While you tend to think of robots doing useful things, like building your cars or scooping your pets’ poo, this robot created by Jason Huggins does nothing but play Angry Birds. It’s called the BitbeamBot and consists of a finger-like rod connected to two servos. The rod is tipped with skin-like material (we think it’s sausage; sausage works great on iDevices and is also delicious) and moves on a simple X-Y plane in order to sling the little avians to their destructive doom. It’s not as exciting as it appears though, because the BitbeamBot is entirely controlled by Jason, who sends commands to it via a remote. It’s as much of a robot as those remote controlled metal mechs from that battle bot show, or whatever it was called.
Still, there may be a purpose to the madness since “he is the co-founder of Saucelabs, and the creator of Selenium. Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications.” The ultimate goal? Perhaps to create farms of game-playing robots that would take care of one of the most tedious parts of software development: debugging.
You know what this means, kids? You dreaming of being a video game tester when you grow up? Please, stay in school and do something useful: your dream job is toast.
Yeah… So it’s a couch. A Space Invaders couch. If you were born in the 80s, or have any appreciation for classic gaming titles, you’ve got to get cracking. Sell your firstborn son, your kidney or whatever it is you need to gather the £5,500 this couch is going to set you back.
Created by Russian industrial designer Igor Chak, it’s made using premium materials, fine leather and even memory foam cushions. Each one is handmade to order and it is designed and manufactured in Los Angeles.
Not that any of this really matters because, come on guys, look at this. It’s a Space Invaders couch.
Oh, and I just saw everyone was talking about this last August. Crap. Well, it’s still nice, isn’t it?
We’re sure you’ve heard, but solid state drives are awesome. Low power consumption, smaller footprint and blazing fast speeds. Sadly they have tended to come in generally smaller capacities, which is why the Macbook Air comes with so little storage. But things are slowly changing. OCZ has announced the world’s first SSD drive to hit the 1TB mark. And it looks like it’ll have some very impressive specs:
Indilin Everest control will feature a 512MB DRAM cache, with the SATA 3.0 featuring read speeds of 560MB/s and write speeds of 400MB/s, and the SATA 2.0 with read and write speeds of 275MB/s and 265MB/s respectively.
Of course whenever you’re talking about a product that’s pushing the envelope, it’ll also be pushing the wallet. Although no official price has been released for this drive, you can expect it to be somewhere around $1.20 per GB.
When we say dangerous, we mean for your iPad 2 of course. Not for the kids or anything, but quite frankly, our iPad 2 being in danger seems almost as unnerving. See, the Crayola Trace and Draw is a toy that would encourage your kids to play with the Jesus tablet. Encourage them, as opposed to instilling mortal fear of ever getting close to it lest they break it. It’s a kid-resistant polycarbonate shell (we’re certain it’ll resist the inevitable fall down a flight of stairs… right?), a peel-off plastic screen and an app. Slide in some tracing paper and the app will show your little’un things they can trace, or color or whatever it is kids do with colored pencils. There’s storage space in the shell for their crayons. And you’ll be getting plenty of “art” which you can proudly display around the house and even at work.
An extra benefit of the $40 toy is that it’ll help chip away whatever is left of your manhood with the mighty cleaver of domestication.
The $694 you’ll be saving on this Dell XPS 17 inch laptop represent almost half its price. 42% to be exact. And for $949 you’ll get getting a good amount of laptop: Core i7-2670M 2.2GHz Quad-core processor, powered by 8GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive (combined), 1080p LCD & NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M 3GB graphics. One reviewer said this of the machine: “If you want to call a 3D capable entertainment platform your own, you could take a liking to the XPS 17.”
There isn’t a whole lot more to say on this other than the fact that the deal ends today, Friday the 21st.
The Aeroshots are caffeine inhalers. They contain a quick-dissolving powder which may or may not have a taste: take a puff and you get an instant burst of caffeine. Each Aeroshot cartridge contains 100mg of caffeine, or about as much as a large-ish coffee. It can take 6 to 8 shots for the cartridge to empty.
Now we use the word cartridge very deliberately, as we know it’s only a matter of time until some drunk/stoned/confused college kid wanting to study bites on a shotgun shell… and eats a bunch of pellets or something. No really, what’s the worse that can happen if you bite a shotgun shell? Anyone?
We don’t know the price yet, but they’ll hit stores in Boston and New York in 87 days as of this writing.
Well this is one of those use-at-your-own-risk sort of devices. The Yapper Zapper is a cell phone jammer that blocks GSM, CDMA, DCS, PHS and 3G signals up to 10 meters (30 feet). It works continuously on a single charge for up to 2 hours and is about the size of a chunky cell phone itself. Put it in your pocket during a movie screening and… well, you get what this does. Or a commute to work. Or a meal. The places where something like this would be a godsend are almost endless.
Sadly a device like this is illegal in most jurisdictions we can think of, while incessant yammering in inappropriate places is not. We’re not even certain you’d be able to get this shipped to you. But it will cost you $109 to try.
Let’s face it, Vertu phones are for the rich. They’re a status symbol, like a Ferrari or a Rolex. And now the company is launching its first touchscreen with a capacitive AMOLED touch display and an upgraded 8 Megapixel camera, which is a first of its kind in this high-end range. Also, 32GB of data storage on the phone. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Specs don’t really matter on these phones; they could be steam powered and they’d still sell. We don’t even know what OS it’s going to be running. It might be Symbian for all we know as that was a staple Virtu OS previously. What does matter for a Virtu owner is the other stuff that comes with its purchase. Top notch concierge service for instance.
Vertu Concierge can arrange bespoke gifts for a loved one, or suggest the best restaurant in town for a business meeting, all thanks to their staff of global experts based in all the major cities that will advise you either via voice call or email.
Vertu Concierge can even get you past the lines and security and night clubs and country clubs, partnering with many members around the world to offer a once-yearly admission for you and a friend.
Hear that? VIP service at clubs? There’s even access to a sommelier to help you pick good wines. And here are the prices: “Brown ($6,070), polished black or pink ($6,760), black alligator ($8,967), black or white alligator leather with diamonds ($10,900), and red gold with precious metals ($15,034).”
Oh and Rosie Huntington-Whitely was at the launch party. She’s the girl that replaced Meagan Fox on the new Transformers movie. Just sayin…
The marketing department has gone and given the Gerber Gator Pro a zombie apocalypse angle. Yes, we suppose it could separate a zombie’s head from its body in a hurry. But when was the last time you were in a zombie apocalypse? Please. What we really have to worry about is a hipster invasion and I hear New York City is turning into ground zero. But we won’t seriously get on the record condoning any kind of violence. No, really, we aren’t, that’s just sick. What we’re saying is that instead of thinking about killing zombies, the Gerber Gator Pro is pretty badass for any survivalist, woodsy type of folk. It has a multi-purpose blade that can act as an axe, a machete or a knife and might, just might have kept you a little safer if you were in the woods in Ohio recently (wild animals escaped, if you don’t know). It has a rubber grip, weighs 18 ounces and costs $53.
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