Cats know where it’s at. All they seem to do is sleep, eat, sleep, stretch, get you to pet them, lick themselves, and sleep. I’m not sure what exactly they’re good for, besides being warm and fuzzy while making you feel jealous and somehow inferior at the same time. It seems like the Chinese have figured it out, though: cats are USB compatible. Simply jam your peripherals into kitty’s spine, or its mouth, and you’re good to go. If you want to see something really messed up, I might suggest plugging a couple USB Humping Dogs into it. Just picture that for a second and you’ll see what I mean.
In order to get smooth and stable video, the pros use several thousand dollar Steadicams. After watching this video, I think a chicken might be more effective. While Steadicams rely on high inertial mass to keep them from jiggling around, the chicken possesses superior technology in the form of a gyroscope (probably its inner ear) and compensating motors (the muscles in its neck). It’s able to instantaneously compensate for any movements of its body to keep its head just about perfectly stable. So all you really need to vastly improve your spastic videography is a willing chicken, a little helmet with a camera mount, and something to keep the chicken looking where you want it to look. Something like, I dunno, a girl chicken in a bikini or something. Brilliant.
Food chains are rather nasty things. We don’t like to think about it much, but you know all those cute little fuzzy wuzzy soft and cuddly animals like bunnies and gerbils? They exist primarily to get EATEN by bigger animals with NASTY SHARP POINTY TEETH. GRRRRRR!!! The sooner your kids learn that, the better they will be able to survive in the wild, so why not be pragmatic this holiday season and get them some Food Chain Friends.
Food Chain Friends come from a far away planet called Daro, which exists much like Earth did, some 200 million years ago. They come in sets of five, and cutely feast upon one another. For example, the Frokol eats the Vextie eats the Fergel eats the Skoodle eats the Zezzel, which gets by on Floober Tree Moss. Get it? No? Well, if you can fit one into the mouth of another, odds are it’s lower on the food chain and therefore lunch.
They’re friends. They eat each other. It’s a complicated relationship.™ Food Chain Friends come in two different sets, and are available for about $50 at FAO Schwartz among other places.
Yes, I know, your dog is the best dog ever and you just have to know what he’s doing all the time and share that information with the rest of the known universe. Well, get yourself a SNIF tag and you can do just that. Hooray. The SNIF tag uses and accelerometer to guess what your dog is most likely doing (walking, running, napping, licking itself, etc.) and then transmits the information wirelessly to the SNIF base station, where you can monitor your pet real time through the SNIF website and post updates to your twitter account every 30 seconds. If your dog is out of range, the SNIF tag stores the information, which you can retrieve by docking the tag with the base station later. You can compare the activity levels of your dog with other dogs of the same size and breed, and see how your pooch stacks up to the competition.
In addition to activity monitoring, SNIF tags also contain a unique ID. When your dog meets another SNIF tag equipped dog, the tags exchange IDs through RFID, and your dog as made a “friend,” who you can check out later by accessing your dog’s social network via the SNIF website. And hey, if the owner is cute, “you have the choice of becoming friends, or maybe more.” Um, right. The big downside to the SNIF tag that I can see is that it’ll just provide conclusive proof that your dog is much more fit, and has a lot more friends, than you. Oh well, you knew it all along.
The SNIF tag starter kit costs $200 for a limited time here, and it costs $89 a year to access some unspecified “premium” online features. An extra perky user review of the SNIF tag (OMG it accessorizes and lights up!) after the jump.
There are the casual bird watchers, who can appreciate robins and blue jays and stuff when they see them. Then there are bird enthusiasts, who buy binoculars and telescopes to spot more exotic types. And then we’ve got the actual bird voyeurs, who buy hardcore spy equipment to catch birds with their pants down. If you’re a creepy weirdo, a Handykam system is for you. It’s a nest box with a digital camera hidden inside the roof, letting you spy on the comings and goings of your feathery woodland neighbors.
Handykam comes in either wireless or wired versions, although why you’d want a wired version is beyond me since the thing is going outside. The cameras are full color, with 420 lines of resolution and sound, and will switch to infrared black and white mode at night using an array of IR LEDs to illuminate the hot, hot action. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an up-close view of a pair of tits. Great tits.
Handykam bird boxes start out at about $110 for a wired camera in a pine box, and the wireless version in cedar costs about twice that. Feeders with camera systems are also available, starting at $94. Sample video of what you might expect to see, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Unlike most pieces of functional artwork, the Seven Rats Table Light doesn’t seem to be making any sort of Statement and may just be weird for the sake of being weird. Designed by Ingo Maurer “and team” (whatever that means) the light sculpture is made of steel, gold, brass, and plastic cages which contain three black and four white rats (plastic rats, calm down), and the whole thing is lit from the bottom with a 50 watt halogen bulb.
Oh, wait. I know what this lamp-thing is all about. It’s so obvious, that’s why they don’t spell it out for you. Clearly, it symbolizes the subconscious obsession of the human race with subjugating nature to create a schism between mind and body that satisfies our materialist and consumerist super-egos while illustrating the conflict between self and other in the context of subliminal racial pressures via a visual exposition of our primal instincts through Plato’s cave allegory. It’s so simple.
No matter how incredibly deep the underlying meaning of this thing is, the $4680 cost means that it would be far, far cheaper to make this light fixture with real cages and real rats. And I bet if you connected all the cages and added some comfy hammocks, the rats (two perhaps, not seven) might even enjoy the setup. And you probably would enjoy it a lot more, too, having some fuzzy little ratties to keep you company instead of a really, really weird sculpture with (okay, I admit it) an incomprehensible meaning.
See this thing? This is the bane of curious little kitties everywhere. It’s a blender and a strobe light attached to a remote switch that’s triggered by a motion sensing camera. When kitty decides to explore the counter in search of yummy houseplants, the blender and strobe light fire off for 3 seconds, and a camera documents the whole thing, uploads the movie, and sends the owner a link via email. You could come up with a simpler solution to keep cats off of your counters, but why would you want to? Click here to watch the videos, they’re damn funny.
The Blender Defender is something you can build yourself for a couple hundred bucks and a passing familiarity with Linux; basic instructions are on the Blender Defender website.
Animal Planet has commissioned a series of claymation videos on how to save the planet. None of the tips they offer are likely to surprise you, but the videos are pretty funny and they address common sense things that we should all keep in mind. You can view all 11 clips on YouTube here, and I’ve included another of my favorites after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
This, folks, is a solar powered camel. Let’s all just ponder that for a second. Truthfully, this camel is not, in fact, powered by the sun, but the refrigerator on its back is. The cooled-down camels are used to transport vaccines and the occasional pint of Ben & Jerry’s to remote health clinics; when they arrive, the panels can be detached and used to provide additional electricity to the clinic. A foot-powered system can be used as backup during the 15 minutes at night when the sun is not actively trying to fry you.
The camels are part of Princeton’s Mpala project, helping nomadic communities in Kenya to use technology to improve their lives.
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