Gadgetopia

Monopoly .com Edition : From 2000, complete with pictures.

In it the streets are replaced with ‘30 of today’s hottest web sites’. These are: Sportsline.com and FoxSports.com, Yahoo! Geocities, Oxygen and iVillage, shockwave.com, games.com and E! Online, Priceline, Expedia, and eBay, weather.com, about.com and cnet.com, ETrade, monster.com and MarketWatch.com, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista and Lycos, and Excite@Home and Yahoo!

Antipodes Map - Antipodal location for any map point: I love this. It’s two Google Maps interfaces. Point the top one to your current location and the bottom one will reorient to your “antipodal” location, which is your exact opposite location. So, if you were to tunnel through the Earth from your current spot, your antipodal location is where you would pop out.

From Sioux Falls, I’d come up smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

‘Star Trek’ Fans Put Kirk’s Command Chair in Their Homes: This is the new hotness for Star Trek fans.

[…] lately fans like Mr. Veazie have been building or buying more sophisticated versions of the command module from which James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner, ordered “Ahead, warp factor six.” Moreover, they are making them the centerpiece of their homes, thus conquering what is for them a final frontier of domestic decor.

[…] Drawing on a wide variety of new sources, including construction-oriented Web sites, Web-based entrepreneurs who supply kits of parts, and a Maryland company that just started selling ready-made chairs for $2,700 a piece, they are making a definitive statement to the world, or at least to their friends and families.

1234567890 Day: Awesome.

It’s time to party like it’s 1234567890 – ‘cause it is! On this Friday, Feb 13 at exactly 3:31:30 PM (PST), Unix time will equal ‘1234567890’.

EMT Paintball Sentry Turret: The videos on this page (WMV only, sorry) are awesome. This would be a trip to play with.

On the field, The EMT Paintball Turret adds a whole new level of game play to any scenario game. It is also a huge hit for public groups when used to guard a base or target. The Video Relay Remote Controls allow physically disabled persons an opportunity to participate in paintball when they previously were unable to. It’s also a popular option for parents or children too shy to participate on field with more experienced players.

My buddy Chris, a veteran paintballer, says there are turrets with software that will automatically lead targets to hit them on the run.

Graphs that lie: This drives me nuts as well.

It is standard practice to start the y-axis at a number much higher than zero, in order to magnify the ups and downs of the market.

He has a graphic on the page that represents the actual market fluctuations, showing the full value of the index.

Mythbusters draw a MONA LISA in 80 milliseconds ! at NVISION: Watch this video to the end — the last five seconds in slo-mo are worth the whole thing.

The Mythbusters were presenting at some conference, and they built a massive parallel paintball gun, loaded with specific colors in specific barrels, then fired it at a canvas, The result is the Mona Lisa, fired from a shotgun.

DEFENDER of the Favicon: Ah geez, this is the stupidest, coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

DEFENDER of the favicon was done in 3 nights, from start to finish. Each frame of the game is generated on the fly in JavaScript into a 16?16 canvas element, then converted to a 32bits PNG image and used in place of the favicon. The core of the game act as a state machine. Notice a few details such as the pause when this window is not focused, and the resuming and game over transitions.

And not just to Mac (and Linux) users. Mini seems to think so too.

One of the pages on the miniusa.com site will load a Flash animation showing a car trying to parallel park (link). When the driver finds there isn’t enough room (and bashes the bumper of the truck behind him) he lets out a string of curse words — or rather characters — that includes the Windows logo.

Now that’s funny!

via Jalopnik

If I convince my employer to replace my cube with one of these, I believe I become an honorary Dark Lord of the Sith.

via neatorama

10 impossibilities conquered by science: This article is about a lot of things that science has done, but the last one is something we’ve discussed at least twice before: teleportation.

What’s interesting are the comments. The commentors are a highly educated bunch, and they’re fixated on the teleportation angle, and they returned to the same point we’ve discussed: are you (1) transported whole, or (2) destroyed and recreated?

This is important, because if you’re destroyed and recreated, what happens to your soul? What happens to any non-physical aspects of your…being?

Without an assumption that thoughts are not bult on a physical base, we are still left with the problem of how to transport this no physical entity (someones soul?), something that I am not aware has been tackled by science.

The real question is …. Would you be happy to destroy yourself on the understanding that some new entity will be recreated at some time in the future that thinks it is you, and thinks exactly like you do?

Read the comments — it’s interesting how something straight out of science fiction like teleportation brings up some solidly religious and spiritual questions.

This is from a comment I made on my own post in 2005:

Being a Christian, I believe we have a spirit apart from the body and the physical brain. So I guess there’s a religious aspect. I don’t think you can “create” life, so you can’t just duplicate me in another spot. I may be a correct biological creature, but I would never be Deane.

Meet the Disintegrator: 24 barrels of rubber band minigun madness: Truly, without question, the greatest rubber band gun ever made in the history of the world.

Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability, making it one of the most dangerous weapons to remain unbanned by the TSA.

You have to watch the video.

Karla, our creative director, bought a new leather coat.

Yesterday, she pulled a slip of paper out of the pocket — it’s scanned and re-produced above (click here for a larger version). It looked like it was ripped from a notebook, and the letter was hand-written in ballpoint pen.

In short, it looks like more than your average “Inspected by #8” note.

We’re trying to harness the power of the Internets and all its tubes to try and translate the note above. What does it say? We don’t even know what language it’s in and there’s a 50% chance it’s upside down in the image.

What’s Your Meme IQ?: I didn’t go through the whole list (it’s long), but I can say through the first 30 or so, there were only two I hadn’t heard of.

We here at memelabs spend quite a bit of time on the internet and one of our favorite things to do is pass around funny memes that we come across. We thought it would be fun to put a list of some of our favorites.

This lent itself perfectly to a quick pop quiz. So take a look at the list below and see how many you recognize

First jet powered Birdman flight: This guy is one of the pioneers of those “flying suits” — the skydiving outfits with wings and webbing that skydivers use to glide.

Well, one day he smoked some crack and got the idea to strap jet engines to his legs, just to see it he could maintain altitude given sufficient thrust. Turns out, he could.

[…] after attaining normal bird-man flight, Visa requested full power from the engines, which responded smoothly in horizontal acceleration. After checking the altimeter several times, it was apparent that there was no appreciable loss in altitude for this period of time.

Visa next changed his angle of attack by redirected the thrust and changing his body position to attain vertical climb. This caused a loss in horizontal speed, and stalled (the body?). Recovering from the stall was made easy because of the agility of the human body to change flight profile easily. A few more attempts at this exercise yielded the same result.

Here’s the video, though the jet-powered guy takes off (literally) from the camera guy pretty quickly once the jets are turned on. I imagine the U.S. military probably watched this video with some interest.

Next thing you know, someone’s going to strap jet engines to a bike. Oh, wait…