Archive for June 2016

Drake Anthony aka “styropyro“ is truly a mad scientist. Why you ask? Because he recently created a 200-watt laser bazooka. Just to give you an idea of the power that he is harnessing, a typical laser pointer is .005 watts, and even the most most powerful handheld lasers out there are just 3.5 watts.

Check out this beautiful Xbox One. This isn’t your typical boring game console that sits in your entertainment center ignored, except to turn it on and play your games. This is a console worth waging war over.

These days, smartphones can take some pretty great photos all on their own, but the biggest limitations of their cameras is the size of the lens and the size of their image sensors. Built-in lenses are usually set to a middle-of-the road field of view, so they’re usually best for general purpose usage, and not optimized for super wide angle shots, super close-ups or long shots.

Beer Pong has been around for ages, but maybe it’s time for an upgrade. Something that makes the game a bit more challenging. Someone came up with just the right idea: involve Roombas in the game.

I work in an office full of women who seem to have a completely different perception of temperature than I do. That means I sit in my office with sweat on my brow while they walk around with jackets on complaining about how cold it is.

One of the latest amazing robots to come out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is based on a Salamander. It can mimic the way a salamander moves, on land or in the water.

You may have never heard of omni-directional car wheels. I certainly hadn’t. What that means are wheels and tires that allow the vehicle to move in any direction you need it to within the length of its body.

This is the sort of nightmarish bike H.R. Giger might sell you if he owned a creepy bike store. It’s slow, creepy and inspired by the Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest. This thing was built by California art and engineering collective CARV.

Bose is offering up a new product that they hope will encourage kids to learn about electronics. The Speaker Cube is a build-it-yourself Bluetooth speaker that is aimed at kids eight years old and older. With the $149 Speaker Cube, anyone can learn step by step, how to make a device that reproduces music or other sounds.

Now robots are now taking our pizza making jobs. Mamma-Mia! This is how robots make and deliver pizza: Marta is a robot that assembles pizzas, then hands them off to another robot named Bruno. Bruno loads the pizzas into an oven where they bake partially.

I watched Labyrinth growing up and the movie seriously creeped me out. Still, it had Miss Hottie 1986 Jennifer Connelly in it so I watched. David Bowie was one weird bastard in this movie.  Still I have fond memories of the ’80s thanks in part to this film.

I sort of wish someone here in the US would make the sort of weird hamburgers that they get in Japan on a regular basis. J.S. Burger Café in Japan has turned its burger grilling skills to making Ghostbusters themed hamburgers and they look oddly appetizing.

Remember SpotMini, the Boston Dynamics robot dog of doom that does chores around the house? Well, he’s back, and it turns out he has a really foul mouth. This parody video comes from British comedian vagabonds.

When my kids were really small, I found it highly entertaining to use gobs of bath bubbles to create little wizard hats and beards on their little chubby faces. The trick was to see how tall you could get the hat before one of them crushed it or ate a big mouthful of beard bubbles.

One of the worst things about cooking burgers or steak on the grill is having to start the charcoal. For me it always seemed like the charcoal started up well enough, and then as soon as the fluid burned off, the coals were cold as ice and the meat never cooked.

Most new cars these days come with a backup camera, or offer one as an option. But if you’ve got a car without a backup camera, you’ll definitely want to check this out. The Pearl RearVision is a license plate cover that will alert you when there are obstacles behind the car while you’re backing up.