Hasta La Gadget!

Flickr member/Artist/Legologist Carl Merriam loves making functional sculptures out of his favorite medium. Take this microscope for instance. It’s not high tech enough for CSI: Legoland, but it does have a magnifying glass inside and working focus knobs.

Merriam thought of making a microscope when he realized that his X-Pod looked like a Petri dish.

He didn’t provide a detailed breakdown or how-to, but he did say, “I used a planetary gear system to allow both coarse and fine adjustment of the objective “lens”. A little more tinkering and I connected the focus to a magnifying glass and fiber optic light in the eyepiece, so adjusting the focus knobs would actually bring the writing on a LEGO stud in and out of focus.”

I guess this is an Imperial microscope. Check out Merriam’s Flickr page or his blog for more of his builds. And yes, someone’s already built a working LEGO telescope.

[via Doobybrain]

According to a report by former WSJ reporter Jessica Lessin, Apple’s long-rumored stand-alone TV service will supposedly allow viewers to skip over commercials.

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It’s a rather hopeless landscape that makes up the Mad Max game, and the movie series that it represents. Here in this week’s first gameplay trailer for the title, you’ll find the “soul of a man” song turning the Australian outback’s post-apocalyptic sensibilities back on a 2013 title for devices both current and next-generation in name. While the story is based in hopelessness, the conservation of fuel and scrounging for firearms and food, Mad Max will have a few more rounds to blast.

While the Mad Max movies will be remembered for their epic car chases and unique pre-steampunk style, the dark tone and starving nature of man’s state of affairs after a massive world war will indeed be translated to this game title. At least this first “gameplay” trailer says it will. Complete with a lovely rendition of a country song made to tug at your heartstrings, (Soul of a Man – Steven Stern) this 1.5-minute spot has a few missing elements as well.

There’s no dog, for example. While the dog doesn’t appear throughout the Mad Max series as a staple from the start of each film to the end, the idea that the creators of this game could have added a dog but didn’t will have some die-hard fans weeping. The same goes for the main character. That’s not Mel Gibson.

You’ll have noticed – if your eyes are attuned to such things – that the vast majority of the clip does not actually feature gameplay as such. Instead you’ll have to pick and choose scenes where you’re actually diving in on driving and shooting – the rest is made up of some rather impressive looking cut-scenes.

This says a lot about the final product, mind you. If the final game doesn’t look half as good as the scenes we’re seeing here, at least they’ll be interspersed with the good stuff while the gameplay attempts to make up for it.

You’ll at least be driving a vehicle in part of the game, fighting with hand-to-hand combat and 3rd-person sharpshooting in the other. That seems clear.

The original E3 announcement trailer shows a bit more on the ins-and-outs of the title – on the tenor, at least. Fans of Mad Max that’d been playing Fallout in wait for a real Road Warrior title will be finding themselves tickled – or run over by the black heat.

Mad Max video game full gameplay trailer tips Xbox One and PS4 digs is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

TV advertisers imagine that one day soon you might see a product on screen — say Don Draper’s whiskey glass or Daenerys Targaryen’s dress—and pause the program, click on the product and then instantly purchase it. Relatively primitive versions of this technology already exist, but the idea is far from new. Long before most people had even seen a TV set, this type of instant-purchase tech for television was already being imagined in the "radio" of the future. A radio set that also included TV with a swivel head, instant newspapers printed right at home, and a telephone that could reach the family car.

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Imagine if we had robots that could not only tear a building down, but also recycle it. Large building projects would go much faster and they would likely be cheaper and safer too. This new concept in robotics may just improve the efficiency of building demolition and recycling. It comes from Swedish student designer Omer Haciomeroglu who says that ERO is a smart recycling robot like Wall-E.

He states that ERO would “efficiently disassemble concrete structures without any waste, dust or separation and enable reclaimed building materials to be reused for new prefabricated concrete buildings.” In other words it could be a dream come true for the construction sector.

It uses high-powered water jets to crack the concrete. The cement and water is then sucked up and separated. The water is recycled back into the system, while clean aggregate is packed and sent to concrete precast stations for reuse. The rebar can then be cleaned and cut on the spot for reuse as well.

A fleet of ERO robots working together would be able to scan the area and plan their demolition/recycling. The robots could “literally erase a building”. It is a great idea, and I hope it sees action one day.

[TAXI via Digg via Neatorama]