Hasta La Gadget!

It is called Lord Humungous and it was created by 52-year-old Lance Greathouse from Phoenix, Arizona. “It” is a flamethrower attached to a mobility scooter. Lord Humungous cost about $1000 and a month of labor to create.

This deadly mobility scooter is made out of an electric golf cart, all terrain tires, and a helicopter seat. The flamethrower spits fire almost 10 meters away. It looks like it would fit right in during the apocalypse.

Greathouse Labs customizes wheelchairs for disabled people to reflect their personality, so that they don’t just have a boring ride. They also send out customized wheelchairs to the needy. Basically, everything they do is awesome. Fire! More fire!

[via METRO and Daily Mail via Damn Geeky]

If you’re planning on buying the NVIDIA Shield mainly for its ability to stream PC games, you might want to try out this crude workaround shared by Linus Tech Tips. The great thing about this setup is that you don’t need to have a compatible NVIDIA GPU to stream games from your PC like you do with the actual Shield. The bad thing about the hack is that the quality of the stream will depend heavily on your router and smartphone. But that’s why it’s called a Ghetto Shield.

To make your own portable PC gaming setup, you just need a smartphone running iOS, Android or Windows Phone. Then download Splashtop, a free program that lets you control a desktop computer from a mobile device. That’s right: this “hack” will not only let you play PC games away from your PC, you can do a lot more with your PC using Splashtop and a mobile device. Install the required apps on your device and computer, attach the compatible controller to your PC and off you go.

There are many other remote desktop programs aside from Splashtop, so if you’re more comfortable with another program or if Splashtop isn’t working for you feel free to try its alternatives. The metal sheet that connects your phone to the controller is optional but it will make your setup more Shield-like.

That wasn’t bad at all, considering the actual thing costs $300.

[via Lifehacker]

Have you ever wanted ride shotgun in a robotic car as it drives around your neighborhood? Sure, autonomous cars are still very expensive, but how about miniature version? I bet you hadn’t though of that, but a couple of engineers came up with this scaled-down version of Google’s driverless car.

The RoboTech SuperCar is a toy car kit, powered by an Arduino controller. It has RGB LED headlights and tail lights, an ultrasonic sensor, and a 24-pin RC bus that can interface with its microcontroller. The car can operate in several modes, including full RC, computer-assisted RC, or fully-autonomous driving.

The benefit is that it’s low cost compared to a full-size autonomous car, and I’m sure that you can have your own robotic invasion fleet ready soon. It’s definitely something quite ingenious to have around if you want to spy on your neighbors.

[via MAKE]

Remember the days when ticker tapes would continuously churn out stock prices? Unless you’re somebody’s great grandparent, probably not. People have gone paperless these days, rendering these machines pretty much useless. Or are they?

While they’re not being used to print stock prices anymore, they are being used to print tweets. At least that’s what British web developer Adam Vaughan is doing with the steampunk-looking contraption that he built from scratch called the Twittertape Machine. The machine has a microcontroller and a thermal printer hidden on its base and connects to a computer via Ethernet. It then checks Adam’s Twitter account every half hour.

Adam explains where he got the inspiration for the Twittertape: “I got the idea that I’d really like to have one on my desk, but of course they’re incredibly rare now and sell for huge amounts of money. Then it struck me that even if I did manage to get one it would just sit there gathering dust, doing nothing. So I had the idea that I would build one of my own, one that actually functioned… I was trying to think about what information it could produce, and of course Twitter is just a perfect fit – short succinct messages just like the stock movements of old.”

[via C|NET]

Robert Morris and Daniel McDuff are currently studying for their doctorate degrees at MIT. But even geniuses get addicted to Facebook. Robert and Dan confessed that they collectively spend about 50 hours a week on the social networking site. To get rid of their bad habit, they decided to undergo a literal shock treatment.

Named after the famous physiologist Ivan Pavlov, the Pavlov Poke is an Arduino-based system that connects to a computer via USB. It works with a program on the computer that monitors application usage; Robert and Dan used the UI Inspector in OS X. If it detects that you’re visiting a specified site or sites – in this case it’s Facebook – too frequently, it will flash an alert on screen and send a current to a couple of conducting strips that are stuck on a keyboard rest.

If being electrocuted won’t be enough to stop you from checking your feed, you can try the outsourced equivalent of Pavlov Poke. It still uses an application monitor, but this time it uses a Python script that asks people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to call you whenever you’re slacking off.

I think the second one’s more effective. Not only is it more annoying, the cost for the calls alone may be enough to reform you. Head to Robert’s website to learn more about Pavlov Poke, but only if you’re done working.

[via C|NET]