Hasta La Gadget!

You know what’s odd? We never ever saw Darth Vader or any of his Stormtroopers stop for a meal. You’d think battling the Jedi-Rebel Alliance and building Death Stars (yes, plural) would work up a mean hunger. And if you are gonna eat a meal, it better be seasoned well. At a bare minimum, you need some salt and pepper.

I think that it’s more likely that the Jedi would use these Darth Vader and Stormtrooper salt and pepper shakers since they kind of reduce the Empire to a role of simple servitude. Naturally, the Vader shaker holds pepper, while the Trooper holds salt.

So use The Force to open another browser tab and head over to Convenient Gadgets & Gifts to order a pair now for $19.95(USD). Now I want a Darth Maul shaker for my chili powder. And Grand Moff Tarkin for cumin. And Count Dooku for oregano.

The folks at PiFace – makers of hardware interfaces for the Raspberry Pi – wanted to make a camera rig that could create the bullet time effect popularized by The Matrix, but they didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on cameras. Naturally their first instinct was to see if they could use the Raspberry Pi to make a cheaper alternative. To their surprise, their idea worked!

PiFace calls its rig the Frozen Raspberry Pi or Frozen Pi. It consists of 48 Raspberry Pis each with a Raspberry Pi Camera and a PiFace Control and Display interface, all mounted on a laser-cut wood frame. The computers are networked via Ethernet so they can be simultaneously triggered remotely and so that the pictures they take can be sent to a single computer. PiFace wrote a Python script to collect the pictures and arrange them in order. Skip to around 2:17 in the video below to see the rig in action and people in inaction.

Slow down time and head to the PiFace blog to find out more about how they made the Frozen Pi.

[via MAKE]

Netflix recently held a Hack Day for its engineers to come up with tweaks to the popular streaming video service. Even though the activity was made primarily for fun, one of the resulting hacks is quite promising: a hack that uses information from a Fitbit to detect when you fall asleep and then pauses the video in response. It could give lazy people a reason to buy a fitness tracker.

Made by Sam Horner, Rachel Nordman, Arlene Aficial, Sam Park and Bogdan Ciuca, the Sleep Tracker not only pauses the video but also makes a bookmark of that point. And then it’ll report the boring video to Netflix. Just kidding. It should though.

Netflix makes no guarantee that the hack will make it into their software, specially since not everyone has a Fitbit or fitness tracker in general. But wouldn’t it be nice if all displays had this technology built in? Check out the Netflix blog to see more hacks from their engineers.

[via TechCrunch]

I love Bravely Default. It’s one of the best RPGs I’ve played in a long time. I had so much fun playing it that I made a mini-guide for a certain part of the game. So I headed to GameFAQs, and while I was figuring out how to write my guide I came upon this neat Easter Egg for the game. I can’t describe the trick without spoiling a major feature of the game though. You’ve been warned.

Here’s your final warning. SPOILERS INCOMING! Okay, Amigo-bot, here’s the trick. As you know, the game’s Start screen has four main options. Normally the fourth option will only be unlocked if you get the game’s “true ending”, which needless to say takes a long time to obtain. But YouTuber Shmiam found out that you can temporarily unlock that option by entering the Konami Code. More specifically, at the Start Screen, point the cursor to the fourth option then enter the code. The contents of that option are shown in Shmiam’s video as well, so you might want to stop watching after he demonstrates the trick.

I already got the fourth option before I found out about this trick, so I can’t verify if it works. That said, when I tried it I also heard the exact same sound effect that Shmiam got. Switch to the Browser Job and head to GameFAQs if you want further assurance that the code works.

Back in 2009 we found a Game Boy costume that played Tetris. It had working buttons and had a laptop running an emulator. It turns out that anonymous cosplayer kept on working on his hack and showed off its latest version at the 2014 Ohayocon.

Aside from its much improved case, the costume can now switch games, which is done by inserting equally huge cartridge replicas into a slot… somewhere in the back of the costume. Seriously though Redditor Dacaris says the cosplayer told him that the whole thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The cartridges “had slots cut in them so they would press different button combinations when they were inserted, and those told the raspberry pi which game to load.” Here’s a video of the costume shared by YouTuber MidgarZolom:

I bet he calls his jewels Select and Start.

[via Reddit]