newVideoPlayer("engineworks_gawker.flv", 475, 376);Someone had the great idea of putting a high-pressure, heat-resistant camera inside the cylinder of a four-stroke engine. Shooting at 1000 fps, the camera recorded just exactly what happens to make engines run. Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow! [LiveLeak]
It’s been an amazing week for microscopic photography buffs (and those of us who just like to look at neat pictures with significance we can barely comprehend). Just the other day we featured this gallery of electron microscope photos from the Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest. Now, Nikon has just announced their winners in their Small World contest, comprised solely of photographs from beefy light microscopes (Ed: NOT like the ones you probably used in science class). The gallery is worth a click through, if only to remember that natural phenomenon are even crazier than Hollwood cgi. That top shot is the winner, a red and green fluorescence image of a double transgenic mouse embryo.
Looking for a place to park that new Zune? Brando suggests pulling up The Chair, a $US6 gadget stand that looks like those stackable chairs you lugged outside to the church picnic back in olden times. Now when you play Bag Lady Barbie with those mini shopping carts Jason introduced you to last week, at least Barbie will have a tacky old-fashioned 6-inch-high chair in which to sit. [Brando]
Like carrying pictures of your kids around but have way too many kids? This Wallet Pix credit card sized picture viewer lets you take out 58 wallet-sized photos in digital form, all in a package you can fit easily into your wallet. It has auto-shutoff and auto-resizing, and works with newer Windows machines. And at 58 wallet-sized photos, that’s enough for 54 of your spawn and 4 of your wives, because there’s no way in hell that one woman could pop out 57 kids—even with twins and triplets mixed in there. [LNT via Random Good Stuff]
You’re in a hotel lobby when your mark walks in. You pull out the Digital Card Calculator Camera and pretend to casually crunch sums, while in reality you are snapping Top Secret Digital Photographs. Your target would only know you’re a spy if he/she spots the enormous VGA lens and bezel right next to the keypad. It’s a good thing, then, that you’re reasonably inconspicuous in trenchcoat and matching fedora. A technical question, though: if it’s got a lithium-ion battery for the camera and a 1.5V button battery for the calculator, how’s come the solar panels? More cloak n’ dagger deception, I imagine. [crimebusters911.com via OhGizmo]
You’d better hope your fingers are small if you want to play these positively minuscule table games from Japan. They’re shrunken down to palm size, letting you play hockey, Foosball or air hockey wherever you go. There are even fold-away legs to make them easier to carry around. Check out the air hockey game, where you turn on a switch and a battery-operated fan keeps that tiny puck slightly elevated over the table’s surface, just like the real thing. Each air hockey, hockey and foosball mini-table game is $12.85. [Rakuten, via Like Cool]
If you are ready to reenact Rommel’s campaign in North Africa, vandalize any wall in sight or look like Atom Ant, here’s the Paintball Panzer. At 3.4 x 4 x 6-foot it’s not comparable with the 17-tonne FV432 paintball tank after the jump, but I would love to have this mini-me version anyway. Compare specs and prices after the jump. Spoiler: Rommel gets killed and VanGogh cuts his ear.
Here are the Paintball Panzer specs:
The Microdot recorder, which Joel over at BB and Nigel from RedFerret have pointed out to me, is supposedly the world’s smallest digital audio recorder. It’s about the size of the an index finger tip, or about the size of a piece of japanese chewing candy, if that gives any context at all. (it’s 12x35x17mm) It’s got 128MB of memory which is good for 18.6 hours of recording, in what I presume is monaural before needing to be data dumped by USB. There’s voice activation, so you don’t have to worry about deep sections of zero sound, and for about $500, you’d better be deadly serious about your stalking. [PiMall via RedFerret and BBG]
Have you ever wanted to know what it was like to be a shopping cart-type homeless person? If you did, the Korean store IdeaTopic offeres miniature shopping carts that not only roll around, but fit into each other just like real carts. In fact, if you buy enough, you can even make-believe you’re going on a cart run at your local Safeway. Don’t know what we mean? Catch the video after the jump. It’s pretty much the worst video ever—believe us.
We’re not exactly sure what kind of evidence you’ll be gathering with this so-called “world’s smallest” micro camcorder. But whatever that is, you’d better get ‘er done in two hours, because that’s how long its battery lasts. You can see how tiny this thing is—small enough to literally pull out of your ass—but despite its Lilliputian size it can hold 33 hours of video on a 1GB SD memory card. One more animated pic after the jumpage.
