Archive for April 2013

Chairman of the Turkish Cultural Association of Austria, Birol Kilic, thinks the Jabba’s Palace LEGO play set is “culturally insensitive.” Why? He says that it resembles Istanbul’s historic mosque Hagia Sophia. Or any other building with a domed roof, for that matter.

Who says smoke alarms need to be nondescript beige boxes? Helsinki designer Paola Suhonen sured doesn’t think so, with her unique smoke detector that looks like a gigantic house fly.

Despite the fact that I’ve played through both Portal games from start to finish a couple of times now, they’re still some of my favorites of all time. Between the tricky puzzles and gleefully dark sense of humor, what’s not to love?

Do you really want a Jar Jar Binks USB flash drive? There are so many better characters you could choose from. Well, at least this storage device can’t possibly be as inept and useless as the CGI Gungan himself, right?

Etsy is home to all sorts of fun, cute and geeky handmade stuff, and these creations by Little Bun satisfy all three of those criteria in spades. She makes little people and characters based on pop culture figures using clothespins as their bodies.

We’ve seen beautiful and grand LEGO Star Wars chess sets before, but Avi Solomon’s LEGO Star Wars micro chess set is unique in its simplicity and portability. With your help – and LEGO’s benevolence – it could become a real product.

Automation company Festo loves showing off its technologies and expertise by creating robot versions of animals. We’ve featured the company’s SmartBird before, and you may have also seen its AirPenguin in action. Now the company has released information about its latest pet project, the BionicOpter.

Computer geeks have been using various flavors of 3DMark to benchmark their computers for years. The cool thing about their benchmark suite is that it has visually impressive tests that challenge both the GPU and CPU inside your computer.

I’m kind of a dessert purist. For example, I like plain cheesecake – not one that tastes like pumpkins or anything else. And desserts that try to imitate other desserts usually bug me – like cinnamon apple pie flavored yogurt.

Beer is a real man’s drink. That’s why it comes in a can or a glass. It would come in a suit of armor if it were practical to manufacture it that way. But since it’s not, Dougfungus has done it for us.

Ever wanted a robotic hand? Well unless you’re a Terminator, or this guy, you probably don’t have one. Well, thanks to 3D printing, and the wonders of Kickstarter, you can soon own your own robot hand without breaking the bank.

Next time you throw a cocktail party with a prohibition-era, Boardwalk Empire theme, I’ve got the perfect thing for you. Instead of serving up your drinks with regular ice cubes in them, try putting some gun-shaped ones in their cocktails.

Anyone who watched last Saturday night’s Doctor Who episode noticed the book Summer Falls by Amelia Williams when Clara and Artie talked about it. And no doubt you were interested in what lies between the pages.

Supercomputers are incredible pieces of technology with thousands of processors, terabytes of memory, and often hundreds of terabytes of storage as well. Back in 2008, the fastest supercomputer in the world was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, called the Roadrunner.

Sega has been making their Homestar planetariums for a number of years, and has finally created one that might just be worthy of a place in my geek sanctuary, with the release of their new Darth Vader Homestar projector.

Readers can be a fickle bunch – around here we know this from experience. It seems like we’re always getting comments or e-mails accusing us of taking money from this company or that because we cover so many of their products.