Hasta La Gadget!

Screens and curtains are alright, but sometimes you want a real wall. Solid, substantial and offering some privacy. And if bricks and cement blocks are too boring, you can always turn to repurposed household items. Right?

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I’ve owned a few cars over the years that had shiny bits in the interior that would glare right in my eyes at certain times of the day. It was very irritating. Ford wants to eliminate that problem and has a slick rig that it uses to simulate the outdoors for use in testing its vehicle interiors.

Ford calls its testing center the Lighting Lab. It’s equipped with 6,000 watts of light that allows the engineers to recreate any lighting condition in the world. The dome-shaped facility has a moving light rig that can recreate conditions simulating lighting from dawn until dusk, changing angle and intensity of the lights to match the time of day.

The goal of the testing process is to reduce the glare on the interior of the car and on vehicle controls and surfaces. The Lighting Lab was used in the development of the 2015 Mustang to create gauges that are legible under all light conditions and an aluminum dash panel that doesn’t glare in driver’s eyes.

“With the Lighting Lab, we can ensure that the first time a buyer sits in the 2015 Ford Mustang, that person will be able to see the interior as the designers originally envisioned it – in the best light possible,” said Mahendra Dassanayake, Ford lighting technical specialist.

[via CarScoops]

The decrepit old visitor center at Stonehenge has been too small and too old for decades. In fact, it’s been described with typical Brit candor as "disgraceful" and an "embarrassment" to England. Finally, this month, a new, $44 million visitors’ center has opened—here’s a look inside.

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One of the hassles of playing tabletop games is that pieces are often moved out of their place or sometimes even off the table. It’s a minor inconvenience at best and a game-stalling dilemma at worst, as you try to figure out which piece should be at which position. That’s the problem that BFR Games wants to solve with GripMat.

As its name implies, GripMat is made of a material designed to create a enough friction to prevent pieces from accidentally sliding about. It’s waterproof and retains its form even after you roll it up or crumple it. It’s also great to roll dice on. It muffles the sound that dice make and quickly stops them in their tracks. What I don’t know is if GripMat makes it easier or harder to pick up paper-thin items like cards.

As shown in the video, GripMat comes in a variety of designs; the ones in the gallery below are just a few of them. You can also customize your order further with tile or hex grid overlays.

Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a GripMat as a reward. It also comes in different sizes; naturally the larger ones are available at higher pledge tiers.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of its classic camera, the Leica store in Sao Paulo, Brazil commissioned this wonderful puzzle that would be given to important clients throughout the year. The non-functional camera, designed by ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi in Brazil, would be distributed as a full-sized poster with pre-cut parts that could be popped out and assembled into the faux Leica you see above.

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