Hasta La Gadget!

Raising a kid is a huge responsibility (and from what I’ve seen my sister go through so far, it’s also the cause of many pains and frustrations.) But the fun thing about babies is that you can dress them up in whatever clothes you want, and they don’t have any say because, well, they don’t really care.

This isn’t exactly an article of clothing. It’s actually a swaddle blanket and it’s designed to turn your baby into a burriTOT! (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) The blanket itself looks like a gigantic tortilla, and your baby is the filling.

Don’t be surprised when people’s heads turn your way when your baby’s wrapped in this and you happen to be out and about, because it’ll probably look like you’re embracing a gigantic burrito.

The Tortilla Baby Swaddle Blanket is available online for $48(USD). Sour cream and guacamole not included.

[via Incredible Things]

There is nothing like fruitcake for Christmas, and many people are thankful for that fact. The hapless holiday dessert has fallen out of favor over the past few decades. New ideas have come up for what to do with the unfavorable baked good, including using it as a building material and launching it from a specially designed cannon just for fun. There have even been rescue organizations set up to take in unwanted fruitcakes and find them new homes.

Remember Jean-Claude Van Damme’s split between two Volvo trucks, the ad that wasn’t computer generated but an actual stunt? Well, Chuck Norris splitting between two Lockheed C-5 Galaxy with a squad of special forces on top of his hat is CGI. But that doesn’t matter, because if Chuck wanted, Chuck would totally do it.

Read more…

Dexter Industries makes a Raspberry Pi add-on called BrickPi, which connects the ultra cheap computer to LEGO’s NXT Mindstorms parts. To show off what you can do with its kit, they made a robot that reads eBooks aloud.

The BrickPi Reader was designed to read from the Kindle app on the Nexus 7 tablet. Aside from a Raspberry Pi and LEGO, the BrickPi Reader also has a Raspberry Pi camera. The camera takes a picture of an eReader’s screen. The Raspberry Pi then uses an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to extract text from the picture. A Text-to-Speech engine reads the extracted text aloud. Finally, its Mindstorms arm taps on the Nexus 7′s screen to turn the eBook’s page. When you think about it, it’s basically a Rube Goldberg machine.

But don’t say goodbye to Audible just yet. Not only does it take the BrickPi Reader a few minutes to convert a single page, its “voice” is also horrible. Maybe it’s soothing to baby robots.

I love how they show a guy wanting to read an eBook while driving, as if their finished contraption could be used in a vehicle. Still, who would’ve thought LEGO could read?

[Dexter Industries via Make:]

Have you signed up for Google+ yet? Have you?! Or have you been cowering in the closet, whispering empty reassurances to yourself as it slowly but surely closes in. There’s only one place this can all be headed: Enter Google Blackmail.

Read more…