Hasta La Gadget!

Bicycle riders in New York now have a new weapon in the commuting wars. The CitiBike Smart Helmet will show you the way to the nearest CitiBike docking station. That’s pretty handy. Maybe I should say heady. It is a helmet after all.

The Carrera foldable helmet used for this project is embedded with LED strip lights, a FLORA accelerometer, a compass and a FLORA GPS system. All of this is used to guide the rider to the nearest bike docking station in the city, using blinking lights in the periphery of the rider’s vision to show them the way. The colorful LEDs on top serve no purpose other than to provide a cool light show, though.

That should save people a lot of time and effort. This project comes from Tyler and Justin Cooper, who have provided all the instructions to make your own CitiBike Smart Helmet if you are inclined. Pretty neat.

[Adafruit via Damn Geeky]

If people are snooping on your textual communications and you don’t like it, there are a couple of things you can do. You can try to block the prying eyes, you can stop saying things you don’t want to be seen, or you can make your messages make no sense to the outside. The anti-authoritarian typeface ZXX is shooting for that last one.

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It’s the longest day of the year, so I don’t really know what you’re doing not being outside right now. But since you’re here, take a moment to check out some of the best pieces of art, architecture, and design, we found this week.

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The atrium of New York’s Guggenheim Museum is usually a bustling space, filled with crisp light and crowds of visitors. You wouldn’t have known it from the scene yesterday, as the museum opened its long-awaited James Turrell show: saturated in shimmering cobalt light, visitors quietly sprawled around the space, gazing up at Turrell’s “skylight.”

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I have to admit that the McLaren F1 was a masterpiece in engineering, and it looked pretty awesome too. Though it took McLaren almost a decade before unveiling their production car that was wholly designed and built by the company.

The McLaren MP4-12C has a carbon fiber composite chassis and it is powered by a mid-mounted McLaren M838T 3.8L V8 engine, which has twin turbos. It produces 616HP and the car uses Formula 1-sourced tech to make it that much faster than other sports cars. It uses something called brake steer, which means that when the inside rear wheel is braked in fast corners, there’s a system to reduce understeer.

Like all supercars, the MP4-12C isn’t cheap. You’ll have to shell out at least $239,400(USD) to get yours.

[via Fubiz]