Hasta La Gadget!

A couple of years ago Robbie Rane and his friends were making up funny euphemisms for taking a dump. One of his buddies contributed “Toss Boba Fett in the Sarlacc.” The joke got stuck in Robbie’s head like pudding on porcelain, until one day he could bear it no more and decide to take the metaphor literally.

With the help of illustrator Alyssa Scott, Robbie made a set of stickers that will make a toilet bowl look like the Great Pit of Carkoon. Along with Boba Fett – the bounty hunter, not Robbie’s friend’s poop – the set also includes stickers of Han Solo and Chewbacca saving Lando Calrissian.

Robbie sells the Toilet Sarlacc decal set for $25 (USD). I don’t know how much your plumber will charge to install it.

[via Nerdist]

A couple of days ago we saw MobileFun’s sticker kit that makes an iPhone 5 look like an iPhone 5S, sorta. It turns out they have a sillier stick-on conversion kit for the iPhone 5. The iFruit vinyl skin is based on Rockstar Games’ eponymous companion app for Grand Theft Auto V. I bet they find this sticker hilarious.

Because the phones are about the same size, the vinyl should fit the iPhone 5s as well. You can order the iFruit skin from MobileFun for $13 (USD). Man, mocking oneself is expensive. To complete the transformation, change your phone’s wallpaper to one of the iFruit app’s backgrounds. Se7ensins forum member Tag 7s extracted the images from the app itself.

[via Inventor Spot]

We’ve all misplaced keys, gadgets and occasionally even children. Well, no more. StickNFind is a nifty, inexpensive solution for tagging and locating electronics, keys and pets. For roughly $25 a pop (estimated retail), you get a small adhesive disk that can be affixed to any flat surface or attached to a keychain. Inside, there’s a replaceable CR2016 watch battery that’s said to last more than a year, a Bluetooth module and antenna, an LED-lit ring and a piezoelectric speaker. A free Android or iOS app then lets you hone in on any stickers within a roughly 100-foot (line of sight) range. The current version can only display distance, but an update, set to hit before StickNFind ships, will add direction, leading you directly to your target. You can also activate a (fairly faint) beeper, and an LED ring around the perimeter of the sticker, further helping you to find the device, even in a dark room. The app will offer several other features, including a “Virtual Leash” that alerts you when the sticker goes out of range — a “Reverse Virtual Leash” will make the device (perhaps attached to your keys) beep, letting you know you’ve left your smartphone behind.

The product designers will also be offering an SDK, so developers can even create their own apps for StickNFind. For example, you could write an app that uses the stickers as triggers — apparently one museum plans to affix the device to art, so as visitors approach, a text notification will pop up describing the piece. Another company is considering using stickers at an upcoming conference, and with Bluetooth transmitters placed around a venue, they can track the precise location of attendee badges (and the individuals wearing them), and even send “pages” by triggering the beeper and light. During our hands-on, StickNFind worked quite well, though as we mentioned, the current alpha version of the app only displays distance, not direction. The device is currently available for “pre-order” on Indiegogo, with an estimated March ship date. You can snag a sneak peek of it in action though, in our hands-on video after the break.

Continue reading StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you tag and locate your goods with a smartphone (hands-on video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Household, Mobile

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Source: StickNFind (Indiegogo)

Nobody wants to be called a man-eater. People have been singing about them for years but it’s hardly a compliment to be called one. But a man-eater is what you have to become if you want to top the high-score charts in this urban game aptly called Man-Eater.

Daniel Disselkoen played with the man-eater concept and came up with the game for his graduation project at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

To play, the people in the tram simply have to close one eye and adjust their position relative to that of the man-eater that’s stuck onto the window of the tram. As the vehicle moves, they must then try to ‘eat’ as many pedestrian heads as they can.

Daniel explains the reasoning behind the game: “Why would you look out the window with curiosity when there is no reason to expect anything new?”

Man-Eater is pretty simple but I think it can make people want to look out the window more.

[via Pop Up City]

Strangely, the Austrian city of Klagenfurt doesn’t have a public library, even though it hosts the Festival of German-Language Literature. However, an initiative dubbed Project Ingeborg is turning the municipality into a book repository of sorts with 70 QR code and NFC chip-equipped stickers. Plastered throughout town, they direct users to web pages where they can download public domain works, largely from Project Gutenberg. Oftentimes, e-books will be located in relevant locations — so you’ll be sure to find Arthur Schnitzler’s The Killer near the police station, for example. Come August, the team behind the effort will partner with local talent to distribute books, music and other digital content too. In an effort to build a stronger bond to the location, the organizers have prevented search engines from indexing the links, so you’ll have to visit Klagenfurt to access the curated goods. If you’d like to turn your city into a library, the group hopes to release instructions for replicating their system soon.

[Thanks, Michael]

Filed under: Cellphones

Austrian city builds public library with nothing but QR codes, NFC and stickers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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