Hasta La Gadget!

Etsy shop Chinook Crafts is a treasure trove of geeky trinkets. I was going to feature its Pokémon Kanto gym badges by way of GoNintendo when I spotted an unusual category in the shop’s list: tombstones.

But if we think about it it’s actually kind of surprising that we don’t see more of these. Video games are ripe with death after all, from the ones we don’t even think about…

…to the ones whose deaths are given and thus inconsequential.

There are also deaths that jump start a game…

…including ones that turned out to be the start of an alternate reality and an entire series of games.

And as in real life, there are deaths in games that we’ll never forget, the ones that will leave you reeling in shock and despair. Like, The Transformers animated movie level of shock and despair.

The tombstones cost $10 (USD) each plus a variable amount of sadness. Check out Chinook Crafts for more designs. You creep.

A while back, I came across a remote-controlled flying version of the Starship Enterprise. Now, the guy behind that build is showing off the next member of his flying fleet, a Klingon D7 Battlecruiser.

This awesome paper model from SG Ideas flies perfectly and would definitely give Kirk and his Starfleet crew a run for their money if they ever did battle. Here, check it out on its maiden voyage:

About the only thing this thing needs is a battle-scarred paintjob, photon torpedoes and the ability to cloak.

We already saw a very cheap way to emulate the NVIDIA Shield’s game streaming function using a smartphone and VNC. But if you want an even cheaper way – assuming you don’t already have a smartphone – check out Limelight Pi, an open source program that lets you stream Steam games to a Raspberry Pi.

Made by GitHub member irtimmer, Limelight Pi uses NVIDIA’s GameStream technology to stream your Steam games. Thus, you’ll still need an NVIDIA GTX 600/700 series GPU, NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience program and either a high-end wireless router or an Ethernet connection. Here’s a demo by YouTuber leCauchemarXY. The screen on the left is the one connected to the Raspberry Pi.

You can download Limelight Pi from irtimmer’s Github page. Limelight Pi is actually a fork of irtimmer’s Limelight, which works on Windows, OS X and Linux computers. So if you’d rather stream to a desktop computer, get Limelight instead of Limelight Pi.

[via Raspberry PiPod]

Last September the brilliant Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki said that he’s retiring from making animated movies. As a tribute to his idol, artist Martin Hsu designed Miya-san, a 6″ figure of the genius behind modern classics such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro.

Bigshot Toyworks is going to produce 300 copies of Miya-san, and sales from the toy will be donated to an as yet unspecified charity.

You can pre-order Miya-san from Tenacious Toys for $95 (USD). Again the toy will only have 300 copies so you better order now if you want one. Happy retirement Miyazaki-sensei! Perhaps you can drop by your studio from time to time and give them ideas for new films.

[via Cartoon Brew]

As an image-driven person, I often find myself deeply lost and buried in the vast online libraries of universities and research centers. Scientists just love to show off all the big and shiny machinery they work on.

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