By David Ponce

Weather forecasting, inaccurate as it might sometimes seem, is still a pretty useful science. But at the end of the day, you’re only told what tomorrow’s temperature is going to be. No one is actually, you know, showing you. That might be the line of thought that made one Robb Godshaw create the above Cryoscope. It’s a device that lets you feel, with your hand (or any body part you wish to use…), just what tomorrow’s temperature will feel like. It consists of an aluminum cube which contains a heat sink, a fan and a Peltier element, which is a thermoelectric pump. An Arduino brain fetches tomorrows forecast based on your previously entered zip code, and the device automatically adjusts its external temperature from 0F (really freaking cold!) to 100F (tropical heat). Anything outside those boundaries should serve as a reminder that moving to a place with better weather should be on your to-do list.

It doesn’t look like you can buy this thing, but we could be wrong.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ CNet ]

By David Ponce

Ok, so your tweets will appear in actual letters, but you will have composed them using Morse code, and that’s where the cool part is. It’s cool of course only because it’s redundant, inefficient and arcane, but in a geeky, satisfying manner. One Martin Kaltenbrunner created this device and he likes to call it an exercise in interface archaeology. In other words, it’s the study of just what happens when you try to mate the old and the new via invented interfaces. The Tworse Key device contains an Arduino brain and other electronics which enable this conversation between communications circa The Titanic and communications circa Justin Bieber. Just plug the machine into an Ethernet port, dust off your Morse skills and you’re good to go.

Best part is that if you posses tinkering skills, the schematics are available for you to make your own.

[ Tworse Key Schematics ] VIA [ Geekosystem ]

By David Ponce

News of the MakerBot Replicator had already been out for some time before CES, but I’m happy to say that seeing it in person got me much more excited about the tech. If you haven’t heard, this is a 3D printer for home use. Any 3D object you can think of, anything you can either design in a CAD program or even download from the Thingiverse (a user-populated marketplace of pre-made CAD files) is yours to simply print right at home. In the back of the machine are spools of ABS plastic that are fed into the system, heated up and extruded (glue-gun style) from the printer head. It’ll then slowly make your object, layer by layer. It’s simply awesome.

A few caveats. The printed objects have a slightly rough surface. This is because each layer is visible as the extruded plastic is tube-like; two circles stacked atop each other will not form a smooth surface. You can clearly see this in my video, after the jump. It’s not a huge problem however because these “tubes” are so tiny (much, much less than 1mm). Still some people prefer to sand their objects once completed. Also, it’s a very slow process. A figurine like the one in my video can take 30 minutes or so. Still, you’re buying this for home use, so go make yourself a coffee and stop bitching about awesome tech.

It’s $1,750 for the one-spool replicator, and $2,000 for two spools, which gives you more color options. A 1kg spool of ABS plastic costs around $43.

Hit the jump for two videos: one shitty one, mine. And one good one, the company’s.

[ Product Page ]

By David Ponce

Matt Keeter appears to be a student at MIT and pictured above is the final project for one of his classes. It’s a sweet looking boombox whose case is made from a set of retro-inspired nested octahedral prisms. They’re all laser cut from 0.208″ plywood. Music plays off a standard SD card, while the rig is powered by a 9V battery. The controls on the front are capacitive and the entire thing holds together with barely any glue.

It’s not for sale but the link below leads to his project page where you can read about his step-by-step and even download the required files to make your own, assuming you have access to the same equipment he did.

Incidentally if one of our readers ends up making one of these, we promise to feature it.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ TrendHunter ]

By David Ponce

A few weeks ago we reported on a group of researcher’s successful attempt at putting a single pixel inside a contact lens, fitting it on a rabbit and having the rabbit happily snacking on carrots minutes after the experiment. We saw it as the firstearly prototypes of what we hope will be contact lens VR. But YouTube user Ben Krasnow (username bkraz333) was watching and apparently figured “hey, I can do this! Only with an LED…” In the video below you can see how he coils metal wires, solders them onto an LED, sandwiches them between two soft contact lenses, fuses them together with hot pliers and yes, puts the contraption on his eye. Squirmy viewers shouldn’t look, although nothing bad happens. Matter of fact, it works. There’s a bunch of electrical engineering speak that we can’t quite piece together, but the short of it is he’s using inductive coupling to light up the LED and make it flash a few times a second.

