Friday, April 18, 2008
Gadgets
Instant Hot Tub? Just Add Water and Quicklime
11:40PM Addy Dugdale | This is how you make a hot tub, hillbilly style. Three guys from the prairies of Illinois turned an old stock tank sitting in the open air into a jacuzzi, and heated it up using quicklime, that scary caustic stuff that burns your skin off if you’re not too careful. A video of how they did it, using gas masks, tin baths and a lot of ingenuity, is after the jump. More »
Gadgets
WeRobot Shirt Pays Homage To Our Robotic Overlord Celebrities
11:15PM Mark Wilson | How many times have you been walking around SoHo when you spot a robot celebrity trying to play it cool? You tap him on the shoulder and are like, “You’re the Robot from Lost in Space!” And then he turns around and…how embarrassing. It’s just a gumball machine with some hosing stuck to the side. Wait, no, it was the Robot from Lost in Space! See? It gets tricky. More »
Cameras
Casio Exilim EX-F1: Tomato Violence at 300, 600 and 1200fps
10:50PM Wilson Rothman | What’s the first thing we did with our Casio Exilim EX-F1, the Hiro Nakamura camera/camcorder that makes time stand still? We recorded a mini Cuisinart laying havoc to some tomatoes. Why? If you have to ask, you probably shouldn’t be here. The top vid is a view of the carnage at 300 frames per second. (As you’ll see, I call my food processor “Hitchcock” because it’s always keeping me in suspense.) Below, additional tomatoes get annihilated at 600fps and then 1200fps, with increasing detail, but decreasing resolution and light. More »
Software
Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in June
10:30PM Jesus Diaz | Evolution Robotics ViPR visual search technology is coming to the iPhone this June. ViPR allows you to take a photo of any movie, CD or book, send it to a server, and automagically get an email back loaded with information and links pointing to YouTube videos or iTunes Music Store links. It will also be deployed in Japan on KDDI’s au camera phones this Spring. As you will see in the iPhone demo after the jump, it works incredibly well, even when the object is partially occluded: More »
Vehicles
1,290 Kph Jet Car Needs Just One Thing More: A Pilot
10:25PM Gizmodo US Edition | Think you’ve got what it takes to out-do Wing Commander Andy Green and the 1,228 kph land speed World-record set by Thrust SSC? Well, the team at North American Eagle may have a spot behind the controls for you: they’ve launched an open contest for the driver of their vehicle. The crazy red car looks a shade like an F-104 Starfighter, you say? Well, that’s because it actually is one. With wheels. For going along the ground, faster than the speed of sound. More »
Entertainment
How to Solve the Rubik Cube in Six-Seconds Flat
9:30PM Jesus Diaz | We are very big fans of Rubik’s Magic Cube, even while none most of us have not solved it yet. Not even trying this one, really. Until today. Why I didn’t think about this before, I don’t know, but that felt oh-so-good. [Rubik in Gizmodo—thanks Carlitos] More »
Peripherals
Bonanza Banana Flash Drive Has a Bunch of Memory (8GB, Actually)
9:05PM Addy Dugdale | When I saw this Bonanza banana, I thought of this. Eddie Murphy stuck one up a tailpipe, now you can stick a banana up your USB port—well, you can stick it wherever you like, it’s Friday and we’re all adults here. The fruity flash drive has an 8GB capacity, looks lovely, tastes rubbery, and is made by a firm called Hantat. [AVING via Pocket-lint] More »
Science
Scientists Build Worlds Smallest Transistor: Just One Atom Thick
8:52PM Gizmodo US Edition | Just the other day we were banging on about graphene, the new “wonder material” based on graphite, and now a British team has used it to craft the world’s smallest transistor. It’s just one atom deep and ten wide, and we don’t need to tell you that that’s teeny. In fact, it’s more than three times smaller than the 32nm transistors at the cutting edge of silicon-based microelectronics: so it looks like Gordon Moore’s law of transistor shrinkage has a bit of life in it yet. More »
Entertainment
NASA to Broadcast Earth Views in High Definition
8:20PM Jesus Diaz | Fans of space, high definition television, and watching-your-washing-machine-while-stoned rejoice! Honoring planet Earth and hoping to bring us closer to the awe that astronauts feel while watching or home planet, NASA is going to start transmitting crystal-clear HD video of Gaia taken from orbit—both totally silent and also with commentary. More »
Cameras
