How Realistic Are These Five NYC Apartments You’ve Seen on TV?

By Harry Sawyers

There’s always a slight hint of doubt when you see a TV character’s fictional apartment, even if the place is a borderline dump. If it’s on TV, it just doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true.

Padmapper took a look at five New York apartments—the places the characters live in Mad Men, Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and 30 Rock.

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Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

This boy crazy.

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Gizmodo Is Back on Gizmodo.com!

By Harry Sawyers

After spending the better part of last week rescuing our servers from the storm, Gawker Media’s tech team has restored gizmodo.com to its former glory. Thanks guys!

And thank all of you for reading our Tumblr over the past week. It’s been fun. The posts have migrated back to the main site, with the discussions open—so feel free to let loose with the witty, incisive reactions you’ve been holding back. We missed you.

Also, we’re keeping updates.gizmodo.com online—we love Tumblr, we appreciate the community, and we’re not going to stop posting on this site. We plan run some stories that feel a little different than your regularly scheduled gizmodo.com programming. So stick around!

[Gizmodo]

Movie Night: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

By Brian Barrett

One of the biggest commercial flops of the late 1980s also happens to be one of the most wonderfully imaginative, whimsical, and downright silly movies of the last several decades. Not that you’d expect any less from Terry Gilliam, especially when he was in his prime.

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Soundtrack: Dinosaur Jr. - Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know

I hadn’t thought much about Dinosaur Jr. since the mid-90s. Why would I have? They broke up in 1997, and got back together without much fanfare in 2005. But the group’s latest album, and particularly this lead track, hits me with a jolt. It belongs in 2012, but feels like 1994. It’s a thread strung through a wormhole, a reminder that even as you get older (and older), you haven’t changed as dramatically as you might think. And neither has the world around you.

The Surest Way to a Viral Hit: Professional Clicking

By Brian Barrett

Need a viral smash? No point leaving it to chance. Just get Buyral on case. Their team of expert clickers will get your views up in no time; whether or not anyone actually sees it is another matter altogether.

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Maybe We Wouldn’t Pirate Music If There Were Anywhere Else to Hear It

By Brian Barrett

It may not be totally fair to blame piracy’s ascension on MTV’s decline. But you know what? Neither was sending Snooki to the Vatican.

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Amazon Really Does Lose Money on Every Kindle Fire HD (But Microsoft, Not So Much)

By Brian Barrett

Fresh on the heels of an iPad mini teardown that revealed $188 worth of components, IHS has pegged the Kindle Fire HD bill of materials at $165. That means that only about 20 bucks’ worth of hardware separates devices with $130 price tag differential. Yeesh.

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Copyright-Infringing Tweets Will Now Be “Withdrawn” Instead of “Disappeared Forever”

By Brian Barrett

Twitter received 4,410 DMCA takedown notices last year alone. But while previously a successful claim would lead to a tweet being vanished under dark of night, from here on out it will be replaced by a notice that it’s being withheld.

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Here’s the Mother Lode of Windows 8 Nerdery

By Brian Barrett

Sure, you watched the Microsoft Build conference keynote last week. Why not? It had a comprehensive Windows 8 overview, Ballmer being Ballmer, some jaunty pre-show music. You know, typical keynote stuff. But if that didn’t satisfy your Windows 8 itch, well, here’s your chance to scratch it raw.

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Hackers Replace NBC Sites With Smörgåsbord of Hacker Cliches (Updated)

By Brian Barrett

Those in search of SNL and 30 Rock clips over at NBC’s videos page have been met with something quite different: a hacked page of weirdness with a surprisingly catchy soundtrack. It’s most prominent website hack we’ve seen in a while, and also one of the least coherent.

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The Onion’s TED Talk Parodies Keep Getting Better (And More Scathing)

By Brian Barrett

We haven’t checked in on The Onion’s brutal TED Talk parody series, but now’s as good a time as any to get caught up. Above is the most recent, a breakdown of farm animal noises with rapidly escalating pretension. And below? Maybe the purest distillation of TED yet.

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Sandy-Soaked New Jerseyans Will Be Able to Vote by Email

By Brian Barrett

Rather than let a hurricane disenfranchise thousands of displaced New Jersey residents, Governor Chris Christie has given a green-light for voting by email or fax. Are the security concerns? Sure. But if you’re going to pilot a e-voting program, at least it’s in a situation that has no other choice, and that isn’t really in contention anyway.

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