Hasta La Gadget!

Ah-ah. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Did he fire six shots, or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But, being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, PUNK?

You know what? Dirty Harry might have been dirty, but he wasn’t stupid. Even a kid can count up to six. Harry knew how many shots he had fired.

But what of today’s shootists, their brain-finger connections honed by video-games, but at the same time their memories are softened by always-on information. Could the average American adult keep track of his ammo? With Michael Ciuffo’s shot-counter, he won’t have to. Watch this video, and try to remember that it is real-life, not a first-person-shooter. The slo-mo starts just after a minute in.

The counter uses an accelerometer to measure the recoil acceleration at each shot, and the brain is an ATTiny 2313 micro controller running on a pair of AAA batteries. The sensitivity can be adjusted from 0G to 50G, and there is software trickery to stop secondary vibrations from being detected.

Cranking down the sensitivity means that bumps and whacks won’t cause false readings. Michael says that in order to fool the sensor “You would need to smack it hard enough to produce 22.5gs of acceleration directly on the muzzle of the gun.” He also says it should be fast enough to keep up with any weapon that “fires fewer than 900 rounds per minute.”

Such is the reaction to the videos on his YouTube channel that Michael plans to put up a site and start selling these things, either whole or in kit form. Real-life Gears of War, here we come.

Bullet Counter official test [Michael Ciuffo / YouTube via Kotaku]

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• Gadget Lab Podcast #39: Hidden Stun Guns in Bikes, Dr. Dre's …
• Mystery Anti-Recoil Device for Guns

Angry Birds maker Rovio has teamed up with 20th Century Fox for the latest version of its insanely popular Angry Birds series. The game, a tie-in with Fox’s upcoming movie, Rio (a CGI movie due out in April), is “like the original with a few new twists,” according to Rovio.

The company added that the game will be available “app stores everywhere in March.” So, iPhone and Android for sure, right? Probably Nokia’s Ovi store. And maybe Windows Phone 7 and HP’s webOS store? 

At launch, the game will offer 45 levels and improved graphics over the original. Future updates will bring “more levels and a surprise or two.” The game will hit the market in March. Check out a trailer after the jump.

At its unveiling at CES, Ford missed no opportunity to talk up the ability of its Focus Electric to charge in half the time of the Nissan Leaf when connected to a Level 2 (220 – 240V) charger, of the sort that Best Buy will gladly install for you for just $1,499. Three to four hours is all it should take, indeed impressive compared to the eight hours the Leaf needs at the same voltage. However, the story doesn’t end there, as the Leaf has another trick up its sleeve: DC fast-charging via the CHAdeMO standard. That gives 80 miles of range in just 30 minutes and, while not a global standard yet, it’s certainly trying to be. The SAE is working on its own DC quick-charger standard, and that’s the pony Ford is looking to back, saying:

Fast charge will not be included on the Focus Electric until an industry standard has been set by SAE. Once an approved/accepted standard is in place, we will work on getting the car ready for [it].

That leaves us with two questions. First, will the SAE get its standard finalized before Ford gets the Focus Electric finalized? Second, will the SAE standard be compatible with the Japanese CHAdeMO standard? Sadly, our magic eight ball is not giving us much hope on either account.

Ford Focus Electric unlikely to support DC quick-charging, slower than the Leaf after all? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Picture of a USB 3.0 cable

Last week Intel unveiled USB 3.0 specs that demonstrates how the next generation USB is going to work. USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is due out in 2009 or 2010. Intel was even kind enough to make the new specification royalty free so that developers don’t have to fork out money just to make devices that utilize the new technology.

What’s so great about USB 3.0 that will make you want to jump on the bandwagon? Here’s a list of some of my favorite features:

• Faster transfers, duh. USB 3.0 will be able to move data at a mouth-watering 4.8Gbit/s (614MByte/s). That’s 10 times faster than USB 2.0, and the speed difference will definitely be noticeable with larger files. For example, a 27GB movie will take 70-seconds to transfer as opposed to 15-minutes with USB 2.0.
• Read and write simultaneously. With the current USB technologies devices can’t read and write at the same time, but that’s a thing of the past with USB 3.0.
• More power output. The power output will be bumped up from 100 milliamps to 900 milliamps. You’ll therefore be able to charge more power-hungry devices at a single time.
• Power friendly. USB 3.0 will use an interrupt-driven protocol instead of a polling system when the host is looking for traffic. That means your laptop won’t have to waste precious resources trying to see if a connected camera is trying to send data.
• Backwards compatible. You’ll be able to plug-in a USB 3.0 cable into a USB 2.0 device, and still reap some of the benefits like the new interrupt-driven protocol for conserving power.

Sounds great to me. Some of the things like the faster data transfers will be governed by what your hardware is capable of though. Mechanical hard drives will be one of the biggest limitations for users as they won’t be able to write data faster than USB 3.0 will be able to transfer it. SATA drives capable of 6.0Gbit/s speeds might be out in time for USB 3.0, otherwise we might be relying on solid state drives (SSD) to make the most of the technology.

Checkout Maximum PC for more photos of what the USB 3.0 cable looks like.

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True story: I once asked my parents to buy me a Porsche 911 for Christmas. Amazingly, they did, only it was a lot smaller than the one I wanted. They bought me a toy car. I should have just made one, like this amazing pedal-powered Porsche, the Ferdinand GT3 RS, aka the World’s Slowest Porsche.

The car-bike is an art project, perpetrated by Hannes Langeder of Austria. It took a year to build, and cost as much as a real car: 13,000 euro, or $17,700. Inside, as you can see from the extensive photos (there are even more on the project’s Flickr page), the main structure is steel. This was then built out using a toy 911 as a model, covering the skeleton in plastic tubing and then skinning the whole thing with packing-tape and gold foil. Thanks to these simple materials, the entire car weighs in under 100 kilos [220 pounds]. That’s not exactly light for a bike, but you probably wouldn’t want to take the Ferdinand out for a spin on a windy day.

The car debuted in June 2010, as Autopia’s Keith Barry reported, but we got our hands on some additional photos, and the project’s pretty outlandish, so we think it’s worth a reprise.

The car looks fantastic on the road. Even though there’s a bike inside, it has the presence of a car. I’ll bet the rider gets a lot more respect from car drivers just because he looks like one of them. Even if he is tootling along at just 10 mph.

Ferdinand GT3 [Ferdinand Johannes L via Core77]

Ferdinand GT3 RS BikePorsche/Flickr

Artist Creates the Slowest Porsche in the World [Daily Mail]