Hasta La Gadget!

This is how the end of the world begins. The landscape is filled with thousands of these glowing invaders. You can shoot and shoot, picking them off one by one, but they just keep coming in wave after wave. Dear God, will we ever be rid of them? I heard an rumor that some guy in Iowa shot down the mother-ship, but I don’t know man. They just keep marching across the sky.

Soon my platoon will run out of ammo. These aliens don’t even care. They just keep flapping their arms. Also, soon those pylons that we are taking cover behind will be all shot up. Tell my wife and kids I love them. I gotta go kill some more of these green bastids.

Yeah, that’s how it happens. But anyway, enjoy this Space Invaders LED light show in the streets of Toronto, Canada. Then go prepare for the inevitable day when the aliens arrive.

[via Obvious Winner]

If you had told us at roughly this time last year that the e-reader race would be heating up going into the 2012 holiday season, we would have disagreed. If anything, 2011 seemed like the beginning of the end. Spurred on by the tablet explosion, companies like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and even Kobo were looking toward that space for inspiration, introducing flagship devices on which reading was just one of many features. Heck, even the readers themselves started to look more tablet-like, with many abandoning of physical keyboards in favor of infrared touchscreens.

But here we are at the end of September, and this product category has never been more exciting. Back in May, Barnes & Noble captured our hearts and midnight reading marathons with the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, a wordy name for a great little device that made reading in bed at night a little easier. (A problem, according to Barnes & Noble, that was tearing the country’s families apart.) But don’t let it be said that Amazon doesn’t believe in the American family. Earlier this month, the company launched the Kindle Paperwhite, the latest addition to a product lineup that has more or less become synonymous with the term “e-reader.”

At that launch event, CEO Jeff Bezos described the four years of R&D that went into the front light technology powering that bright screen. It was clear from our hands-on time with the device that, although Amazon is placing extra emphasis on the Fire line these days, it still has a lot invested in the e-reader fight. The sharpened, illuminated text is impressive, and Amazon has gone so far as to describe this as the Kindle it’s always wanted to build. That’s all well and good, but how does it compare to similar offerings on the market? Is this worth the $119 asking price (with ads)? Let’s find out.

Continue reading Amazon Kindle Paperwhite review

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite review originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nowadays, kids are into violence.  Guns, explosions, fist fights – you can’t deny that these have all become an integral part of the gaming experience.  Borderlands 2?  Violent.  Halo 4?  Violent.  All 50 million versions of the same game?  (CoD.)  Violent.

Portal is one of the more docile games in terms of getting injured, but we’ve taken one small part of that experience and focused on it in all kinds of different creations. Which part is that, you ask?  The part that shoots things, of couse – the turret from Portal!  One minute it’s your friend, the next it’s stabbing you in the back.  With bullets.  Still recovering emotionally from Wheatley’s betrayal.

A guy by the name of TwoHornsUnited, who understands the concept of two objects being stronger than a single object, has created this awesome tribute to Portal.  No, I don’t think it will actually protect you from noxious gas, but it sure as heck will make the neighbors pee their pants when I crawl in through the window holding my Portal gun replica.

Here’s what the mask looks like from the view of the fifty foot woman.  You know – did anyone ever try to reason with that lumbering creature of a woman?  “Are you talking about my wife again?”  HAHA – I’m going to tell on you like I used to in grade school when you’d flick boogers at Jenny.  “So you weren’t talking about my wife?”  No – we already came to the consensus that she looks like that bear Matthew Inman drew.

If you like the Portal Turret Gas Mask, then you’ll definitely want to check out the Portal Webcam.  ”Not really, actually.”  I’m not a mind-reader, you intellectual potato.  Go take a look at the LEGO Portal set while I wallow in my self-pity, which gives off an odd stench.

Jack Kieffer owns Cool Gizmo Toys, a site that has a bunch of geeky stuff on it.

As you probably already know, GPS technology is pretty much useless once you’re inside of a building, so companies are working on ways to provide directional and navigational information while indoors. One very promising technology has been demonstrated by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

The technology uses visible light communication (VLC), pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) and map matching algorithms to determine the location and direction an individual is facing while indoors. In this demonstration video, we see a subject walking through a mall, and a 3D model of the same location closely replicating the individual’s location and direction.

It doesn’t look like it’s accurate down to the inch, but it’s pretty impressive compared to traditional GPS systems. It’s hard to tell or if the location sensors are placed throughout the building or carried by the individual, but it looks like all he’s carrying is a tablet to control the application, and it’s possible that the sensors are only in the tablet itself. It seems to me that the tablet has an application with a pre-rendered map onboard, and it’s using the tablet’s camera and the lights throughout the space to determine its relative position. Guess it wouldn’t work in the dark then.

It’s not clear if or when this technology will make its way into our lives, but it sure would be cool to be able to find your way around malls, office buildings and indoor stadiums so you can find your way around and your friends can locate you too.

With the exception the occasional lighting fixture at IKEA, most cool modern lights are ridiculously overpriced for what they are. Here’s a case where you can get your hands on a cool accent light that looks amazing, and costs just 20 bucks.

Designed by CFabStudios, the O-Lite is a small (3-4″ high/3″ wide) accent light which is made out of discs of concrete. It’s powered by a small LED light source and outputs a warm glow for up to 20 hours on a single 9V battery.

At just $20(USD) a piece, you can buy several of these to place on your bookshelves, or possible in place of candles on your dining table. They’re available over on Etsy, where you can also find matching coasters and other accessories made from concrete. There’s also a plug-in lamp called the R-Lite for $10 more, but I think I prefer the look of the battery-operated design (which may also come in an AC version down the road.)