This project, designed to piss off the creator’s girlfriend, is a tank with a Nerf gun, speakers, and remote controlled base. The resulting tank is pretty cool although the goal – to terrorize a woman who would live with a guy who would build such a magical thing – is a bit odd. Maybe he wants to be alone?
Maybe he can reverse the suction on the Nerf gun. → Read More
Take a look at the Jansen walker, a laser cut robot built out of plastic and some spare nuts and bolts that were lying around. Ok, and maybe an Arduino cpu. You too can build one of these, all you have to do is buy the parts and assemble it. Oh, and program that cpu using the servo code that you can download. → Read More
When I was writing my last book, I used to go run at the gym for about an hour every morning to clear my head. The TVs were always set on ABC, so I’d zone out to either “Live with Regis & Kelly” or “The View”–two shows I’d never watched before.
I was always struck by the constant fear mongering about the Internet, particularly on “The View.” It seemed every day there was a story about pedophiles patrolling MySpace, ex-wives putting retaliatory dirty-laundry-airing videos on YouTube and 20-somethings getting fired because of college keg party pictures on Facebook. The message to housewives was loud and clear: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS USE THESE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE SITES! → Read More
Need to Ionize your water? Keep yourself safe from “raditations?” Find ghosts? Don’t buy the junk Wired looked at in order to test the validity of their claims.
The most interesting product, the KYK Genesis Water Ionizer, a $2,000 lump of nothing, is features a picture of Ed Begley Jr. as well as a bunch of writing in Korean. The results of the ionization experiment? A bunch of water in the kitchen. → Read More
Ignite is a pretty cool show, it allows people share information with others. It’s not your normal long, boring slide presentation (who hasn’t experienced death by Powerpoint?) because there are a few rules. → Read More
The Thanko madness goes on and on. The Japan-based gadget maker is now selling a “lightoscope” [JP], a term coined by the company itself. Apparently, a lightoscope is a combination of a microscope and a light. And yes, it has a USB interface, otherwise this wouldn’t be a Thanko product. → Read More
Sanyo has released a new “eneloop”-branded and battery-assisted bicycle [JP] that’s aimed at people (in Japan only for the time being) wanting to replace motorbikes and mini vehicles with a “green” alternative. The so-called CY-SPG226′s battery is powerful enough to let the bike travel about 85km with a single charge (which takes 3.5 hours). → Read More
We now have it straight from the horse’s mouth: the Windows 7 Release Candidate will be available for public download on May 5th. The Windows 7 beta team reports that they’ve had a feedback report sent to them at the rate of 1 every 15 seconds during the busiest periods. They also indicated that they have actually used this information, and it’s helped to improve some of the more bleeding edge features coming out. → Read More
Japan-based Digital Cowboy today announced the Movie CowBoy DC-MC35ULI [JP], a device serving as an iPod dock and an HDD media player that’s compatible with 3.5-inch SATA HDDs (sold separately). Users wanting to watch movies from their hard disc can directly connect the box-like Movie CowBoy with their TV via HDMI. → Read More
Time Warner Cable might be backing away from its tiered pricing proposition, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do it gracefully. An Austin TWC customer with a Road Runner unlimited data plan got his connection unceremoniously severed, and after investigating, found out it was because he’d used a shocking 44GB in one week. → Read More
This Express TV stick thing could be pretty handy. Of course, there are other TV tuner solutions out there, but are any this portable and sport 4GB of storage? Great for catching up on network TV, and you can record right to your hard drive as well. It’s a bit bulky for a thumbdrive (try this one if you want small), but if you only want to carry one of the things around, why not make it a TV too? → Read More
Oh, cats. Will you ever cease being entertaining? Your feline antics are irresistible. Here we have a common house cat that seems perplexed and/or horrified by the noises its owner’s printer is making. I’ve never liked that little eet-eet noise either, but at least it doesn’t make me convulse. That would have been embarrassing in middle school. → Read More
Last month, Douglas Bowman, the design lead at Google, left to become the creative director at Twitter. Today, a former co-worker joins him. Dustin Diaz, who was an engineer working on Gmail, resigned from Google and announced he was taking a job at Twitter, on Twitter.
“It’s kind of shocking we couldn’t keep him,” another Googler tells us, calling Diaz “one of the best frontend developers around.” But of course, Twitter is the hot new company, just like Facebook was months back when it was stealing employees left and right from larger companies — like Google. → Read More
Dropbox, the Y Combinator and Sequoia-funded file synchronization startup that makes it easy to share files across multiple computers at once, just hit a major milestone: it now has over 1 million members. And as the graph below shows, much of that growth has come in the last few months, with over 900,000 signups since the product’s public debut at TechCrunch50 last September.
We don’t hear about Dropbox too often (it seems that they’re a bit too secretive for their own good at times), but their product rocks, and is gaining fans quickly. We’ve been using it around the TechCrunch office for over a year now to collaborate on group projects and keep key files handy regardless of which computer we’re using. And we’re not alone – I often hear about other startups that are using Dropbox for their own projects, including Facebook’s Dave Morin. → Read More
Why are you still here? Are you insane? You read the headline! Get over to Steam and buy, buy, buy! Half-Life 2 and its two episodes so far, the Lost Coast, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 for ten freaking dollars, are you kidding me? Come on! → Read More
If you’ve traveled enough, there’s a good chance you’ve lost your luggage before. Sure, it’s annoying as hell, but most people get it back within a few days. However, some people, for whatever reason, never claim their lost luggage, and the airlines then auction it off for charity. That’s where isthisyourluggage.com comes in.
The site, run by some anonymous person, collects this auctioned off luggage, and takes pictures of it to put on the site. Yes, this person opens the lugguage, takes out all of the items, and photographs them. Yes, this is creepy. → Read More
Here’s an interesting debate that’ll help kill the remaining Friday hours. When you take an old game, upgrade its textures, increase its resolution, and, generally speaking, make it look “better,” do you lose something in the process? Is the game that you played, (presumably) that you enjoyed, now worse for wear? → Read More
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/Show_Your_Best_Talent_Win_a_Ton_of_iPhone_Apps’; Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree. Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end – but it’s not over just yet. Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day – plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all. → Read More
