Hasta La Gadget!

Every guitarist wants a guitar that will set the stage on fire. This is that guitar – literally. Don Juan De Pyro turned his guitar into a flamethrower that initially could shoot multicolored flames up to six feet for about 40 seconds. He calls it the FLAMEnco guitar.

He tinkered with it some more and now it can shoot 18-foot long colored flames. Don uses a new super compact burster system that works with a Mark 3 constant flame system. Mark 1, 2, 3 and 6 can all be controlled remotely off-stage with the help of a RF remote receiver.

I was hoping for a version of Light my Fire in the video, but sadly it didn’t happen. This thing looks great in action – though it’s probably best used only in outdoor venues.

[via Hack a Day via Damn Geeky]

Some dads get their kids toy cars or iPads to play with, while others go the extra mile and make something that their kids will remember for their entire lifetime. Laurent Aigon is one of the awesome dads who went for the latter.

For the past five years, Laurent has been building this highly-detailed 737 cockpit simulator in his son’s room. He ordered the parts online and enlisted the help of Jean-Paul Dupuy, another enthusiast, to build it with him.

You might assume that Laurent is a pilot, but he’s actually a waiter with a passion for flying. It was always his dream to be a pilot, so while that didn’t happen in real life, he can sort of pretend to be one in the amazing simulator that he put together.

[Sud Ouest via Oddity Central via Gizmodo via C|NET]

Mattel’s Magic 8-ball toy has 20 answers, each one printed on a 20-sided die. Jason Poel Smith of DIY Hacks and How-Tos thought that that was 40 answers too few, so he made his own version of the fortune-telling toy that can have up to 60 possible answers. And he can cheat with it.

Smith could have used a 60-sided die – I know, I’m as surprised as you are! – but he opted for a more elegant solution. He split open a magic 8-ball and put a digital picture key chain inside. This way he can edit the toy’s answers by plugging the key chain to his computer via USB. I bet he placed 57 positive answers.

Shake your browser and turn it over. Outlook good? Then bring out your toolbox and head to Instructables.

[via MAKE]

Earlier this month we saw a car with a joystick shift lever. It looks cool, but it doesn’t have any additional function. Ford engineer Zachary Nelson made a more high-tech shift lever mod that’s geared towards newbie drivers. It’s a shift knob that vibrates to tell you when to shift gears.

The shift knob is based on the Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller. Using an Android app and the OpenXC Vehicle Interface, the knob “monitors the vehicle’s speed, RPM and accelerator pedal position. Based on this information, the application calculates and then indicates to the driver when he or she should shift by vibrating the shift knob.” Additionally, the knob can be set to prioritize speed or fuel economy. Zach used a motor from an Xbox 360 controller to make the knob vibrate and then designed and 3D printed the knob’s case. It was then installed onto the manual shift lever from a Ford Mustang.

Start your browser’s engine and head to OpenXC to find out how to make a vibrating shift knob. Or not.

[via Wired via Gearfuse]

Modern automobiles benefit from increasingly small and smart computers, which can help control or augment everything from a car’s dashboard display to fundamental functions like steering. But as the world is slowly realizing, if something runs software, that thing can be hacked. That’s what Forbes recently found out thanks to a demonstration by two computer security experts.

Image by Forbes

Forbes’ Andy Greenberg met with Charlie Miller – a security engineer at Twitter – and Chris Valasek – the Director of Security Intelligence at security services consulting firm IOActive – to experience firsthand how today’s high-tech cars can be fooled. Charlie and Chris connected to one of the Electronic Control Units or ECUs of a Toyota Prius and proceeded to do all sorts of dangerous tweaks with it on the fly.

Charlie and Chris are working under a grant from DARPA to expose vulnerabilities in cars. Greenberg also drove a Ford Escape that both security experts hacked in similar ways. When Greenberg spoke to a Toyota spokesperson, he was told that the hack in the video above didn’t really concern them because it involved gaining access to the car and physically connecting a device to it. But the reason why Charlie and Chris didn’t bother to do it wirelessly is because that part has already been proven, way back in 2010:

Yeah these things need to be patched now. These videos are extremely troubling.

[via Forbes via BBC]