconds and trillionths of a gram.” This means they can weigh a cell the instant it dies, finding definitely the mass of… Read More
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Watch a real rocket scientist figure out (and beat) carnival scams
As a parent you often are forced by your tyrannical children to try carnival games. This, according to ex-NASA and JPL engineer Mark Rober, is a bad idea. Rober and his friends – including a professional baseball player – dismantle every carnival game they can find, assessing the probabilities of winning and point out that the only ones you could feasibly win are the throwing games… Read More
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Watch brand Nomos thinks only men are ‘at work’
As TechCrunch’s resident watch lover I enjoy a view on markets outside of the typical consumer electronics dreck. I get to see beautiful pieces hand-built by true artisans, historical pieces that pay homage to past glory, and sexist watch companies who suggest, in no uncertain terms, that dudes are the only ones who do any work. Bear with me. A reader of my other blog… Read More
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The new Casio G-Steel B100 is a smartwatch that hides its brains
Casio has been doing some interesting stuff lately. With their latest Edifice model they began toying with the idea of an analog watch that connects to your phone and can set itself to any timezone automatically. This decision to focus on function over OLEDs is a good one and the G-Steel B100 is the latest example of this move. The B100 is a slim, rugged watch with a multi-layered… Read More
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The Goliath CNC is an autonomous cutting machine
The phrase “autonomous cutting machine” may sound like something out of Terminator but this clever little robot, called the Goliath CNC, wants to help humanity, not harm it. Created by Lorenzo Frangi, Alessandro Trifoni, and Davide Cevoli, the robot is basically a free-rolling CNC machine that can crawl over a surface and etch and cut lines into many materials. The machine uses a… Read More
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MrOwl wants to be your new sharing platform
MrOwl is a new app by Arvind and Becky Raichur that lets you store, sort, and share data. What kind of data? All of it. The app is what would happen if a social network had a baby with Evernote. Users can create public or private stores of data – this is my branch about Rolex – and put in images, text, and links. There are popular branches like this one about secret menus and you… Read More
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The iPhone X gets a cameo in a shopping vlog
Hey guys! While we all know shopping makes everything better did we also know that it’s great fun to drive down to Infinite Circle and hit Cafe Macs with your dad who can then proceed to show you his unreleased iPhone X? Well YouTuber Brooke Peterson thinks so! In this four-minute video the prolific (and soon to be popular) vlogger hits Sephora then a Pilates Studio and then has some… Read More
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Heartland startups finally strike back
A year ago the Midwest seemed on the cusp of a renaissance. Small towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Omaha had perfected the YC model of accelerator creation and low-cost/high-impact funding. The ecosystems have cropped up everywhere there is a coffee shop or an artisanal sandwich truck and the idea of “doing a startup” vs. going to work for some corporate behemoth is a well-worn… Read More
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Nintimdo RP is a DIY Nintendo Switch clone that plays classic games
Tim Lindquist is an undergrad at Iowa State University and, if you’re into classic gaming, might just be the man of your dreams. His super-cool Nintimdo RP project is a 3D-printed case for a Raspberry Pi that is designed to simulated the size and shape of a Nintendo Switch without all those silly modern gaming advances. In fact, the Nintimdo RP is dedicated to playing classic… Read More
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Watch a tiny turtle get a 3D-printed mask
Today is your lucky day because, in my mind, it’s Terrapin Friday! In today’s episode we present Patches, a black-breasted leaf turtle who lives at the Knoxville Zoo. This 30-year-old turtle was living high on the hog for a number of years until she developed a hole near her nostril, probably caused during mating (“Male turtles are very rambunctious when they are trying to woo… Read More
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This hack connects you to the Internet via a virtual modem
Legend tells of a programmer named Martin Kirkholt Melhus who worked at a client site where there was no Internet. Realizing most of his work involved cutting and pasting from StackOverflow, he needed a way to get online. And so he turned his speaker and microphone into a working (in theory) modem. “This was only ever intended as a gimmick and a proof of concept – not something that… Read More
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Feeling blue might lead to faster broadband
In what could amount to a sea change in the way we transmit data over fiber optics, researchers at University College London have found a new way speed things up by changing the color of the transmitted light. “To maximise the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of light. Ideally, we’d dedicate a wavelength to each subscriber… Read More
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The canaries in a coal mine
I’ve seen startups come and go over the years and I was particularly interested to see what happened to August Home today. The company originally tapped Yves Behar to make a better smart lock, one that would meld with the sensitivities of a certain kind of smart home stylist with the high-concept, high-tech design of the Nest thermostat. The products, while beautiful, were unusable in… Read More
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The Sonos One offers all that wireless speaker goodness with a side of Alexa
There isn’t much to say about the new Sonos One that hasn’t been said about Sonos already. The company has long been the gold standard in wireless whole-home audio and their speakers, while small, are powerful and more than usable for music, home entertainment, and general merriment. So how do you make a good speaker better? Just add Alexa. The new Sonos One is a $199 fully… Read More
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MysteryVibe’s Stephanie Alys talks about a pleasurable future
The MysteryVibe is a snake-shaped vibrator that took the Internet by storm and is still going strong. This week I talked to the co-founder of the company, Stephanie Alys, about the future of pleasure and sex toys. It’s safe to say that this episode of Technotopia is a little NSFW. The future, suggests Alys, will feature smart tools that will help with our sex lives and our relationships. Read More
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Bitcoin engineer Jameson Lopp SWATted by angry crypto fans
An engineer for BitGo, Jameson Lopp, faced down a horde of police officers with rifles at his home in Durham, North Carolina after someone sent an anonymous tip regarding a hostage situation at his home. The engineer has been vocal on Twitter about upcoming changes in the protocol. “They shut down most of my neighborhood,” he said. “There were dozens of patrol units, a SWAT… Read More
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The Populele makes it fun/easy to learn the “devil’s guitar”
As a staunch believer in non-existent superstitions I feel that the ukulele is a very dangerous, sensual instrument that could lead to the ruination of our young people and rend the very fabric of society. That said, I can now play Stand By Me on the Populele, a feat that was rendered possible by the melding of LEDs, Bluetooth, and a clever app. The Populele by Popuband is a $159 ukulele with… Read More
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The end of oversharing
The early 2000s were the era of user-generated content. Companies like Associated Content and Shareasale rewarded content producers richly – one friend of mine made millions on YouTube in 2004 because he was one of the few serial content producers on the platform. The future was going to be broadcast in all of its gritty glory. Bloggers would win forever and ever. The voices of the… Read More
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It’s just gotten a lot easier to reprint keys from photographs
If you’re in the business of opening locked doors for business or pleasure, it just got a little easier. Using a parametric file for SCAD, you can easily recreate a Kwikset key with a few keystrokes. Kwikset is particularly vulnerable because it has only five pins and five positions – 1 being not cut at all and 5 being cut very deeply. This means you can look at an image of a… Read More
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CamSoda is updating its streaming network to support language lessons
Not to be outdone by other streaming media sites, adult site CamSoda [Partially NSFW] is introducing language lessons. That’s right: you can learn all about conjugation, declension and perhaps reproduction from scantily dressed teachers. CamSoda models requested the service when they found it fun to teach the folks they spoke with online about differences in languages. Further, the… Read More
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