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We've been hearing about the possibility of 3D-printed, full-size houses for some time. We may even get our first one sometime this year, thanks to the efforts of a couple of different architectural firms. Now you can get an idea of what it would take to create your own home from 3D-printed blocks.

Real estate blog Movoto has created a "3D Print your House" calculator to give you the daunting numbers involved with using a 3D printer to make your abode. The numbers are based on the time and cost of materials of using a MakerBot Replicator 2 to print out plastic bricks.… Read more

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

You wouldn't expect high-end features in a simple phone, and you're not going to get them with the Envoy II. Not only is the low-resolution screen hard to look at from certain angles, you also won't get video recording, a flash, or any expandable memory.

True, like its predecessor, this handset is geared toward people who are mostly interested in making calls. But given that, call quality should have been better than it was.

Frankly, for a prepaid price of $49.99 and a contract price of $69.99, I'd want something more. Fortunately for U.… Read more

Fit Radio takes one of the more popular features of other radio curation services and builds an entire app around it. The result is a stripped-down music discovery and radio app that works perfectly for those who are heading to the gym and don't already have their own playlists.

The purpose of Fit Radio is to create and curate playlists of songs that are perfect for anyone going to the gym or working out at home. It combines a number of features in terms of DJ-supported playlists and custom songs to give you a choice among dozens of possible … Read more

iCarousel offers a quick, intuitive image search tool for your iPhone that takes only moments to set up and that works instantly for any search. The interface is designed to resemble the carousel-style sliders in iOS, but ironically loads and moves faster than most of the apps Apple integrates this feature into. The result is a fun-to-use app that has a number of instantly accessible uses.

iCarousel is a relatively feature-bare app. When it opens, select your search term and hit the button to populate a carousel of images. It takes only a second or so for the carousel to … Read more

Instapicframe generates framed photos and other effects for Instagram, but due to a convoluted menu system and poorly-labeled home screen, it is often unnecessarily hard to use. Buttons are located in three different places, only some are labeled, and the process of actually creating and sharing an image takes much longer than should be necessary.

When you open Instapicframe for the first time you must create a project. Once you do, you will be able to choose from various frame options and then add images to those frames. Image options include images on your phone or those on your Facebook … Read more

Old Fart Booth is far from the only photo modification app on the App Store, nor is it the best; but with a sleek interface and impressive effects, it can be a lot of fun to play with. Using facial matching technology and what appears to be a very sophisticated filter, Old Fart Booth presents realistic images of what you or your friends could look like in old age. The results may be a bit disturbing, but are also very entertaining.

When you open Old Fart Booth for the first time, you will need to sift through a fair number … Read more

PhotoTribe creates a personalized network of individuals with whom you can share photos and videos from your mobile device, all of it done very smoothly. While other apps allow you to share images and videos easily, few offer the kind of security and personalization that PhotoTribe does. While it is necessary for every member of the Tribe to have a PhotoTribe membership, the benefits are numerous.

The first step in using PhotoTribe is to create your account--you can either sign up directly or log in with Facebook. From there, you can create a new Tribe, decide who can add people … Read more

PicsPlay offers a large number of photo editing tools in a relatively easy-to-navigate interface that works well on the iPhone. For a free app with few restrictions, PicsPlay is a very solid, well-designed, and ultimately very useful photo editor. It gets crowded by the rampant competition on the App Store, but on its merits alone, it deserves to be one of the top free options available.

PicsPlay manages to get everything you'll need onto one screen for easy access, but keeps it from being overcrowded. Once you load an image (either from your phone or camera), you can crop … Read more