Hasta La Gadget!

One of the best parts of the holiday season is visiting all your friends’ houses and checking out their Christmas trees (or Chanukah bushes) covered with unique ornaments that make you ooh and aah. To keep with the holiday spirit, we decided to make an imaginary Christmas tree full of the nerdiest ornaments we could find. Why cover your tree with normal Christmas lights when you could have Yoda lights? And why buy those regular, ol’ ball ornaments, when you can buy a Star Trek Enterprise one?

After the jump, we rounded up some of the best geeky Christmas ornaments on the Web. Feel free to share your own nerdy ornaments with us in the comment section below.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only guy who LOVES peeing into public urinals that have a bed of ice cubes at the base. I assume bars and clubs place the ice there to damper any “ricochet” from hitting the floor and to mitigate the sometimes pungent aroma of rented beer. But whatever its purpose, peeing on ice is fun! The cubes melt away into nothingness as soon as they come into contact with the warm stream of urine. It’s exactly like playing Super Breakout. With pee. This is the secret game of men everywhere. Taking this phenomenon to the next logical level, the good people at Sega have created a video game system built for public receptacles that you can play with your urine.

The system includes a screen directly over the urinal that reacts to the liquid it collects. The system can be a benefit for bars and clubs looking to keep any mess off the floor by providing a “reward” for drunken patrons to collect their fluid deposits in the right location. It also gives pee-ers an activity to occupy their mind during the isolated act of urination. And Sega will get a chance to sell advertising space for a very captive audience.

Everybody wins.

(For you ladies who are looking for the men in their lives to be more open about their inner psyches, this is an example of some of the things we keep inside. Think long and hard if this is really what you want to hear more about.)

via PopSci

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s a PlayStation app coming soon for the iPhone and Android handsets. The bad news is that it doesn’t actually do what you’re hoping it does–i.e. play games.

The app is more of a supplemental resource for PlayStation owners. You can use it to check things like trophies and friends’ statuses, discover information about new games, read the PlayStation Blog, and share info via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. PlayStation phone it’s not.

The app is coming “very soon” to European markets like the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. More markets will follow later.

The future is a sexy, sexy place. You can thank ThriXXX for that–at least in part. The adult entertainment company has hacked everyone’s favorite new Xbox 360 controller for a new, sexy, um, hands-on experience.

The company hacked the Kinect to make it work with its own brand of adult simulation games. At present, the hack only really seems to work with the hands. ThriXXX is working on adding full body support for–well, use your imagination. Or don’t. I mean, you’re at work, for god’s sake.

ThriXXX is offering a patch for an alpha version of the hack early next year. Joystiq has a video of the thing in action. We would have embedded it, but our bosses wouldn’t let us.

In the original incarnation of Super Mario Brothers for the NES, the pair of mustachioed Italian plumbers waged bloodless battle through a surreal two-dimensional world of walking mushroom zombies, turkey turtles, and spazzy lizard kings in order to save a princess who was way out of their league.

And that was just great in 1985.

Of course, if SMB were made today, the gamer audience would demand that foes were taken out in a more extreme fashion than jumping on them or socking them with a lubricated turtle shell. The above is an example of how a modern-day Mario and friends would take Bowser and his army of mindless goombas out in order to become the new kings of the Mushroom Kingdom.

via The Daily What