Last night The Gadget Show in the UK revealed a unique simulator that allows users to be fully immersed in the first person shooter game Battlefield 3.
Crazy Gadgets
If you have a MacBook Air and a few hundred dollars to waste, then you can now give your MacBook Air the colorware treatment.
The company is now offering the MacBook Air in any colour combination you wish and allows you to choose what you want. The price? $1850 although it does include a 13 inch MacBook Air (2010 model). [click to continue…]
TomTom has released a few different voice packs for TomTom navigators. These have included the TomTom Yoda voice pack as well as the Darth Vader voice pack. Next up is the Looney Tunes voice pack that brings the likes of Bugs Bunny and co to TomTom.
Several packs will be made available which includes the already mentioned Bugs Bunny as well as Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Pepé le Pew. [click to continue…]
When Apple [AAPL] announced the iPod nano last week, the music player was seen with a watch filling the small square screen. This of course made a number of people look at comparing this thing to a watch and wearing it around a wrist.
Well, you can now do just that for $17. The strap is 22mm wide and is a Matatac Nylon band that has a section cut out for the clip to attach to. It comes in a number of colours. [click to continue…]
eBay is often full of random auctions. Today we came across an auction with a BIN (Buy it Now) price tag of $30,000. What you get for $30,000 is a lot of video games, consoles, accessories and more. All of the items come from a game store that deals primarily in used console games. The store is shutting down in a few weeks time and all the games need to go. [click to continue…]
Check out the video below. It demos a wipeout style game made of cardboard where an RC car is driven around a track controlled by a retro arcade machine.
There's not much to say about the video other than the suggestion you watch it now to see how it was done and why... [click to continue…]
If you were impressed with the 45 Gigapixel Dubai capture then check out the 70 Gigapixel Budapest 360 degree panoramic picture.
The picture it's self was created using two 25 megapixel Sony A900 cameras using 400mm Minolta lenses along with 1.4X teleconverters. The new 70 gigapixel image is said to now be the largest photograph in the world and the results are quite amazing. [click to continue…]
The NXT is a brick shaped computer that is capable of detecting inputs from sensors. We've seen the NXT used a number of times in custom built Lego projects.
In this case, the NXT has been used to play back sounds and basically sound like a drum machine. The drum machine is called the NXT-606. Full instructions have been provided so you can actually build your own out of an NXT kit.
To get the NXT working as a drum machine you'll need to pick up some free software that can be found over here. [click to continue…]
The Chipophone on the outside looks like an old 80's kind of home organ. Inside though, it's a whole different story. The organ has been modified to contain a bunch of chips that make it play like an old 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I guess you could still say it's an 80's organ, but in a different sort of 80's way.
Created by Linus Akesson, the Chipophone has the looks of an old organ, but the brains needed to crank out awesome 8-bit sounds for live chiptune performances. Linus ripped out all of the original tone-generators and wired up keys via a bunch of 74HC165 chips, daisy-chained together to an Atmega88 controller chip. He also wired up the knob potentiometers to the microcontroller's analog inputs.
Have a look at the video below to see Gary Numan play the 1979 hit "Cars" on a couple of dozen real cars. The setup is quite bizarre where 24 cars are attached to a single car battery as well as a double keyboard. When a key is pushed the corresponding car horn sounds to make the Cars tune. [click to continue…]
EpicWin is an app launching soon that spruces up your To-Do list a little by making it in to an RPG game. Most to-do lists are just lists of items stored on paper, in Outlook or wherever that show a list of things you need to do. Often the reminder gets delayed 5 minutes and another 5 minutes and another day etc... until nothing really gets done.
What EpicWin attempts to do is make completing tasks more rewarding. You enter your to-do list on to the EpicWin iPhone app and it becomes part of an RPG. When you mark off your to-do list one at a time, ie - you accomplish tasks rather than postponing them, you get rewarded in the game. As you complete more tasks you jump up levels, get more stamina and other bonuses. [click to continue…]
The image above shows a small metallic cube that was created by applying 1,000,000 atmospheres worth of pressure to the chemical xenon difluoride. This particular chemical is normally a white powder. With the extra atmospheric pressure squashing it, it manages to be capable of storing an amazing amount of energy inside.
DVICE mention that it becomes a very powerful battery although it is unknown at the moment what kind of life span could be expected from the small cube.
Of course, it's not going to be easy to apply 1,000,000 atmospheres worth of pressure to this caustic and stinky powder that's normally used to etch circuits on silicon. To withstand that kind of pressure, you need a tiny 2-by-3-inch compartment lined with a couple of diamond anvils.