Hasta La Gadget!

George Zisiadis – one of the designers behind the sweet mistletoe drone – shares with us one of his latest concepts: a public art installation on the facade of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History filled with large pinwheels. Visitors will be able to make the pinwheels move by blowing into horns located around the installation.

George said that there will be about a dozen oversize pinwheels in total, with the largest one about 10ft. in diameter. But visitors won’t need to blow as hard as they can into the horns, because the pinwheels are actually powered by electric motors. Microphones will be hidden in the horns to detect when someone is blowing into them.

To encourage interaction, George will make it so that blowing into one horn triggers only some of the pinwheels. Therefore visitors will have to man all the horns at once to make all the pinwheels move simultaneously. Here’s George testing his prototype:

If the museum picks George’s concept, visitors may be able to play with the pinwheels this summer. Good luck, George!

[via George Zisiadis]

Remember back in the 80s action movie heyday when anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it was guaranteed to make lots of money. These were the days when Arnie was jacked, and blowin’ shit up was his shtick. I’m talking way before the wrinkles, saggy skin, and governor days. Back when the worst most of us thought about Arnold typically involved Junior.

One of my all time favorite Arnold flicks was the original Predator. If you have a fond spot in your heart for that flick, check out this incredible 1/4-scale Dutch action figure from ThinkGeek. Tiny Arnie is amazingly detailed, offers 20 points of articulation, and even comes with an M-16 with grenade launcher, pistol, and a knife.

It’s not exactly cheap at $99(USD), but I am assuming the high price has to do at least in part with rendering Arnie’s share unto Arnie.

This toy makes me think of a simpler time when all you needed to defeat advanced alien life forms was mud and some pointy sticks. With all the remaking of 80s movies going on, I wonder when will they’ll attempt to remake the original. Predators doesn’t count in my book.

We saw an unofficial LEGO version of the Motorized Patriot a couple of weeks ago. But if you wouldn’t mind spending a little cash for something more detailed, check out NECA’s officially licensed action figure of the fearsome Heavy Hitter.

The action figure stands 9″ tall and comes with two tattered flags of Columbia, two interchangeable heads and a gatling gun.

The gun’s barrels move if you turn its crank, and the flags fit in the back of the action figure, just like its virtual counterpart.

For the glory of Columbia, order the action figure from ThinkGeek for $30 (USD).

[via Gamefreaks]

Show off your love for retro gaming with this animated pixel art frame. Similar to the Pixel and Pixel V2, Game Frame is a digital canvas that can be loaded up with hundreds of your favorite 8-bit video game characters and symbols. Time to show off some 8-bit art in your home.

Basically the frame is a grid of 256 ultra-bright LED pixels, for showing off all kinds of geek art. In fact, Game Frame comes with over 40 brand new animations from eBoy. The hardware is Arduino-based, and the complete source code will be released once they ship. Thousands of images & animations can be stored on SD and played back the way you want, configured by two buttons on top.

While it’s not as high resolution as the Pixel, there’s something to be said for the chunky square LED pixels on the Game Frame.

A pledge of at least $230(USD) will get you a completely assembled Game Frame, while you can pick up a kit version with all components but the frame for $150, or without the LEDs for $60.

[via This is Why I’m Broke]

I have said it before; I am a big fan of the flick The Princess Bride. If you like the movie as much as me, and are into card games, you might like this one.

The game is called The Princess Bride: Prepare to Die! The concept is simple; you have a bunch of cards that look like the “Hello my name is” stickers you might see at a company meeting. You have another stack of cards with random bad deeds that start with “You” and end with “Prepare to die!”

The idea is you that a “judge” selects a name tag, then each other player must pick a funny “Prepare to die” card. Whoever the judging player picks as the funniest selection wins the round.

What you end up with is something like, “Hello, my name is Abraham Lincoln. You drank my milkshake, prepare to die!” I’m betting you just red that in a Spanish accent. The game is available for $29.99 from ThinkGeek.