Hasta La Gadget!

When The Lord of the Rings trilogy ended, I cried. Not because it was such an awesome ending, but because I no longer had any movies to look forward to – until The Hobbit was announced, that is.

A lot of folks are excited for the movie, and it shows. Heck, some of them even went to great lengths to come up with this video featuring everyone’s four favorite hobbits (that’s Sam, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin) in a Halloween adventure of their own.

The coolest part? The entire gang’s made up of LEGO.

In the video, Merry and Pippin are their usual naughty selves when they decide to pull a prank on Sam and Frodo. They dress up as the creepy Nazgul and manage to scare their friends off – until they find themselves face to face with Aragorn.

The mischievous duo find themselves the victim of their own prank later on when a surprise guest joins them later towards the end. I leave it up to you to find out who that ‘guest’ is, which you can easily do so by checking out the video below:

Have a Happy Hobbit Halloween!

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

Out of the hundreds of classic arcade games that we remember playing growing up, Tetris is just one of them. It’s a game that takes skill and strategy, as well as the ability to make decisions quickly. One man was determined enough to embed the classic title into a real pumpkin, and he calls it Pumpktris.

Just in time for Halloween tomorrow, the Pumpktris can play Tetris like any other game device would. It comes with a matrix of 128 LEDs to act as the display of sorts (16×8 LED array), and the pumpkin stem acts as the joystick to move and rotate the falling Tetrominoes. Then, some coding was done to get the game working, and the pumpkin was carved out to make room for the LED matrix and the circuitry.

Coding the game actually doesn’t seem all too difficult when the creator explains it. Tetris has seven Tetrominoes that each have four blocks (as implied by the numerical prefix “tetra”). A three-dimensional array stores the location of every pixel of every shape, in each of the four positions of each Tetromino. It might sound confusing and time-consuming, but each of the seven Tetrominoes takes up only six lines of code.

In total, 128 LEDs were used, as well as 256 pieces of heat-shrink tubing with 313 solder joints. The builder of Pumpktris said it took him around 12 hours of work spanned over a week and a half, but he got it done in time for the Halloween parties that occurred this past weekend. The high score so far on Pumpktris is 9,800.

Pumpktris is Tetris in a pumpkin is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Folks in Boston who love drinking coffee while modding with their smartphones will be happy to know that Starbucks has just rolled out a series of wireless smartphone charging stations in Boston. The world-renowned Italian-style coffeehouse chain has partnered with Duracell Powermat to provide a limited time in-store trial for wireless charging in Boston. Approximately 17 locations were selected for the tests, with the first three stores located in One Financial Center, 125 Summer Street, and 101 Federal Street, respectively.

Starbucks uses the technology of Powermat to install charging pads into their tables. This, of course, will be made possible through a process called inductive charging, which uses electromagnetic field to transfer energy between two objects. Basically a charging station will send energy through inductive coupling to a smartphone that supports the said technology. Starbucks is planning the test the technology through the holiday season until early next year.

“Customers are coming into our stores every day with mobile devices, and putting them down on the table. If they could be charging their device at the same time, then we’ve connected with that customer and met their need, maybe even before they realized they had a need for wireless charging,” said Adam Brotman, the Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Starbucks customers can pay with Square Wallet in November 2012, Starbucks and Square team up for payment solution,

Elecom Japan today introduced not one but three new multi-format card readers namely the MR3-C002, MR3-C003 and MR3-C004. These card readers support the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface. The Elecom MR3-C002, MR3-C003 and MR3-C004 are also compatible with CF, SD, mini-SD, micro-SD, MS, M2 and MS Pro Duo cards. If you are interested, you can buy the Elecom MR3-C002, MR3-C003 and MR3-C004 for 4,095 Yen ($51), 3,675 Yen ($46.5) and 2,900 Yen ($36.5), respectively.

[Product Page]

If the name Trimble sounds familiar to you, that’s because we were able to cover its own Trimble Yuma tablet PC many years ago. But just as we thought that it’s going obsolete, the company is announcing its next-generation rugged tablet called the Yuma 2. A spin-off to its first-generation Yuma tablet PC, the Yuma 2 offers full office capabilities in the many fields such construction, transportation, utilities, and any other outdoor or service-related industry. Sporting a 7-inch capacitive multi-touch screen, the Yuma 2 is powered by a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom dual-core processor and is supported by a 4GB DDR3 DRAM and a 64 GB solid state drive.

Other notable features include a 5-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi b/g/n, a Kensington security slot, dual battery with eight hours of typical run-time, an extended battery set, a 128 GB SSD option, and 3.75G cellular data connectivity. Unfortunately, the Yuma 2 will not be among the first line of tablets to run Windows 8. Users will have to be contended with its Windows 7 operating system. The Yuma 2 truly lives up to its name, thanks to its IP65 and MIL-STD-810G certifications. Expect this tablet to hit stores later this year.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Trimble Nomad 900 Series Outdoor Rugged Handheld Computers, Trimble announces Trimble Juno SD handheld field computing device,