Hasta La Gadget!

Professional sculptor Hector A. Arce mashed up Game of Thrones with SoulCalibur in this grisly stattuete. He calls it Throne of Souls, and it shows the fighting game villain sitting on a throne that’s “made up of the souls and swords of his fallen enemies.” Take that Aegon.

I was going to post about this Mario Bros. sculpture but when I got to Minty Fresh I got sidetracked by the other items for sale. Steve Minty is the Fangamer of geeky visual art. Or maybe Fangamer is the Minty Fresh of geeky apparel. I could have picked an item from Minty Fresh’s virtual shelves at random and it would have been worth sharing.  For now though I just had to highlight Hector’s masterpiece. The statuette is 12″ high and 10″ wide and is made of ceramic clay.

Wield your browser and head to Minty Fresh, where you can buy the statuette for $450 (USD). Hector priced it at $300 on his shop, but it’s not yet available there.

If you want to play LEGO Game of Thrones, you wish or you die. Nah, you go to Citizen Brick. The company that’s harvesting the fruits of LEGO’s refusal to create an adult line of toys has a series of minifigs with the awesomely bad title Dragon Sword Fighter Force. The familiarity is strong with this Force.

Heavily inspired by the characters from George R. R. Martin’s  A Song of Ice and Fire novels and HBO’s adaptation of said literature, the minifigs come in four separate packs with three toys each or as one big bundle of 12 toys. That’s not all – if you buy all 12 minifigs at once, you get a bonus minifig that looks like Mr. Martin himself. Though to be fair there are millions of men who look like Sir Typesalot.

Betray your browser and head to Citizen Brick to purchase the Ga– Dragon Sword Fighter Force minifigs. Each three-pack costs $55 (USD). The 12-pack bundle won’t save you any money because it costs $220, but at least it’ll come with Sir Types A.A. Lot.

[via GeekAlerts]

A lot of folks say that 2014 will be the year of wearables, as in wearable technology. We’ve had wearable devices such as watches and cameras for decades, but the past couple of years we’ve seen devices like Google Glass, Pebble, fitness trackers and more. MbientLab is giving tinkerers and small entrepreneurs a chance to ride the wave with MetaWear.

MetaWear is a small, affordable and developer-friendly platform for creating your own wearable device, or at least a prototype. It’s powered by the ARM Cortex M0 SoC. It has Bluetooth LE connectivity and has a built-in accelerometer, temperature sensor, buzzer, coin motor and RGB LED. It also has two analog/digital I/O pins and an I2C bus. On the software side, it already has its own API, and MbientLab will be releasing open source Android and iOS apps for MetaWear as well.

In my brief chat with MbientLab’s Laura Kassovic, she said that the MetaWear can be used to build a fitness tracker that could compete with existing products like FitBit’s products or Nike’s FuelBand if you so choose, saving you a lot of resources in the process: “First off, you don’t have to spend 4 years at University to get your engineering degree just so you can write firmware. So that’s 4 years we are saving you! We are also saving you the time it takes to prototype, test, and certify hardware just so that you can put it on the store shelf. That’s another 4-6 months of reduced development time. We save developers 80 to 90% of their development time and cost with MetaWear (and I think that’s awesome).”

But Laura is also excited about the potential of MetaWear to enable tinkerers to create niche or even one-off wearable devices: “MetaWear will allow developers to create devices that large companies aren’t interested in building or devices that are very niche (and in my opinion, very cool). Perhaps you want to build a necklace that lights up when your Grandma calls. Perhaps you have an Oculus Rift and you want to add force feedback pods you wear on your body to create an even more realistic simulation. Maybe you have a pet iguana and you want to track its movement but you simply can’t outfit your iguana with a Fitbit Flex; so the natural solution is to build custom on MetaWear instead!” 

So put on your best fitting browser and pledge at least $30 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a MetaWear kit as a reward. Go and get that Facebook money. Or make a fatness tracker. The power is yours.

Los Angeles architectural photographer Mike Kelley posted this awesome image of almost all the departures and some of the arrivals at LAX during a period of eight hours last Sunday. You can buy the photo here if you want.

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This April Fools’ Day, the elite leaders of Google Maps are looking for the very best, like no one ever was. They need your help to catch Pokémon scattered all over the world. The winner gets a chance to officially become Google’s Pokémon Master. Or not. But it can’t hurt to try.

To join the fun, all you have to do is download and open the latest version of Google Maps on your iOS or Android device. Tap the search bar and you should see the words “Press Start” with a Pokéball icon right below the search text field. Tap the words and you’ll launch straight into hunting.

To hunt, just scroll through the map until you find a Pokémon and then tap it. There’s even a Pokédex to make it easier to see how many more you have to catch. The last time I checked there were 150 creatures on the list, coming from the different games in the series.

Will Google really hire the winner? Probably not. Then again we just saw a flashy commercial that must have cost a pretty penny to create. Google can easily afford your services, even just for a day.

[via Google]