We’re not too far off from our Engadget Expand event taking place in New York City November 9th and 10th. While you can get your own tickets at a rather low price, we’re always in the giving mood around here at Engadget and want to offer some lucky readers gratis tickets. All you have to do is enter …
In order to put our money where our hype is we like to take a closer look at Kickstarter products we’ve talked about on the site. Today we have the Bohemian Guitar Company’s “oil can” guitars, a Kickstarter project that raised $54,000 – $20K over their $32,000 goal. The company, based in Georgia, just started shipping their cleverly-designed gitfiddles and I got the chance to try one out.
The guitars have a single pickup controlled by a set of volume and tone dials. A wooden bridge at the bottom and a nice maplewood neck that continues into the oil can body. The body itself is ostensibly recycled and repainted and adds an excellent bit of twang to your picking. The machine heads are serviceable – the ones I tested were a little tight – and the pickup, while simple, seems to be nicely placed for resonance and sound quality.
How does it sound? Take a listen. Excuse the quality here – I’m not a good guitarist.
Generally you will get a twangier sound out of this guitar and it resonates enough to even act as a sort of steel acoustic. I’m positive a superior guitarist can use the unique body to positive effect. I showed it to Charlie Appicella of Iron City Jazz who found it playable and light, if a little too cute for his purposes as a professional jazz guitarist. That said there’s no shame in bringing this thing out especially if you’re a surf or country band and want a little Bo Diddley-like authenticity.
The guitars now cost $299 and a portion of the proceeds go to charity to help spread a love of music in children. It’s a noble goal and it looks like the team, Adam and Shaun Lee, have succeeded in building a business with the Kickstarter push. Most of the models are currently sold out and they’re working on their Boho line – complete with hipster-ish can designs – as we speak. It’s an interesting end to a compelling and surprisingly cool project.
Grand Theft Auto and Glass may be more commonly about the broken variety than Google’s wearable, but that hasn’t stopped one developer from cooking up some head-up map integration between the game and the headset. Mike DiGiovanni‘s realtime GPS for Grand Theft Auto 3 on Glass may only work with the third installment of the […]
We get it! Bitcoin, the newfangled virtual currency, is difficult for normals to understand. Fortunately, this handy CBS News graphic from its segment on the Silk Road bust earlier this week has some answers. In that it is the opposite of helpful or correct.
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(Credit: Apple) The small device known as the iPhone that fits in your pocket wasn’t always so tiny.
In fact, one of the early demos was so clunky that its description conjures up images of the first, massive mainframe computers, instead of the slick handset-computers Apple eventually introduced in July 2007.
In a long magazine piece published online Friday in The New York Times, then-Apple executive Tony Fadell recalled Steve Jobs showing him an early example of the phone’s eventual touch-screen technology in mid-2005: “He said: ‘Tony, come over here. Here’s something we’re working on. What do you think? Do you think we could make a phone out of this?’ ” Fadell says, referring to a demo Jobs was playing with. “It was huge. It filled the room. There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it. It might not be quite fair to call that projector contraption an early prototype of the actual phone — it’s more of an ancestor, or the primordial goop that would eventually become a prototype of the phone. (The story also says that there were six fully operati… [Read more]
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This cat obviously knows how to game.
(Credit: CatastrophiCreations)
If you have trouble peeling your cat away from epic sessions of Super Mario, then consider Etsy seller CatastrophiCreations‘ custom-made Mario cat furniture. It’s about time retro-gaming-fan felines got some cat condos designed for their specific interests.
The wall-mounted pieces are done in stylish earth tones, but the design is unmistakably Mario. The $190 Super Mario cat complex features two sisal-lined warp tubes for your geeky cat to crawl into and out of. There is a question-mark prize box in the middle.
The $210 jumbo Mario cat complex is described as being for “huskier cats.” It’s the same design as the less expensive option, but offers more room for cats who may be a little short on exercise. Which is what can happen if they sit around on the couch all day eating Whiskas Temptations and playing video games.
The Mario pla… [Read more]
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When Valve ships its own prototype version of a Steam Machine later this year to 300 beta users, those folks are getting relatively tiny and powerful gaming consoles. At very least, it’ll have an NVIDIA GTX 660 (all the way through Titan), and anywhere from an Intel i3 CPU to an i7-4770. All …
Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by Boston Dynamics, creators of the famous Big Dog. This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that can power it across rough terrain. Wild Cat was funded by the DARPA’s M3 program aimed at introducing flexible, usable robots into natural environments AKA introducing robotic pack animals for ground troops and build flocking, heavily armed robots that can wipe out a battlefield without putting humans in jeopardy.
Next up we have ATLAS, another Boston Dynamics bot that can walk upright on rocks. Sadly ATLAS is tethered to a power source but he has perfect balance and can survive side and front hits from heavy weights – a plus if you’re built to be the shock troops of a new droid army. ATLAS can even balance on one foot while being smacked with wrecking balls, something the average human can’t do without suffering internal damage. I can’t wait for him to be able to throw cinder blocks!
Finally we present these charming self-assembling robots from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which we covered earlier today. The robots exert an internal force to spin and then connect with each other using magnets, allowing them to fly into the air for a second and then fall down next to their brothers and sisters in exactly the right spot. This allows these completely featureless squares to form any shape they want and, like autonomous LEGOs, they can build complex devices out of a few simple shapes.
“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” said researcher Kyle Gilpin. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”
They may look innocuous but imagine these things self-assembling into, say, a wall, a door, or even a plate of explosives. They could sneak through pipes into your home and create a robotic assassin to destroy you in the sleep, thereby freeing up your “Schlafplatz” for other humans who have been reduced to sleeping out of doors after the robots took over most habitable locations for the storage of fermenting human slurry. Stay frosty, humans!
Now that the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is available to the public, you know what that means. Yep, it’s time for Samsung to release its kernel source code so that Android developers can get cracking on perfecting their apps for the 5.7-inch handset. As with past releases, the Korean company has kindly …
A signal gage permanently showing five bars to hide radio crashes, a “golden path” for demos that was the only way to avoid crashes, and Steve Jobs accusing “you are [expletive] up my company”: the launch of the original iPhone wasn’t straightforward. In a lengthy retrospective about Apple senior engineer and iPhone radio manager Andy […]
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