Gadgetopia

Metal Storm Limited has put together an all new ballistic weapon technology that eliminates most mechanical action from weapons, replacing it with electronic triggering mechanisms that can lead to all kinds of unique solutions. Metal Storm's technology provides a means whereby objects, such as bullets that have been tightly grouped ...

Metal Storm Limited, the Australian company that developed a pioneering fire-by-wire weapons system, will soon be demonstrating a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to Department of Defense officials to prove the technology's potential as part of a remotely controlled weapon. The UAV being used is the Dragonfly DP-4X helicopter, which ...

DISCLAIMER: I cannot be held responsible if your expensive projector takes up skydiving, and meets with negative results. I probably overbuilt it a tad, but since I'm hanging a pretty expensive piece of hardware pretty high in the air, I wanted to make sure everything was solid. Overall, it was ...

Awesome Homemade Hovercraft: These guys made a hovercraft out of a metal disc of some kind, a leaf blower, and a folding chair. It would be cooler if you could steer it. (Note: Sidebar and ad content on this page may be NSFW.)

Textpattern: Dean Allen of Textism has finally released his open-source content management system. I downloaded and installed it and was quite impressed. It's more flexible than Movable Type and actually slips out of the blogging format quite a bit. It's closer to the metal than some of the other systems ...

sylloge: I am a Windows User: The first two comments here are nice. "I ended up getting an eMachines m5310 (manufacturer's page) instead, putting an end to a 20 year stretch of owning and using Apple's products. It may seem like a funny time to be doing this switch, but ...

Corsair Ships "World's Toughest" USB Flash Drives.: The Toughbook of Flash drives. [...] Survivor flash drives, which were introduced at CeBIT in March, are water-resistant and can survive at up to 200 meter depth under 20 atmospheres pressure thanks to EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) waterproof seal. Besides, Survivor sports ...

'Alias' takes on the gaming world: I'm not a big gamer, but this could temp me to start. The main character agile, clever and impossibly beautiful superspy Sydney Bristow (played by the agile, clever and impossibly beautiful actress Jennifer Garner) could easily hold her own with the gallery ...

I bought a FireWire hard drive enclosure the other day, and I'm awfully happy with it. It cost about $45 and I filled it with an old 40GB hard drive I had lying around. It works beautifully plug it into a FireWire port and you get a G: drive. ...

I'm watching Stargate SG1 right now, one of my "guilty pleasures", and one of the pieces of alien technology that SG1 has encountered in tonight's episode is a little doodad that the locals call "The Link." It looks like a little 'C' shaped piece of metal that attaches to the ...

Heavy metal umlaut: the movie: This is an awesome, awesome screencast from Jon Udell about the evolution of the a single page on Wikipedia. Jon scrolls through several years of this page, noting how it grows from one sentence to over a thousand words, and examining various editorial themes and ...

IF Quake: This is Quake as a text adventure. I downloaded it and walked around a bit -- it seems like a perfect re-creation, as closely as I can remember: >look The Necropolis You find yourself in a room with three corridors, each leading to a slipgate. On either side ...

History's Worst Software Bugs: An interesting article about software bugs that did more than just annoy us. The last one is chilling, involving cancer treatment software in use in Panama City and a workaround that went horribly wrong. Multidata's software allows a radiation therapist to draw on a computer screen ...

2008 Lexus LS600h L The Lexus 600 club - a class all its own: Besides being a full-blown V-8 hybrid (0-60 in 5.5 seconds, no less), the new Lexus includes this gem. It sounds amazing in theory, but could all that actually work together? It [...] features an advanced precollision ...

For those times when cutting with an Xacto knife, Dremel tool, or electric engraver just won't do, here's a great alternative; VersaLaser. It's a real industrial laser that fits on your desktop & hooks up to a PC. It will cut, scribe or etch wood, thin metal, fabric, rubber, glass, ...

Numbers station : A post over at Boing Boing reminded me of the phenomenon of numbers stations. Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin that broadcast streams of numbers, words, or phonetic sounds. No one knows for sure where their signals originate or what purpose they serve. The ...

Mavromatic had a post this week with a link to some nice photos about the Volga V12, a hand-built one-off with the heart and underpinnings of a BMW 850CSi and a body modeled after a Soviet-built commodity sedan. The original Volga isn't much to look at (and was ...

I went grocery shopping at Wal-Mart today (yes, I know it's a juggernaut, but I've been assimilated), and one big reason for RFIDs occured to me. I got up to the counter with what turned out to be $118 worth of groceries, and I was faced with the prospect of ...

Someone at Forbes had a great idea, and made it reality: Most time capsules involve cramming stuff into a metal box and burying it in a hole in the ground. It's a method that works but it's so primitive. What if you could write an email to yourself, and ...

I had to buy some USB keys recently to store login credentials. Without the files on the key, you wouldn't be able to log in to the system, period. I dreaded the issues that were sure to arise when people left their USB keys at home, in their car, etc. ...

I started working with Swish-E again recently. This is an open source search engine that, for my money, is one of the best deals in the open source world. A few years ago, I spent some time working with Inktomi Enterprise Search (now Verity Ultraseek) , but after a few ...

... to a brand new G5! At work we're looking at installing a new archive server that will run on a shiny new Mac G5 (woohoo!) Since the server closet is getting a little crowded I was thinking that it would work nicely to put the thing in a rack. ...

Bill Gates recently went on a tour of colleges to encourage students to major in computer science. Apparently the number of declared computer science majors is declining, and Bill wants to shore up the numbers. I got to thinking about this, and I wonder if the plethora of really high-level ...

I think The Flood of New Orleans is the first really big crisis in the U.S. to come after blogs have hit their prime. 9/11 was back in 2001, before blogs were big, and before you got the unfettered accounts of amateur jounalism like we've got with this. But with ...

Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel recently tackled the legend of exploding CDs. The legend goes that flawed CDs that are spun to 30,000+ r.p.m. in 50+X CD-ROM drives have a tendency to explode. Well, turns out that the legend is somewhat true. The guys from Mythbusters were able to get ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...