Hasta La Gadget!

The Internets is currently amused-shocked-enraged-leaving enlightening comments about dogs that have been taught to drive. I think it’s time we show some love to Pepper the parrot and his one-of-a-kind ride, the BirdBuggy.

The BirdBuggy was made by University of Florida student Andrew Gray. It has a joystick that Pepper can move with his beak, propelling him along the sidewalk.

I’m not sure if Pepper is entirely sure of what he’s doing; fortunately Gray installed a couple of safety measures on the BirdBuggy. The thin lines in front of each front wheel are bump sensors. If they hit something, the vehicle will quickly back away. There’s also an infrared sensor up front; if BirdBuggy detects an obstacle, it won’t move forward even if Pepper pecks the joystick to death. Finally, the BirdBuggy can dock on it’s own, using its camera and a color-coded base station as its guide.

Maybe the perch should be mounted sideways so Pepper can keep his eye on the road.

[via Reddit]

If you’re like me, you’re pretty disappointed that Bioshock Infinite was delayed until February 2013. But I suppose I’d rather have a rock-solid game than one filled with bugs and rushed to market. One thing to look forward to when the game finally comes out is the awesome looking Ultimate Songbird Edition.

The highlight of this massive $150 collectors edition of the game is a highly-detailed 9.75″ statue of the Songbird, a key character in the game – Elizabeth’s creepy bird-like protector feared by the residents of Columbia. In a video clip released today, the game’s creator Ken Levine gives us an up-close and personal look this beautiful hand-painted statue, along with the cool retro packaging it comes in.

In addition to the statue, the Ultimate Songbird Edition ships with a 64-page art book, a resin Handyman figure for playing the upcoming Bioshock Infinite board game, a cool lithograph promoting “Devil’s Kiss”, a murder of crows keychain and a copy of the game’s digital soundtrack. It also includes several bonus power-ups, costumes and PS3 and PC users get downloadable themes as well.

You can pre-order the Bioshock Infinite Ultimate Songbird Edition over on Amazon for $149.96(USD), and it ships on February 26, 2013 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Birds need their carbs and fats, too, right? It’s a good thing they can get their fill by ‘flying thru’ these Burger King ‘Fly Thru’ bird feeders. They look so well-made that you’d think the Burger King himself was behind them, but these were actually made by Brian Wolter.

The bird feeder features the Burger King logo prominently and provides a tiny, sheltered space off on one side where the bird food is supposed to be. It looks pretty sturdy, so I’m sure our avian friends can have their fill and chow down on birdseed and bread while being safe from the elements.

The coolest thing about this feeder is that it’s got a solar panel system on top that absorbs the sun’s energy to generate power to light up the Burger King sign at night and during early morning.

[NOTCOT via Neatorama via Obvious Winner]

Well, here’s an odd little story that happened over in jolly old England recently. A woman living in Paignton, Devon started hearing strange clanking noises on the roof of her house, and decided to go outside and have a look. After investigating, she found a couple of orange practice golf balls sitting on her yard. She figured it was from some neighborhood kids playing around, and moved on with her life. But then the balls kept raining down.

Turns out that after much puzzlement, the brightly-colored plastic golf balls were coming not from kids, but from gulls flying overhead and dropping them on her roof.  Apparently, the seagulls think that the balls are mussels, and that dropping them will crack them open so they can get at the tasty morsel inside. I’m sure the gulls are very disappointed when they find out there’s a whole lot of nothing inside of them. Now why they decided to repeatedly use this woman’s house for target practice is anyone’s guess – maybe she ran over a seagull in a past life. So far, more than fifty of the balls have found their way onto the woman’s home.

What’s even more confounding is that nobody seems to know where the balls are coming from – after checking with many local golf courses, none of them use such balls for practice. Perhaps she can start her own driving range now.

[via Daily Mail]

Spreading messages in public that only those who are meant to hear them would be pretty hard. Making up your own language to do so would also just make things complicated. So why not use with something like art science student Matthijs Munnik‘s Little Bird, which is a digital bird messaging system of sorts?

Basically, Matthijs’s digital bird sends out the message in a series of random tweets and chirps. It’s not in Morse code or anything, so you won’t be able to ‘hear’ the message in any way.

However, all you need to decode the message is an app on your smartphone that’ll translate and convert the seemingly random sounds to text. Pretty awesome, right?

The Little Bird installation currently chirps out information from WikiLeaks, probably to push the point forward that it’s meant to be used as a ‘new’ way to transfer information secretly – even though everyone has the potential to access it.

Sounds kind of like WikiLeaks, doesn’t it?

[via Pop Up City]