But there’s also interesting talk of the current limitations to such a system, such as the need to focus the light onto the retina and how if ever this were to become a functioning display, each pixel would have to focus individually…

VIA [ Hackaday ]

By David Ponce

It’s kind of ironic that there seems to be a developing trend of using new technology to breathe new life into really old tech. Like that retro looking cordless handset we wrote about a little while back. And now we hear of a hack that pretty much resuscitates the operators of old. Maker and hacker Davis Remmel took an old rotary phone and made it play nice with Siri. He took a Bluetooth headset, relocated the speaker and microphones to their respective places in the dumbbell receiver and wired the board so that dialing “1″ activated Siri. A sticker with the Siri logo in the center of the dial completed the effect. Watch the video, it’s very future-old-timey…

[ Step By Step Rotary Siri Hack ] VIA [ Wired's Gadget Lab ]

By David Ponce

Used to be that if you were serious about shooting, the .50 caliber BMG round was the way to go. That sucker could propel an 800 grain lead bullet (that means 52g) to 2,900 ft/s and put an eye out from over a mile away. But that’s not enough; some folks went and made their own rifle and their own ammo and created this monster that uses a 70 caliber bullet. Yes, that does mean that it’s 0.7 inches across.

The cartridge, named the .700 WTF (“What The F…”) and is made by fire forming a .50 BMG brass case, trimming it to 3″ in length and then sizing it. The round is loaded with a 1132 grain (that’s 73.58g) paper patched .700 lead cast bullet.

The rifle, with just a 16.25″ barrel, can push the 1132 grain of lead up to 2300 fps. Thats 13,000 ft/lbs of energy, right up there with the .50 BMG and far exceeding the .700 Nitro Express. The cast lead bullet has enough energy to pass clean through a 1/4″ steel plate.

Well, it has a little more energy than that. It goes through the plate and lodges itself a foot deep into a tree stump. The recoil on that thing makes it look like Chuck Norris kicked you in the chest.

Hit the jump for a couple more pictures and an excruciatingly bad video that’s good to watch only because you see this rifle in action.

VIA [ Geekologie ]

By David Ponce

An Instructables user by the name of dimovi has created a privacy monitor in a most ingenious way. He basically disassembled the monitor, removed the polarizing film and glued a cutout made from this film to an old pair of glasses. Once reassembled, only people with the special glasses can see what’s on the screen while everyone else just sees a white monitor.

Of course, people will think you a little strange for staring at a white screen for hours on end, but that sort of stuff never stopped you before, did it?

There’s a more detailed step by step at the link below.

[ DIY Privacy Monitor ] VIA [ Hackaday ]

By David Ponce

It may have the top speed of a caffeinated turtle, but YouTube user Prallpratt’s DIY steam-powered RC car is impressive nonetheless. Just watch to see what we mean.

Not much is known about it aside from what you see in the video and in the description. Made in his “Secret Ural Russian Laboratorys”… Whatever. Cool rig though, dude.

VIA [ Technabob ]

By David Ponce

What could possibly go wrong? This flame thrower (which you can see in action in the below video) was created by an Instructables user called PDRWLSN. While he titled it “Moose/Bear Repellant”, we’d like to think of it as the most exciting way to burn off some eyebrow hairs while lighting a cigarette*. See, it’s a gun-shaped device that contains “various bits of copper tubing, plywood, some laser-cut acrylic parts, butane, and the pulse-ignitor from his gas grill to start the fire burning.” It throws a flame about a foot and a half in length and could easily be misused in a thousand different ways.

Best part? He was kind enough to give us detailed instructions on how to make our own (Instructables… get it?).

[ DIY Flame Thrower ] VIA [ DVice ]

* Don’t be an idiot and point this at any face, ya?