Kinda like last Friday, there’s no really gadgetry going on here, but these guys are just SO CUTE and alien-y I had to post about them. They’re nudibranchs, a type of sea slug, and they’re some of the most flagrantly colorful animals on the planet. The colors are partially to help them blend in on coral reefs, and partially to communicate that they’re poisonous. National geographic has a mind bending gallery by David Doubilet that you can check out here, and I’ve posted some of my favorite pics after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Your weird USB combination of the day comes in the form of a this little dog-shaped 4 port USB 2.0 hub. It’s not just any dog, though… It’s a cycloptic dog, with a giant glowing LED in the middle of its head. If this freaks you out a little bit, don’t fret, just pull the head off of the body and you’ve got an auto-tuning AM/FM radio with an integrated speaker that runs off of 2 AAA batteries. How cool is that? Yeah, you’re right, not especially. At only $20, though, it’s hard to get past the “why the heck not” factor.
I’ll be posting tons of pics from this past weekend’s Maker Faire over the next few days, but here’s a little taste. This is Compubeaver. He’s a beaver (or I guess he used to be a beaver), who now has a computer inside him. His torso contains a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 160gb HD, a gig of ram, a chest-loading DVD burner, and, um, some tastefully placed USB ports. If you’d like a Compubeaver of your very own, Instructables will show you how to make one in 29 easy steps.
Keeping Compubeaver company was Text-o-possum, which combines a bluetooth laser keyboard with, well, a possum, allowing “the convenience of regular keyboard typing in a possum form. Text-o-possum puts the awesome in possum - the future is here!”
Both of these animals were modded by Your Psycho Girlfriend. And if you find yourself asking a question like “why would anybody DO this,” you’ll need to try and get more in the spirit of Maker Faire, which I might sum up as: “Why not do it, it’s cool!”
You might be surprised how often visitors to the Oakland Zoo (where I volunteer) ask whether or not the alligators are… you know… real. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, if you’ve ever seen a real live alligator, since most of the time real live alligators look just like this fake alligator decoy. Except, this is better than a real alligator, since it’s solar powered and has light up eyes. You can anchor it to the bottom of your fish pond, swimming pool, or bathtub to keep predators (or those damn kids) from chasing your koi. And zoos? They can save big money on food and care and pretty much nobody will notice, as long as visitors can be convinced that the solar power cells are just an adaptation. You know, ’cause of the high price of gas and all.
As you might expect, that headline doesn’t tell anything close to the whole story, but it’s essentially true and dripping with irony. And I like the picture. In a test off the coast of South Australia, a Shark Shield device (which is supposed to repel sharks with a conductive field that causes them to experience uncomfortable muscle spasms if they get too close) was chomped on by a 12 foot long Great White shark. The device was attached to a float at the time, instead of a surfer. The company says that the test failure was due to a problem with the electrode generating the field, and not with the way the thing works, but I’m not sure that would make me feel much better.
The company says on their website that “the testing conducted to date proves conclusively (100% of the time) that sharks detest the effect the field has on them, and will keep a safe distance between themselves and the Shark Shield”, but a spokesman has modified that to “nobody wearing a Shark Shield has ever been attacked by a shark.” My guess is that you’re probably better off with one of these things on than not, but keep in mind that your odds of being bitten by a shark are astronomically low. If you’re still worried, a personal Shark Shield for surfers or divers will cost you about $645.
For the last several years, GDC has hosted the Game Design Challenge, where three talented game designers create games based on some sort of weird concept. This year, the challenge was to create a concept for a game playable by humans and at least one other species. The competitors included Brenda Brathwaite (the Wizardry series), Steve Meretzky (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Zoo Tycoon), and returning champion and the most famous puzzle game designer you may never have heard of, Alexey Pajitnov (inventor of Tetris). Read about the concepts, including paintball dolphins and killer mutant bacteria, and learn who won, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Alright, so it doesn’t actually turn you into an ant, but it might help you feel like one. A really goofy one, but what’s wrong with that? These three devices emulate some of the characteristics of three different animals: pretend you’re a giraffe by adding 30 centimeters to your height, pretend you’re a bird with a headband that lets you sense geomagnetic fields, or pretend you’re an ant with a VR helmet and a 50x camera in your “foot.” As you might expect from the picture, these are all designed for kids, but that wouldn’t stop me from putting on the ant helmet and crawling around my back yard for a bit. A few more pics of the ant helmet (and views from the 50x camera) after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
You don’t think about it much, but generally, when stuff falls over, it doesn’t get back up. Off the top of my head, I can think of two exceptions to the rule: Weebles, and turtles. Of course, Weebles (and most other self-righting objects) cheat by having a weight in the bottom. The Gomboc, “invented” last December by Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, is the first convex, homogeneous object with only one stable orientation, which means that it’ll always turn itself “up” no matter which way you set it down, without any help:
Turtles, though, seem to have had this figured out a while ago… Quite a few of them have shells shaped nearly identically to the Gomboc. As for practical uses for those of us who aren’t turtles, I honestly don’t know what this is good for. How about a cake mold, to make self-righting pineapple upside-down cake? Yeah, okay, got nothin’. It’s definitely cool, though.
If you want to order one, they’re available in a limited edition starting at about 1000 euros. Or you could just go find a turtle somewhere.
We don’t talk about food much here at OhGizmo, and for good reason. I’ve yet to find a piece of food that is considered a gadget (not counting those food-shaped USB drives, they aren’t actually food to begin with). However, I thought that I would bring up the topic somewhat briefly because there has been a recent development in the state of cloned meat.
The FDA has officially announced that cloned beef and dairy are completely safe for human consumption. There are plenty of activists out there that aren’t going to be pleased with this news, but I don’t really see any reason why we shouldn’t do this, so long as it has been deemed safe. I’d eat some cloned beef, what about you guys?
Forget about cellphones and other such gadgets, even the bowls the Japanese use to feed their pets are more advanced than most of the tech we have access to. The iSeePet360, whose name seems to capitalize on some of the more popular consumer electronics on the market provides an easy way for busy pet owners to keep an eye on their furry companions while they’re away from home.
Using a cellphone or PC, they can access a web enabled camera on the iSeePet360 to see what their pet is doing at any time. And if the animal doesn’t happen to be in range of the camera, the owner can trigger an audio announcement that dinner is ready while remotely releasing dry pet food into the bowl. From my own experiences, if that doesn’t bring them running you know they’re probably getting into trouble.
And if you’re thinking to yourself that such ‘luxury’ doesn’t come cheap you’d be right. The iSeePet360 is available for about $444 but come on, you’d do anything for your pet right?
Related Tags: -Still-Great, Animals, Unrelated
Permalink | 
No Comments
The company says on their website that “the testing conducted to date proves conclusively (100% of the time) that sharks detest the effect the field has on them, and will keep a safe distance between themselves and the Shark Shield”, but a spokesman has modified that to “nobody wearing a Shark Shield has ever been attacked by a shark.” My guess is that you’re probably better off with one of these things on than not, but keep in mind that your odds of being bitten by a shark are astronomically low. If you’re still worried, a personal Shark Shield for surfers or divers will cost you about $645.
