Hasta La Gadget!

This amazing Lego mecha is, according to the authoritative Brothers Brick, the first walking Lego mecha that “also boosts aesthetics”. We take that to mean that it actually walks by picking up its feet rather than shuffling along like a burned-out meth-addict.

Either way, the IR-remote controlled bot, named Element Commune, is a fantastic build by Flickr user Legohaulic. Here it is in herky-jerky action:

V2.0 will actually be steerable (this one just stops and starts, “walking” in a straight line), and we particularly like the tiny t-rex arms at the front. We wouldn’t want to climb inside the full-sized versions, though. As Brothers Brothers commenter Kunert says, “That thing would go down like ED-209 in a stairwell.”

Element Commune: LP-11 [FLickr]

Legohaulic’s walking biped revolutionizes mecha building [Brothers Brick]

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Let’s face it: Taking it easy isn’t very easy. Meditation classes, binge drinking, marijuana, movies with sexy blue alien cats — these are the things we hardworking Americans rely on to help us unwind. But what if we could eliminate stress altogether? What if we could train our brains to stay relaxed forever?

That’s the idea behind Harcos Laboratories “most painful toy hack ever.” The team of kooky geeks was intrigued with Mattel’s Mindflex, a wireless headset that reads the frequency of your brainwaves to levitate a ball. LEDs on the headset light up if you’re concentrating hard; if you’re calm, no LEDs light up. Harcos Lab wondered, “How can we put that to more practical use in our everyday lives?”

Easy: Reprogram the Mindflex to shock the bejeezus out of you if you concentrate too hard. Harcos hooked up the leads of the LEDs to a transistor/resistor relay network so they’d instead activate an electric-shock kit made by QKit. The end result? Concentrate a little, and you’ll get zapped a little. Concentrate hard, and you’ll get an electrical pulse that will make you think you’ve wandered onto the set of Green Mile. What a shockingly brilliant solution to all our problems!

Actually, the hack wasn’t that easy. Harcos admits it was difficult opening up the Mindflex. A full how-to is over on Harcos’ blog. Check out the lab’s Mindflex hack in the video below.

(Thanks, Jon!)

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The Factor 001 is a $34,000 bike designed and made by Formula-One engineers at bf1systems. It was built “without compromise”, ignoring the UCI (cycle sport’s governing body) rules in order to come up with what is possibly the most technically advanced “training device” ever. The most amazing thing about the design is that it looks – in essence – just like the bike I used to ride to school as a kid.

A bike’s basic two-triangle design is almost perfect, but that hasn’t stopped the bf1 guys from going all high-tech on its ass. Almost the entire bike is made from carbon fiber, but is still strong enough to take out on a real road (although NYC potholes might prove a problem). The bike also has a lot of electronics inside, from power meters to built-in GPS to a handlebar-mounted touch-screen. This bike isn’t meant for racing: it’s all about training.

There are a few departures from conventional diamond-frame design. The head-tube is gone, and instead the forks go all the way up to the handlebars. Apparently it is more efficient than the standard design, but it looks rather more primitive, too.

Gears? Shimano Di2 of course — the electronic Dura-Ace. These are combined with some truly weird-sounding tech. The aluminum cranks, for example, have an “embedded wireless torque system that is usually fitted to F1 driveshaft systems.”

I’d love to take it for a spin, and the Factor 001 would surely be light enough to carry up the many flights of stairs to my apartment (exact weight isn’t given as it depends on the custom spec). But $34,000 for a bike? That seems like crazy money, and takes away one of the best parts of cycling — you don’t need to be rich to afford the best bikes in the world.

And if you think you might need this to improve your performance, consider the story of Luke Whyte, the British biker who entered a South African road race at the last minute, even though he only had a knobbly-tired mountain bike. Despite this “handicap”, Whyte came in first.

Factor 1 [Factor 1 via Oh Gizmo!]

Just how good is the iPad’s pixel upscaling, the trick that makes it possible to run iPhone apps full-screen on the new magical wonder-pad? Not very, it seems.

IPhone (and now iPad) developer Kevin Ng took his game, WordCrasher, and fired it up in the new iPad software development kit (SDK). Using the iPad simulator, he hit the 2x button (actually more like 4x, as the pixels are doubled in two directions) and, well, pixelarity ensued, with jaggies spoiling the clean lines of his pastel-colored letter-tiles (WordCrasher is a kind of stressful, Tetris-inspired Scrabble game).

Next, Ng reworked the graphics for the full-screen of the iPad, and the results look lovely. Of course, the full effect can’t really be seen on your computer, as the screen resolution of the iPad is higher. What you can see, though, is the result of “bump maps and other shader techniques” which are available thanks to OpenGL ES 2.0. You’ll need to click through to Ng’s site to see the full-sized images.

One comment from Ng caught our eye: “Apple is keen for us developers to create strong real world metaphors by simulating real world materials, objects and their behaviors.” You know what Steve Jobs said about having “the internet in your hand”? It seems that Apple is pretty serious about that, rather than it being just a throw-away line. In fact, Andy Ihnatko* of the Chicago Sun Times said on MacBreak Weekly this week that the screen is so fast and responsive it feels like you are moving physical objects around the screen.

All this bodes well for the “Giant iPhone”. And remember, thanks to the lack of multitasking and the closed App Store, your iPad will still run this quick after a year, something we can’t say about our Macs and PCs.

What does a game running natively on the iPad look like? [Kevin Ng Games]

*Ihnatko’s name is actually built-in to the OS X spell-check. Pretty awesome.

Monopoly is about to get a makeover. The 75 year old game will be relaunched with a circular board, and no cash. Other than the lack of corners and currency, the game remains unchanged, which should mean that the inevitably marathon sessions will be just as boring as ever.

Apparently, when the game was first designed by fun-haters all those years ago, one of the original concepts was circular. We like this new, more compact version, and the modern design is a lot cleaner.

But what about the money? Spoil-sports at Hasbro have taken the only bit of fun from the game: stealing money from the bank. Each player now has a credit-card, which is slotted into a computerized console in the center of the board. Or should that read “bored”? This stops you sneaking cash from your brother’s pile when he is distracted by your cunning dice-tossed-accidentally-under-the-sofa move.

New, circular Monopoly will be available as an insomnia cure later this year.

Monopoly goes circular for 75th Anniversary, does away with cash [Pocket Lint]

Photo: Pocket Lint