Hasta La Gadget!

The iCade Arcade Cabinet began as an April Fool’s joke in 2010, but this golden unicorn of iPad accessories has actually made it to production, showing up at our door last week. iCade creator ThinkGeek partnered with Ion to make this former imaginary gadget a reality, and so far it appears to be a hit, backordered for weeks soon after hitting the online store in April. The $100 cabinet pairs with your iPad or iPad 2 over bluetooth, bringing familiar hardware arcade controls to the Atari’s Greatest Hits app, which includes classics like Missile Command (free), and Pong, which you can download from within the free Atari app for $1. The iCade is an awesome addition to your gaming collection, but it won’t replace the hours of coin-dropping at your local arcade. Read on to find out why this accessory may become a permanent fixture on our desk.

Continue reading Ion iCade Arcade Cabinet review

Ion iCade Arcade Cabinet review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  ThinkGeek  | Email this | Comments

In today’s episode of “But will it run Zork?” a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) — a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late ’70s / early ’80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced — transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD’s narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren’t exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We’d love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses’ photo blog at the source link.

Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hack A Day  |  Dial-A-Grue  | Email this | Comments

To most of us, Lomo is the camera brand that inspired a gazillion digital knock-offs, apps that mash and mix your cellphone photos into something that would have been rejected by every picture editor in the days of film. Today, Lomo is ready to remind us just how cool the analog approach can still be, with the brand new Lomo LC-Wide.

The new camera looks a lot like the LC-A, but comes with some extras. First is the new lens, which puts the “wide” in the name. It’s a super wideangle 17mm lens, vs the LC-A’s already wide 32mm. To get an idea of how wide this is, once a lens gets to 16mm it is usually a fisheye.

You can also choose some different formats. The regular, longish 35mm full-frame is still there, joined by half frame (for up to 72 shots on a roll) and square (24 x 24mm).

The specs are reassuringly crappy. The shutter speed tops out at 1/500 sec and the maximum aperture is a light-sapping ƒ4.5. ISO settings run from 100 to 1600, but you can still use any faster or slower film should you want to (I recommend Ilford’s Delta 3200 black and white. It has awesome grain and I pretty much always had a roll of it in my old Leica M6).

You also get a hotshoe for flash, a tripod socket, a threaded hole for a cable release, and both program and manual exposure.

The only thing about the Lomo LC-Wide that isn’t cheap is the price. It’ll cost you $390/£350/€350, depending on where you are in the world. I still kind of want one, though.

Lomo LC-Wide [Lomo via Gizmodo’s Kat Hannaford]

This is LAGEOS. Since 1976, this perfect disco sphere has been orbiting Earth carrying 426 cube corner reflectors made of fused silica glass—except four, made of germanium. It also contains a coded message, designed by Dr. Carl Sagan. More »

Analog apes digital apes analog. The colors of Impossible’s new Polaroid film are wonderful. Photo Steve Maniscalco

If you want to shoot Polaroids, forget about Polaroid. The company is now little more than a label slapped onto plastic junk, which it then tries to make palatable by paying Lady Gaga to say nice things about it.

What you need is to find an old Polaroid camera (the proper ones that spit out the iconic square photos) and load it up with Impossible film. And analog-retro fans are in luck today, as the Impossible Project has launched a new film pack, the PX 680 Color Shade.

PX 680 is much like Instagram for real photos. The colors are vivid and sometimes rather skewed, and odd things can happen thanks to the fact that the emulsion remains sensitive to light for the first few moments after it pops out into the world. If you shield it from bright light after its birth and coddle it for four minutes, you’ll be rewarded with stunningly bright colors.

You have to follow the instructions, though. These suggest shooting straight into a box, shooting in a warm place to get brighter colors, and overcranking the exposure slightly to saturate the colors. And the pictures will continue to change for a few days after shooting. Try getting that kind of thing out of your digital camera.

The film works with Polaroid 600 cameras, as well as the SX 70 if it has a neutral density filter (the speed of the film is ISO600). A pack of eight shots will cost you $22. Available now.

Color Shade product page [Impossible Project. Thanks, Marlene!]

See Also:

• Impossible Project
• New, Vintage Polaroid Cameras Sell Out in Hours
• Rebel Film Developers Give New Hope to Polaroid Fans
• Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age