Hasta La Gadget!

3D printing is a fantastic way to rapidly prototype something that you’re trying to design or develop for business or personal use. The problem is that 3D printers can be pretty expensive, and you can’t just walk into most retailers and buy one. That is all about to change with office supply retailer Staples announcing that it now has 3D printers available directly from its website. The company says that some Staples locations will also have 3D printers in their store by the end of June.

The printers that are available at Staples come from a company called 3D Systems. The printers are Cubify’s Cube 3D Printers and are available for $1299.99(USD).

The printers are ready to work right out of the box and support Wi-Fi for wireless printing. The printers will work on Windows or Mac computers and come with 25 free 3-D templates designed by professional artists. Additional templates are available online and designers can create their own templates to print from the printer. The Cube printer is able to print items up to 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5″ and has cartridges available with 16 different colors. Staples is selling these ABS and PLA plastic cartridge refills for $49.99 each.

We just posted the world’s smallest stop-motion animation over on The Awesomer earlier today, and now it turns out that’s not the only animation IBM’s team of scientists have created. They also made a special one just for Trekkies.

The animated GIF you’re looking at above is actually made of individually manipulated atoms, arranged to form various iconic images from the Star Trek franchise.

In addition to the Star Trek logo, they created still images of the Vulcan salute, and a U.S.S. Enterprise in two sizes.

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The images were created by IBM’s Almaden research facility, in celebration of the impending release of Star Trek into Darkness, which opens on May 17th.

The most amazing image of all is this tiny Enterprise that measures just 1 nanometer in height:

While I’d imagine it would be pretty easy to lose such a small Federation starship, at least it’s not likely to be spotted by Khan or any Romulans – unless their ship is equipped with an electron microscope.

You can check out more amazing atomic images created by the team over on Flickr.

Water bottles are basically banned in most exams I’ve taken, and it’s easy to see why. Students can get so creative at cheating that even a pen itself can be used for that purpose. Case in point? The White Weasel’s editable and printable Aquafina label that lets students create cheat sheets that look like water bottle labels.

The only challenge is finding a printer that can print this stuff on shiny plastic. It’ll look way suspicious if you showed up to the test with a water bottle wrapped in printed paper, don’t you think? Especially if you keep staring at it during the duration of the test. Now that’s a dead giveaway.

But all kidding aside, we don’t condone cheating in any way, so if you do have a test coming up, get off the Internet and crack those books open. Your future self will thank you for it.

[via Geekologie]

Sony has announced a new set of digital recording binoculars called the DEV-50V. The binoculars allow users to take still photos and video of wildlife from afar. That wildlife can include things such as birds and deer (or the hot blonde who lives across the street.) Sony says that these new binoculars are lighter, smaller, and more weatherproof compared to the versions released previously.

The digital recording binoculars have a magnification range of 0.8x to 12x optical, and up to 25x digital zoom. The magnification can also be adjusted on the fly so you can use the low magnification setting to find your subject and then quickly zoom in. The binoculars also automatically focus themselves and have integrated image stabilization.

They’re also able to record 2D or 3D images and work in low light conditions as well. Still images can be taken at a resolution of 20.4-megapixels, and video can be captured in Full AVCHD (presumably, that means 1080p resolution). Each eye gets its own XGA resolution OLED “Tru-Finder” and the binoculars have integrated GPS for geo-tagging photos and video. One cool feature is that you can even play back 3D video through the eyepieces. They also have an HDMI output for connecting to an HDTV.

The DEV-50V binoculars will be available this June for about $2000(USD).

Do Instagrammers who post pictures of food annoy you? Apparently, they irritate a lot of people, including some guys who took it upon themselves to come up with an in-your-face prank that demonstrates just how annoying their behavior is.

Or that could just be my interpretation of their prank. Anyway, the whole thing was orchestrated by Hungry, which is a YouTube channel that’s all about food.

They had two pranksters travel all around town, asking random people if they could take a picture of their food so they can post it to their Instagram account. It’s invasive and irksome for them to do so, but it also happens to be a very funny clip. You can check out what happened in the clip below:

What do you find most annoying about Instagram?

[via Laughing Squid]