Hasta La Gadget!

Confession bear time: I’ve never played any Elder Scrolls game, mostly because I don’t enjoy open world games. Which means I don’t know how unusual the weapons in the series can get. Maybe there’s one made from balloons or whatever balloons are called in the games. But I like the design of the Keening dagger. And by that I mean I like this replica.

This replica was made by Bill Doran, who is not a replica Dwemer but a real artisan who is good at making props and costumes. Elder Scrolls fans know that the Keening first appeared in Morrowind, but Doran used its appearance in Skyrim as his guide. The hilt is made of plastic resin with bronze powder, while the crystalline blade – I call it the Heisenberg – was made from “Tap Plastic’s Clear-Lite resin with some green and blue transparent tint added.”

Doran said he the replica will be auctioned off at a Child’s Play event today, although I think that’s exactly what an evil High Priest would say if he’s messing with… with evil magics and stuff. I’ve run out of Elder Scrolls references. Go on, fast travel to Doran’s blog for more pictures and details on the process.

[via Punished Props via Reddit]

…and Gondor, Eriador, Rohan, Arnor, Rhovanion and Rhun and whatever uncharted land is on Middle Earth. But Flickr user Kristy pulled it off with style at Dragon*Con:

The dress was made by Flickr user Cressiebeth, who said “I worked with a graphic designer who created the “repeat” map pattern and Spoonflower.com printed the map on cotton sateen fabric. I used a vintage Simplicity pattern #3422 as a base for the dress and altered it with scalloping. The clutch was my own design and the “ring” was recycled from an old circle belt buckle.”

I think it’s the fact that it uses only a few colors – and muted ones at that – that prevents the whole thing from devolving into a walking globe costume.

[via Matt & Kristy’s Flickr via Fashionably Geek]

Earlier this year we saw a calculator playing Pokémon via a Game Boy Color emulator. Redditor Builderboy2005 has made something way better (or worse, depending on your expectations). Portal Prelude, a game for Texas Instruments calculators. It’s not the original game, but it does feature its space-warping mechanics.

Like the official Valve games Portal Prelude takes place at Aperture Laboratories, but “long before GLaDOS ever ran the facility.” It comes with 38 testing chambers and even has a level editor. The game is only compatible with Texas Instruments’ Ti-83 and Ti-84 series of calculators. You can watch the video below to see how it plays, but if you intend to play the game don’t watch the video all the way through because it shows how to solve the puzzles.

You can download Portal Prelude for free on Omnimaga. Builderboy and Omnimaga both pointed out that there are calculator emulators for the PC that you might be able to use to run this game, but not only is that method probably illegal, I think it also ruins some of the magic of playing Portal on a freakin’ calculator.

[via Reddit]

Twitter is probably the most up-to-date source of both the most useless as well as the important issues of the day; it’s like a thousand free radio stations where some broadcast nothing but ads while the rest have schizophrenic DJs and reporters. So… it’s not like a radio station at all. But I still find this tweet-speaking radio to be an awesome mod.

The not-radio was made by Sean Hathaway, who calls his device “Volume and Noise.” It has a wooden case from an antique radio but its innards and display have been upgraded with equipment like a newer amplifier, an Arduino microcontroller and a meter that shows the number of tweets per minute.

It filters tweets based on user-defined search terms and then converts them to speech using synthetic voices. In the video below Volume and Noise is tuned in to political search terms. I like the addition of static and tuning sound effects.

I wonder if it would be possible to order it to make a voice command that tells the radio to save or mail a link to the tweet it just read. That way it would be even more useful.

[via MAKE]

Technology is quickly catching up to satisfy our nostalgia. We have modders making amalgams of old consoles, calculators that can run Pokémon and now this, a prime contender for Technabob’s non-existent app of the year awards – an app that lets Android devices run Windows 95 & 98 games.

The app is called Winulator, and it was made by a genius called Dan Aloni. Winulator implements “DirectX and Win32 calls”, i.e. it lets games run on the Android OS despite them being developed for the older Windows operating systems. But most of these games were made not just with a certain OS but also with certain hardware in mind, particularly Intel Pentium processors, and not the ARM processors found in today’s Android devices. Fortunately Winulator takes care of that as well. It can either compile as needed or “compile the entire binary before it runs.” In layman’s terms? StarCraft on your smartphone. Actually that’s a stupid setup but still. It’s possible.

Winulator isn’t finished yet, but Aloni is planning on releasing it via the Google Play market when it’s done. Meanwhile dig up your old installers and get to ripping.

[Winulator via Ubergizmo]