Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re like me, you’re probably starting to amass a collection of flash drives that’s as big as that stack of AOL CDs you had back in the 1990s. But fans of The Simpsons will have to run out immediately and add to their flash drive collection with these fun new storage devices from USBTribe.

The officially-licensed series of keychain flash drives includes big-headed versions of Marge, Lisa, Bart and Homer, cast out of soft rubber. While they only store 8GB of data each, you’re not buying these for the capacity anyhow. In case you’re wondering where the drive is stored, it’s in the head of each of the characters, though I assume that the Homer one is a bit more forgetful than most memory devices.

Simpsons collectors can grab them now over at USBTribe for €19.90 (~$25 USD) each. Now where’s my Ned Flanders and Krusty the Clown drives?

Mike Hoye has recently been playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with his 3-year-old daughter Maya. He read the narration on screen to her, but because he wants Maya to be the hero, he changed all the nouns and pronouns that refer to Link to female ones. One day he got tired of editing on the fly, so he hacked the game’s actual display text instead.

Hoye used a hex editor and manually searched and changed for all of the nouns and pronouns in the game, converting “he” to “she”, replacing “master” and “my lad” with “milady” and more. He talks about the process briefly on his blog. The hack is not for newbies – you’ll need to tinker with binary files in order to apply the patch to a disk image of Wind Waker, which you can then play using the Dolphin emulator.

What Hoye did may sound more tedious than just swapping words on the fly, but this story is not just about the hack. It’s about a parent’s love and a commentary on gender representation in video games. I highly suggest you read Ars Technica’s article on Hoye’s pronoun patch.

[via Polygon]

Kids love to draw and paint on things. Sometimes they make a mess of your walls, tables and floors, but one place that’s just fine for childhood creativity is the sidewalk – assuming they use chalk for their artwork, not spray paint. Now, kids can make drawings on the sidewalk while riding their bikes.

The Chalktrail is a nifty invention which connects securely onto the back wheel of a bicycle, lowering a fat piece of chalk over the ground, so each and every move of the bike is sketched out onto the sidewalk or street. The chalk holde actually fits bikes with wheels from 12 to 29 inches in diameter, so kids and adults can play with it.

A single piece of chalk will last for 1.5 miles of riding, and tight and repeating turns on the blacktop will result in some pretty cool Spirograph-like designs.

You can buy the Chalktrail over at Fat Brain Toys for $19.95(USD) including a single piece of non-toxic, washable chalk, or for $26.90 with a refill of 4 extra chalk pieces. In 2013, a special version of the Chalktrail is coming for scooters (as shown in the video below).

[via Icecream (Chinese)]

Amazon has announced a new service further proving that you can buy just about anything from the massive online retailer. The new services called Amazon Wine, and as you can imagine, the service will ship wine to certain states. However, Amazon isn’t stockpiling a huge inventory of wine and then shipping bottles out directly. Rather the wine is purchased through Amazon, and then shipped directly from the vineyard.

Wine services are available in California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C. Presumably, the limited availability has to do with laws in various states governing the shipment of alcohol from outside of the state. Amazon says that more states will be participating in the program soon.

Naturally, to purchase the wine requires that the buyer be at least 21-years-old. If somehow a kid should happen to figure out how to get around that purchase requirement, the packages won’t be delivered unless someone at least 21 or older is home to sign. Amazon is charging $9.99 to ship up to six bottles of wine and Prime Shipping rates are not available for the wine service.

[via CNET]

Just the other day we told you about the homemade Hobbit Doll House that one Tolkien fan made, now we have Bag End made from balloons. Geeks are going Hobbit crazy.

Jeremy Telford, of The Balloon Guys, spent 40 hours on this version of Bilbo Baggins’ home. He didn’t use a doll house. He used his living room and turned it into a nice hobbit home, using 2,600 balloons. Check out the time-lapse video below.

I’m assuming that he doesn’t have any cats and that he forbids any sharp objects from entering his home. He did a nice job, but I’m sure the room shrinks a bit each day as those balloons lose air.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]