Hasta La Gadget!

Zombies are scary. So are ghosts. Especially scary are zombie ghosts–that’s when a zombie dies but still feels it has unresolved zombie work to do on Earth OR when a regular ghost gets bitten by a zombie and spends its time looking for ghost brains to eat.

It’s all almost too scary and complicated to think about.

But if you want really scary this Halloween, I have three words for you: massive debilitating injury. Nothing is scarier than being reminded about the frailty of the human condition. I spend way more time contemplating plane crashes, undiagnosed tumors, and falling branches than I do about the oncoming zombie apocalypse.

And that’s the brilliance of this costume, which actually dates back to 2006. One former A/V club president designed a way to use a simple digital camera and travel DVD player to make it appear as if he has a gaping wound in his abdomen. The digital camera is strapped to his back capturing the action behind him, the image transmits to the DVD screen in the front, creating the gaping hole effect. It’s actually kind of brilliant. And, with the advance of technology in just the last four years, it’s probably a lot easier and cheaper to do in 2010.

Way more frightening than a ghost zombie.

via Make, image via Flickr

If you’ve ever wondered how you could get Pandora, Sirius/XM, or even your iTunes library playing in your bedroom while your computer stays in the living room, the new GDI-IR2550p Wi-Fi Internet Radio from Grace Digital Audio offers you the ability to stream Internet radio wirelessly anywhere in the house. The tabletop unit will set you back $169.99 retail, and is available online now.

The Wi-Fi Internet Radio is small enough to fit just about anywhere, and can stream Internet radio from Pandora, NPR, CNN, the BBC, Pandora, and Live365 with a touch of a button using built-in 802.11 b/g/n wireless. The Wi-Fi Internet Radio features Pandora because it has one-touch buttons to control playback and rate songs on the front of the device. The unit can also see shared iTunes libraries from a Mac or PC on your home network and play music directly from them. The unit comes with a remote so you can manage your music without walking up to the device, and can be controlled using the Grace Remote Control App for the iPhone.

If you’re looking for a way to give your laptop a sound boost but maintain a clean and elegant workspace that’s not cluttered with large wired speakers, the Edifier Soundbar USB may be the perfect audio accessory for you. The brushed aluminum bar is just over 10-inches wide with a glowing blue mute switch and power button on the side. The Soundbar is entirely USB-powered, so the only cable you’ll need with the device is a USB cable, which is included in the package, and as long as it’s connected to your Mac or PC you can use it as external speakers.

The Soundbar USB also has an AUX-in port that allows you to connect other devices like a mobile phone or digital music player, but you still have to have it connected to a USB port on a desktop or laptop for power in order for it to work. Edifier promises the Soundbar has enough juice to sound out entire rooms and comes in a portable package with a carry pouch that can slip into a laptop bag or backpack. The Edifier Soundbar USB is available now from online retailers for $49 list.
 

There are millions of pounds of plastic in landfills around the country and floating in that big huge garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – you know, the one the size of Texas – and only a fraction of the plastic used in the United States alone actually gets recycled. Thanks to one Japanese inventor and engineer, the table-top Blest Machine (Japanese) essentially takes plastic, melts it down, separates the gases and condensation from the melted plastic, and produces burnable fuel oil at the end. He says about two pounds of plastic will net you a quart of oil, and the oil can even be further refined into other petroleum-based products like gasoline.

What’s the catch? The second law of thermodynamics says no system is perfect, so before anyone thinks this is a perpetual motion scam, note that you actually have to dump energy into the Blest Machine to melt down the plastic, process it, and produce the oil on the other end.

This isn’t free energy by any stretch, but that’s not the point: the $9,500 table-top gadget isn’t designed to be an energy producer, it’s meant to give people and municipalities a way to use electricity (which can be produced using sustainable means) to get rid of plastic waste and turn it into something that’s useful today, like oil. Right now the Blest Machine is only available in Japan, but expect to see it pop up around the globe soon.

[via DVice]

Waiting for that HP webOS to finally take on Apple’s iPad? Looks like you’ll have to keep waiting, for the foreseeable future. HP did, in fact, launch a tablet today–the Slate 500–but in spite of the company’s purchase of Palm and the recent release of webOS 2 and the Palm Pre 2, that ultra dynamic operating system is nowhere to be seen on the thing.

Nope, the HP Slate 500 is a Windows 7 machine–not only that, it’s Windows 7 Professional. Yep–HP is pushing this thing as a business tablet. The company looks to be tackling professionals in fields like education, insurance, and real estate–words that don’t really scream, you know, “sexy” the way an iPad does.

The screen is 8.9 inches, and the device weighs 1.5 pound. Inside you’ll find a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540, a 64GB hard drive, and 2GB of RAM–over in its hands-on, PCMag describes the thing a “zippy.” There’s also a built-in camera and an SD card slot.

There’s no 3G on the thing, but it does feature 802.11b/g/n. The Slate 500 runs $799 and is available. As for the webOS tablet? That’s still coming–at some point next year.