Hasta La Gadget!

The Gino Light Mount is $20 and 30 grams worth of ingenious minimalism. All it does is add a handlebar-diameter tube to your bike, anywhere that you have a 5mm braze-on thread. The mount itself is made from aluminum by Paul Component Engineering, and comes with an allen-bolt like the ones you’d use to attach a bottle cage.

But why would you want it? The main selling point is it means you can get your lights down low so they’re throw long, easy-to-spot shadows from any bumps and pits in the road ahead – this is for the cyclist to see his way safely on dark streets, and clearly not to make you visible to other road users: for that you’ll need a regular helmet or bar-mounted lamp. This is particularly handy in the city where you want to use removable lights for security: Try finding a clip-on lamp which will fit the narrow tube of a fork and you’ll see why the Gino exists.

And that’s it, a specific device for a single problem. In fact, Paul’s store is full of handy little bike tchotchkes, most of them damned handy, and many of them beautiful. Check it out. I have my eye on one of these lovely Flatbed racks.

Gino Light Mount [Paul Comp via EcoVelo]

Photo: Gino/Flickr Creative Commons

A breakthrough for art and technology or just a group of people with far too much time on their hands? Honestly, I’m leaning toward the latter, but who am I to judge? Whatever the case may be, anyone looking to get a little culture Cupertino-style is in for luck. A group of University of Michigan students have formed “the world’s first iPhone orchestra.”

The students’ instructor, Georg Essl has lead the class in turning the phones into instruments, utilizing the handsets’ screens, mics, compasses, accelerometers, and compasses.

The class will be performing live next week.

Until somebody builds USB sockets into standard power-outlets, we’re stuck stringing endless cables and hubs from our poor computer’s USB ports. And have you ever noticed just how long it takes to charge your laptop’s battery when you have a full complement of gizmos hooked up?

The 3 Port USB Hub with Line-In Dock connector for iPhone/iPod won’t help with the juice-drain, but it will keep the number of cables that festoon your desk to a minimum. The cable snakes into the three-port hub and reappears at the other end, terminating itself in an iPod dock-connector. As the rather long-winded name implies, the cable will both charge the iPod and allow data syncing.

At $15, it comes in at roughly the same price as other USB hubs, but thankfully also means you’ll need One Less Cable.

Product page [USB Fever via the Giz]

It’s a refurb, and it doesn’t have speakers, but as desktop monitors go, you’re not likely to find “bigger” bang for your buck. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10408523-58.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Cheapskate/a/p

440 hours and innumerable cups of coffee went into this astonishingly faithful rendering of The Matrix in stop-motion Lego, made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the original movie. And we mean faithful: Trinity Help (named for the scene depicted) is a “frame-accurate” remake, which means that animators Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett “took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that’s nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.”

To put the amount of work into perspective, if Trevor and Steve wanted to make the whole movie in Lego (and allow time to eat and sleep) the project would stretch to 25 years.

The guys have documented the “making of” in just as much detail. The painstaking attention is quite ridiculous: the pair scoured the plumbing section of the hardware store for parts to build their OCR (Orbital Camera Rig), a piece of kit which allowed them to track the camera in any direction for the bullet-time effects. The camera itself was a Canon Ixus 850IS, with nothing done to the output but adding a custom white balance.

In fact, given the CGI-heavy production of the original, Trinity Help is ironically VFX-free. The effects were done solely in-camera, with not even wire-removal in Photoshop — Blu-Tack actually seems to be the most important tool here.

You should really head over to the site to read the full, scene-by-scene making-of notes. I have lost way too much time to it already today. There are some hacking gems in there, too. For instance, the bullet trails are made from sequins and flower-arranging wire. When Trevor bought them from the florist, two old ladies asked him what he was making:

“I am doing a stop motion Lego animation of a scene from The Matrix and I will be using the foam to hold wire bullet trails in place.”

“Oh, you’ll want dry then.”

I guess they have done it all before!

Amazing work, and the takeaway from the website is that this took a lot of work, but was also a helluva lot of fun.

Making of LegoMatrix [LegoMatrix]