Hasta La Gadget!

The camera in our smartphones have advanced to a point where there is no longer a need to carry around a dedicated point-and-shoot camera, since it does the job pretty well by itself, and much more in certain models. Having said that, how many of you have not touched your Micro Four Thirds or DSLR shooter in the week, simply because your smartphone camera is so much more convenient? Well, with the $19.99 Slingshot Smartphone Tripod and Stabilizer, you will be able to make far more use of your smartphone camera, where it functions as a universal smartphone tripod and stabilizer, helping make sure that unwanted wiggle in videos or blur in photos are a thing of the past.

Apart from that, the Slingshot Smartphone Tripod and Stabilizer will also arrive with an adapter that will allow other phones to be attached to tripods. It does not matter whether you are walking on the iOS or Android divide, the Slingshot Smartphone Tripod and Stabilizer will be able to turn your once amateurish videos and photos into something that is way more professional looking. The slingshot bit of it will rely on adjustable cables to lock in your phone, allowing it to play nice with majority of devices out there. All you need then is just one hand to hold your phone steady, while the other would operate the controls in a jiffy.
[ Slingshot Smartphone Tripod and Stabilizer brings your photo taking adventures to a new level copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

I wouldn’t say using pencils as zombie-killing projectiles would be my first thought, but if you do enough slingshot-ing I guess it makes sense that you would eventually run up against office supplies as a source of inspiration. Joerg updates his pencil shooter to be crank operated and more efficient. It can shoot two pencils at a time for a total of 16 in one magazine. And Joerg sees potential for use with a power drill instead of "muscle operated action" aka humans. Leave the pencil shooter going while you run away from the zombies. Solid plan.

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If you’ve been trying to recall what makes theoretical math super fun, here’s a reminder. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology that examines how long it would take Voyager-sized probes to bop around the Milky Way and eventually encounter our solar system. The answer is not that long! Especially if the probes are using gravitational slingshotting and especially if they’re self-replicating.

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We’ve been having fun with the viral marketing campaign that Nabisco has going right now and have seen all kinds of ways to separate the Oreo cream from its cookies. But the one thing we haven’t seen is a gun that can accomplish this important first-world task. Well, get ready to see the Oreo-separating shotgun.

This creation comes from Joerg Sprave who you will know from The Slingshot Channel on Youtube. He knows his stuff when it comes to weapon building, and has built an impressive gun to separate the Oreo cookies from the cream. A pump-action Oreo shooter. Just load some Oreos in the top and they fire from the bottom muzzle section.

This weapon hold 14 Oreo cookies. Just pull the slide to load one in the chamber, then pump it and unleash one of its delicious cookie bullets. So how does the gun separate the cream from the cookie? Okay, it doesn’t really. Well, it kind of does. When cookies hit an object, like a wall, it all splatters nicely and is separated. Just not in a way that is neat and edible. Joerg also tried to put a box-cutter blade inside the barrel to see if it would split the cookie neatly, but all he ended up with was a bunch of crumbs. Still, the idea of a gun that fires cookies is loads of fun.

Yeah. We know. There are pretty much as many ways to play Angry Birds, as there are people who play it. That’s a lot. However, the Super Angry Birds controller you see above speaks to us. Why? Because it’s not just a sling shot, or a fudged use of existing technology. That wooden “sling” hides one of those motorized faders you see in big music studio desks. Using some coding magic (i.e. a force curve stored in a table), the creators were able to give it a realistic resistance feeling, sans elastic. The rest of the hardware is programmed in Max / MSP and Arduino, with a “Music and Motors” microcontroller. It’s not just the sling part, either, with angle and special power triggering available from the same device. A pretty neat solution, we think. Now, we wonder if we could scale this thing up?

Continue reading Super Angry Birds USB controller puts the sling back in your shot (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Super Angry Birds USB controller puts the sling back in your shot (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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