strange + wonderful on technabob...

New York University graduate Adam Harvey created a product designed to protect and empower one of the planet’s most abused lifeforms, The Celebrity. The Celebrity is hunted worldwide by marksmen popularly known as The Paparazzi. To counter The Paparazzi’s flashing weapons, Harvey fitted a light sensor and 3 microcontrolled-LED lights in a clutch bag. The sensor looks out for changes…

How’d you like to wake up to a Sith Lord staring you down in the middle of the night? This Darth Vader alarm clock/radio from Sakar is sure to scare the crap out of you if you happen to roll over at 3am and stare into his glowing red LED eyeballs.

Hours display in the left eyeball, and minutes display…

Someday, people are going to learn not to mess with the dangerous technology. You’re not supposed to build an AI! Haven’t the movies taught you people anything? Apparently not, since some guy has gone and built himself a transforming robot.

Is it awesome? Of course it is–it’s a damn Transformer. It may not be a fancy little car or anything,…

In a study published in Nature magazine, a group of scientists revealed that human cells may be induced to regenerate appendages in the same way that salamanders do. Meaning we can also grow salamander limbs. Kidding.

Apparently the cells on the stumps of a salamander “only” need to revert to a “less mature” state instead of a day 1 embryonic…

Here’s an odd little gadget fresh from Japan. It’s a digital pedometer with a twist. Instead of just measuring how many steps you’ve walked, it has you play a little Samurai game as you amble along.

From what I can tell, Bandai’s YUU HO KEI pedometer game involves ordering your foot soldiers out to battle with you – by making…

Another day, another pillow–stuffed examples of geekery are fluffing up all over this week. But yesterday’s RSS pillow’s got nothing on this plush rendition of the sarlacc pit where Boba Fett met his ignoble end in Return of the Jedi.

Those tentacles may look soft and harmless, but I’m not sure I would be willing to put any portion of…

Weighing all of 48 lbs, VPI’s award winning Scoutmaster turntable is a literal heavyweight. But now it’s got a big brother, the TEAC VPI Scoutmaster II, with an aluminum block platter that weighs 19 lbs and a total weight of 53 lbs. According to Akihabara News, the weight of the turntable offsets unwanted vibration to create the “purest sound” possible.…

Here’s a fun concept for a video game… you’re stuck in a maze and the only way out is to puke all over the place. That’s the basic concept behind Spewer.

In this indie physics-based game from Eli Piilonen and Edmund McMillan, you play a test subject caught in a variety of devious puzzles, and your only method of escape…

If you play any sort of video games at all, you’re probably intimately familiar with character death. We’re desensitized to it; touch the bad thing, fall off the cliff, fail the jump, and down goes your character. Whether the game is as simple as the original Super Mario Bros. or as complex and terrifying as a survival horror title, we…

Sure, you can charge your USB gadgets with that boring old A/C adapter that the factory shipped with your electronics, but why would you want to do that if you could have one that looks like this?

These goofy looking Penguin chargers juice up any gadget that can plug into a USB connector.

You can also cram the battery from…

The Gundam statue isn’t even formally exhibited yet and we already have news on another 1:1 scale giant robot statue that will be built in Japan! Widely acknowledged as the first giant robot ever to be featured in manga, Tetsujin 28-go (”Iron Man 28″) is finally going to live up to its Westernized name, Gigantor.

A 59-ft (18-m) statue of…

If you use Twitter, odds are you occasionally inform your poor followers of some business that just really doesn’t matter. (How’s your sandwich, by the way?) Why not keep them updated on something that might actually matter, like your heart rate?

Thanks to a bunch of Japanese Twitter-lovers, anyone willing to use a heart monitor can update their Twitter feeds with…

What would you say if I told you that your next car could run on air instead of gasoline, and that it would produce zero pollution? The MDI AIRpod might just bring that promise to reality when it hits the streets later this year.

The subcompact AIRpod runs on compressed air instead of traditional automotive fuels. A set of carbon-fiber…

The quest to keep people indoors and separated from each other continues with the mydeskfriend robot toy penguin. The web-connected mydeskfriend will be able to connect to your Facebook account and read your messages and your feeds, in a robotic voice I assume. Your friends will also be able to interact with it via Facebook, thereby avoiding interacting with you.…

Apparently, the folks in Japan have some different ways of chilling out in the tub than what I’m familiar with. Banpresto Fruit Palette are light-up fake fruit that you float around your bathtub while you soak to help you let your mind drift. Ahhhhh… There’s nothing like some oversize plastic citrus to help you relax.

But unlike conventional (or organic)…