There are alarm clocks that wake you gently, and there are others that torture you to get you out of bed. The Carrot Alarm iOS app on the other hand will make you wake up so you can hang out with a GLaDOS clone. How GLaDOS-y is Carrot? She says she kills a kitten everytime you hit the snooze button. I’m not kidding. I hope she is.
Carrot’s clock is easy to use. It’s the alarm part that makes her special. And by special I mean evil. After greeting you with her cold voice, she’ll make you play a minigame before she turns the alarm off. But she has a good side too. As you use Carrot, you earn points that unlock additional sound bites and music.
Carrot is lurking at the iTunes App Store. Pay $0.99 (USD) to let her invade your life.
Flesh and blood dinosaurs must have been pretty cool, but they are nothing compared to metal dinosaurs. Metal dinosaurs would just tear them up and spit them out. Like this awesome T-Rex sculpture made from scrap metal.
It was built by John Lopez who has been making western and rodeo themed bronze sculptures for a decade. He was inspired to make this one by Sue, the T-Rex specimen that was found in Faith, South Dakota – which also happens to be where this metal dino now resides.
This thing is amazing. It makes me want to see a whole bunch of metal dinos battling it out, tearing parts off of each other and crushing metal bones, while our military battles them. Excellent work, John.
Have you ever wished you could capture your pet and train them as your Pokémon? Then take a look at these 3″ Pokéball replicas. Really, just look at them, because that’s all they’re good for. They don’t even open. They’re really shiny though.
These Pokéballs are made not by the Poké Mart but by a shop called Pallet Town Exports. They will be available in six types, but for now the shop only has images of the regular Pokéball, the Premiere Ball and the Ultra Ball. The other three will be replicas of the Master Ball and Luxury Ball, plus a 1.5″ version of the regular Pokéball.
As you can see in the images, the replicas have light-up switches and can be customized with either a clean or battle-worn look. Do Pokéballs battle?
Choose your wallet and go to Pallet Town Exports to order. If you want to be the very poorest trainer that ever was, you can also order the shop’s trainer belt replicas.
Final Fantasy VII was the first game in the FF series to have 3D graphics. Those graphics probably look laughable now, but the squished low polygon rendering of the characters make for really adorable figurines. Look! It’s freakin’ Biggs and Wedge! Well, Gaia’s Biggs and Wedge.
The figurines were designed by Joaquin Baldwin and are printed using full color sandstone. All of the main heroes are included along with some of the villains and many of the secondary characters, including Sephiroth, Zack Fair, a Moogle, a Chocobo and the Turks.
Ride on Cid’s airship and head to Shapeways to order the figurines. They cost between $13 to $32 (USD) each. One funny thing about this set is that Joaquin seems to have priced each figure based on the amount of material needed to print it. This means Cait Sith and the Chocobo are the priciest ones, even though Cloud, Sephiroth and many others in the set are more popular than those two. The cheapest of course is Barrett’s kid Marlene.
Retrogameart specialist James Bit made this set of canvas prints that will be familiar to anyone who’s played Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s the spade panel minigame! These prints won’t net you extra lives if you match them accordingly, but at least they’ll take you to a more youthful state of mind.
Each print is stretched on a ready to hang frame and measures 10″ x 8″. According to James Bit, it’s made from wood, canvas, ink and – the magic ingredient – pixels.
The Mario Match prints cost $200 (USD) per set. Grab your Tanooki Suit and fly to James Bit’s Etsy shop to order.
Redditor anders202 built a boombox that’s perfect for summer parties. It’s called the Boominator, a solar-powered boombox that was designed by diyAudio member Saturnus back in 2007. Unlike its battery-devouring ancestors, the Boominator not only runs on free energy, it also gathers and converts enough solar power to charge mobile devices.
Anders202′s Boominator is powered by an Indeed TA2020 2 x 12W amplifier and two 10W solar panels. It has two P.Audio HP-10W subwoofers and two Monacor MPT-001 piezo-electric tweeters on each side, so it can make people sweat whether it’s behind or in front of them. Anders202 says that with eight hours of sunlight, the Boominator can play for six hours at 100% volume and still have enough power left in its 12v battery to fully charge an iPhone 3 times. The only downside to the Boominator is that it weighs about 66 pounds Then again, I weigh over twice as much as the Boominator and I’m not even half as useful.
One day we’ll all communicate using memes and gifs, but until that day comes we will have to deal with language barriers. We’ve already seen a couple of translatorapps, but Sigmo looks like it could be the most practical and affordable alternative yet. It’s a wristwatch-sized Bluetooth device that relays voice translation.
Note that I said “relays”, because the Sigmo doesn’t do the translating. Instead it connects to your iOS or Android device via Bluetooth via the Sigmo app. The app then connects to language translation services online to translate what’s being said. The people behind Sigmo didn’t say exactly which services the app connects to, only that Google Translate is one of them. Here’s how Sigmo works:
It’s definitely not perfect, but it seems to get the job done. Sigmo says that the app won’t drain your mobile device’s battery. As for the 2-way speaker, its battery should last up to 300 hours on standby and is good for up to 8 hours of use.
Its dependence on a mobile device and an Internet connection hampers it a bit, but it’s way better than nothing. Pledge at least $40 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Sigmo as a reward.
Currently, the Sigmo app can translate 25 languages: English (US), English (UK), English (Australia), English (Canada), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (United States), Spanish (Mexico), French (France), French (Canada), Finish, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (China), Mandarin (Taiwan / Hong Kong), Catalan, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Polish, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hebrew, Czech, Turkish, African and Malay.
This custom 7″ action figure of the Crimson Typhoon wasn’t made by triplets. It was modded by toymaker/jaeger meister/apocalypse canceller John Mallamas aka Jin Saotome.
Jin modified NECA’s official action figure of Pacific Rim‘s Chinese mecha to make it more poseable and attractive. He replaced its arm hinges and added ball joints on its ankles. He also replaced the hands using parts from Transformers action figures and made a plasma blast prop for its left hand. He also installed an LED on its eye and added a ton of sculpting detail. Finally, he repainted the entire toy, adding details like wear and tear.
Jin put the action figure up for auction on eBay, but it’ll most likely be gone by the time you read this. But he’s also going to sell custom action figures of Pacific Rim‘s main mech Gipsy Danger as well as of the Knifehead Kaiju, so watch out for those on his deviantART page. He should make his own take on a mecha-Kaiju.
NFC (near-field communication) is gradually making its way into everything from smartphones, to credit cards, to cargo containers, to product packaging, as a method of carrying a small amount of data or authentication information along with virtually everything.
Now, some smarty pants over in the UK has come up with the latest use for the technology – wearable NFC, in the form of jewelry.
Created by John McLear, the NFC Ring is a bold and minimal metal ring which has two NFC chips embedded into it. This allows you to use the data stored within with NFC readers. This data can be used to do everything from unlocking doors or mobile phones to sending your contact information to smartphones with NFC capability. I suppose it could even be used to enable mobile payments at some point.
It’s actually a pretty ingenious idea, since it places the NFC data in a much more personal place than a credit card or your wallet, plus you never have to take anything out of your wallet to make it work. The ring has two sides – a larger one which stores public data, and a shorter one which stores private information.
The ring also works with a companion Android app (a Windows Phone version is coming too) which lets you create actions for accessing specific websites when you place the ring at the back of your smartphone.
The NFC ring is available via a Kickstarter campaign until the morning of 8/19/13 – and it’s already blown through its fundraising goal. To get your own NFC ring, you’ll have to pledge between £22 and £25 (~$34 to $39 USD), depending on your ring size.
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