Hasta La Gadget!

Everyone hates a player almost as much as they dislike cheaters. But no one will fault you for playing people and treating it all like a game. Not if you’re just playing Solitaire with these personalized Facebook playing cards.

This new offering from Firebox takes the Facebook craze further. The social network has close to a billion users worldwide, and the numbers are still growing, so it makes sense to capitalize on it while it’s still as popular as it is.

If you love playing cards and fancy the thought of having a personalized deck with the faces and images of people from your Facebook friends list, then you might want to commission Firebox to print you up your very own deck.

It’s a quick three-step process to get some playing cards that feature your actual Facebook friends. Just access their app, pick 54 people to be on your cards, then assign which person will grace which card. Pay up and voila! You’ll never have a lonely time playing solitaire, guaranteed.

The Personalized Facebook Playing Cards are available from Firebox for £11.99 (~$19 USD.)

[via Chip Chick]

I’m a sucker for remote-controlled toys, especially flying toys. Sadly I’m not qualified to fly any of the airplanes or helicopters I’ve ever tried. Generally I get to fly once and then crash during landing, destroying any chance at a second flight. RC geeks in the UK will soon be able to get a cool spy plane called the Spy Hawk, which to let you record your landing disasters – or the pool party your hot neighbor is throwing.

Spy Hawk is a three-channel mini glider that comes with an integrated first-person video system able to send five-megapixel live video feeds back to a 3.5-inch LCD on the remote control. The plane even has an autopilot mode with gyro stabilization that lets you get it to altitude, and then watch the video without having to worry about actually flying. The toy has a range of up to 600 m with an average flight time of 15 minutes on a single charge.

The system has an integrated four gigabyte memory card to store the video. It also uses intelligent signaling so you can fly more than one Spy Hawk at the same time. The Spy Hawk will sell for £249.95 (~$386 USD) when it lands next month over at Red5.

Try as I might, I’ve never been able to skip a stone across water in my life. And while there are some people who possess this skill, I’m not one of them. That’s okay, because it turns out there’s a robot to do my bidding skipping.

Skippy the Robot flings stones perfectly across the surface of water every time. The ‘bot is set up along a lake in Sun Valley, Idaho, and you can actually instruct Skippy to skip a stone across this idyllic scene if you are patient enough to wait in line for it. But even if you don’t want to wait, here’s a little clip of Skippy in action, doing his thing, so you can get the point.

If you’d like to ask Skippy to fling a stone on your behalf, head on over to the appropriately named www.stoneskippingrobot.com.

[via Mashable]

When it comes professional soccer around the world, FIFA is the league where most of the major teams play. It’s not uncommon for the referees to have a difficult time calling a goal during a match because it can be hard to determine when the ball passes the goal line. FIFA has just approved a new high-tech soccer ball that will eliminate any misunderstandings when it comes to scoring a goal or not.

The ball itself looks normal on the outside, but has bands of copper sensors on the inside that wrap completely around the ball. When a player kicks the ball through the goal, as soon as the entire ball crosses the goal line antennas mounted to the goal pick up the score. A light on a watch worn by officials then comes on to signify the score.

It’s not clear at this point when the ball will make its first appearance in a professional soccer match. However, this technology should easily end any arguments about whether or not the goal was good down at the pub.

Silence is golden. That’s something I learned after working a few months in an always-busy office environment where some people can be extremely loud. Now talking might be unavoidable sometimes, and in the din of all that noise, you might miss the occasional notification or so from your smartphone or email client.

So for that, you need the L8 SmartLight. It serves up notifications using a unique lighting system, so you don’t need to hear anything to get the message. All you need is to see it.

The device is made up of a grid 64 LED lights on one side and a super bright LED light on the other. It connects with your computer or smartphone via Bluetooth to deliver stuff you want to know through light codes, like tweets, Facebook messages, e-mails, game results, temperature, and more. And it doesn’t just light up in blue – the L8 is works in full color, and can be programmed to work as an ambient light or even turn on when somebody approaches it.

The people behind the project need to raise $90,000 to make the L8 SmartLight into a reality. To find out more about it and maybe even support it, head on over to Kickstarter. A minimum pledge of $69(USD) will get you your very own L8, and $80 will get you the developer edition, complete with early access to the SDK.