The family that sleeps in a giant sleeping bag together… is just weird. Regardless, this sleeping bag is big enough to fit your family inside. It’s great for unexpected emergency situations like if you’ve lost your house or something, but otherwise you are just going to drive each other crazy, hitting each other with your elbows and whatnot.
This sleeping bag is made from 100% Polyester and you can unzip the bag from the bottom up to allow increased airflow. Speaking of airflow, just a little warning. Do not use this thing as a family on taco night.
After you spend some time trapped in a nightmare cocoon with your them, you won’t even want to be a part of the family anymore. So enjoy it while it lasts.
When you have a Wookiee piloting anything, you have to have a seat belt. Wookiees are huge. In the event of an accident, you don’t want a Wookiee flying out of a vehicle. People are going to get hurt as that big ball of fur hurtles through the air.
So always have a seatbelt in your cockpit and make it one that the Wookiee would feel at home wearing, like this one from Etsy artist The Common Room.
This bandolier cover sells for $21.99(USD), and adds style and comfort to an item that’s already designed to save your life. It measures about 19 inches-long and fits all standard seat belts. Just be aware that depending on your car, the seatbelt may not be able to retract all the way back into its casing after use if the cover remains on. Safety first. Even for Wookiees.
Would you name your daughter Cthulhu All-Spark? I wouldn’t. But Stephen McLaughlin might, because that’s the name the Internet has suggested and voted to the top for his soon-to-be-born daughter.
Perhaps the pressure to finding a good name on his own was too much. Maybe he just wanted to have a little fun and do something different in the naming process. It doesn’t matter what his reason is though, because his plight for a name has been heeded by legions of Internet users and trolls who are all too happy to suggest some decent (but mostly outrageous) names.
Got a few suggestions of your own? Head on over to NameMyDaughter.com and send them in! Maybe we can band together and prevent his unborn daughter from being saddled with such a name. Though it’s better than Megatron Doge McLaughlin or Streetlamp Moonshine McLaughlin, I suppose.
Can’t get enough of the taste of beer? Well, forget swigging down pints and pints of liquid. Now you can get the taste you crave from jelly beans. That’s right, jelly beans. Just in time for the Super Bowl, Jelly Belly has announced that it’s adding a hefeweizen inspired Draft Beer flavored jelly bean to its lineup.
Jelly Belly says that “beer has been a highly-requested flavor for decades” – of course it is. The final beer flavor took about three years to perfect, but now they have it. The Draft Beer flavor jelly bean has a golden color with an iridescent finish. Sadly, it won’t foam slightly when you bite it. C’mon, this is jelly bean technology, not a miracle.
They describe the flavor as “clean with notes of wheat and a touch of sweetness” with a “mildly bready” aroma. And no, there is no alcohol in the new jelly beans. All the taste, none of the awkward drunken pranks that you are used to.
Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.
According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.
As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.
What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.
The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.
Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.
A new online service called Greeting Games lets you attach a mini-game to a digital greeting card. The hilarious thing about the service? The recipient has to beat the game before he can read your message. Which means you can send Greeting Games to both loved ones and sworn enemies.
The mini-games involve the usual suspects, including match 3, Sudoku, word hunting, mahjong as well as Fruit Ninja clones, just given a different coating. The games are playable over any fairly modern device, including tablets and smartphones.
According to Polygon, aside from the prize message you’ll also be able to “add in-game messages as well as set the difficulty level, customize any attached messages within the card’s email and link their Facebook profile picture to the card.”
Greeting Games is free to use until the end of January. After that you’ll either have to pay an as yet undisclosed amount per card or sign up for a subscription to get discounts and other bonus features, such as “the option to send the same Greeting Game to several people.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a hit, but I think it would be much better if the games were intentionally silly, easy to beat and ripped off game titles and aesthetics for more laughs. Like, there could be a Card of Greeting: Birth Ops 2. As it is I’d rather send an actual game to my loved ones.
If you find most styluses in the market too big for your pocket, bag, or wallet, then you might want to look into Elektra Nails. It’s the most compact stylus we’ve seen yet – and a wearable one, at that.
Elektra Nails is essentially a stylus in the form of a nail that people can put on their fingers. In a sense, it turns a person’s finger (or rather, their nail) into a stylus so they can draw, write, and doodle with nothing but their digits.
The nails come in a neutral color, so guys can leave them as is while girls can paint over them with nail polish to customize them.
Made by Tech Tips, the Elektra Nails will be sold in packs of six and will come with six index fingernail styluses, adhesive strips, glue, a cuticle stick, and a prep pad for $14.95. They will be available by the second quarter of 2014.
I love old horror sci-fi movies like The Thing. And so does Instructables contributor leftmusing who made this “The Thing” cake for their significant other’s birthday.
She asked what kind of cake he wanted and it turned out that he wanted something weird and awesome. Not a problem. Since he loves ’80s sci-fi and horror movies, she got an image from John Carpenter’s 1984 version of “The Thing” and went to work.
Using sculpture tools, some YouTube videos and an appreciation for the grotesque, she created this amazing cake based on the movie. It is so nasty and unappetizing, but that is the point. So, great job, leftmusing. You have achieved your goal.
We’ve seen people use the Oculus Rift to simulate beheadings. BeAnotherLab used the virtual reality headset for something less morbid but no less interesting. The organization’s The Machine to be Another was an “artistic investigation” in which the Rift was used to give participants first person views from actual people.
In one experiment, participants were told to direct the movements of a performer – if they moved their hand, the performer would move their hand as well, if they walked, the performer walked etc. The participant wore an Oculus Rift, through which he or she saw real time footage from a camera mounted on the performer.
The participant could also make the performer pick up objects scattered throughout the experiment area, at which point the performer would say something about the object they picked up. It was like a first-person video game, except you’re controlling an actual person and exploring the real world.
In another experiment, two participants – one male and one female – became each other’s performer. The pair had to synchronize their movements, which is why you can see them being slow and tentative in the video below. The idea was to put the participant in the body of the opposite sex. Note that the video below contains nudity:
Amazing isn’t it? Perhaps studies and experiences like this will be a lot easier to pull off when computer graphics become more life-like. Imagine you’re a browser and head to The Machine to be Another website for more information.
A small robotics company called UFactory is working on the uArm, a small version of the industrial robot arms we often see tirelessly moving about in modern manufacturing assembly lines. The uArm is about the size of a desk lamp and is controlled through an Arduino-compatible board.
The current build of the uArm is made largely out of laser cut wood or acrylic and uses four off-the-shelf servo motors. It also has three different “hands”: a gripper, a suction cup and a small circular platform.
uFactory currently has a Windows program that lets you control the robot through a mouse or a keyboard. They’re currently working on Android and iOS apps too.
The company also wrote an Arduino library for uArm, so if you’re familiar with the language you can program the robot through that as well.
uFactory promises to make its design files, hardware and software open source after its Kickstarter campaign ends.
Pledge at least $185 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a uArm assembly kit as a reward. I’m waiting for Iron Man fans to reenact this scene with their armored pets.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
