No one likes mowing the lawn, but what if I told you could sit back on the porch, sip a cold glass of mom’s home made lemonade all the while trimming the greens?  Yeah, I bet you’d be sold.

So it ain’t as simple as cruising down to your local Sears but if you’ve got a penchant for modding things, know what an Arduino is and have a small work shop then you’re probably set…and a little bit of extra spending cash.  Video after the ‘leap’

[via Hackaday]

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First responders, pay attention, because you might be able to save some MORE lives with what I’m about to hit you with next.  Some engineer managed to take ten dollars worth of electronic parts–available off the shelf pretty much anywhere–and modify his mobile phone into a cell phone that does double duty as a microscope.

This is no ordinary engineer; he’s an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, and he’s actually started up his own company to market the cell phone microscopes.

Not that this is just great for the medical and scientific communities–now any putz can check a blood sample for signs of tuberculosis, malaria, or anemia!

It’s conceivable that, from here, the phone would then be able to remotely send the images back to actual medical professionals for diagnosis before the patient was even put on an ambulance.

No idea when they’ll be available, but they really should do a whole lot of good when they’re done.

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The hay day of the original NES might be far behind us, but that didn’t stop one modder from bringing a little of the old to the new.  Called the NEStickle, it combines the NES console from the 80s with a Sanwa joystick and is apparently compatible with not only an Xbox 360 but a PS3, PS2 and whole slew of computers.  Oh, and to connect the controller to your gaming machine of choice, it comes by way of a custom USB cord that jacks into the NES’ controller port.

[via Geeky-gadgets]

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This is a portable Game Cube from maker extraordinaire Hailraser.  He’s used a variety of components from a variety of systems to build this system.  The oddest part, though, is the exposed disc drive on the rear of the device.  So, if you’ve got large mitts you might find your finger on the wrong end of a spinning disc.  Actually he says it’s harmless, but I’d beg to differ when it comes to an infant’s finger.

Video after the ‘leap’

[via Gizmodo]

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Chiggity check these decked out Scion DJxBs by Five Axis on display at this year’s SEMA auto show in Vegas.  They’ve got TVs in the doors, a grill in the back with a sink, amps up the yin yang, slotted turn tables in the roof with dance floor and a whole bunch of stuff that truly does pop!

More pics after the ‘leap’

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‘Stacks’ have long existed in Apple’s Mac OS, but what about the iPhone?  They are now thanks to ‘Stacks’, a piece of software that you can add to your iPhone, that is assuming it’s Jailbroken (aka hacked).

Much like Mac’s OS you can add multiple applications (in Mac OS X you can view multiple files in a folder, at a glance, from your dock) to your iPhone or iPod Touch’s dock instead of just four.  Tap on a ’stack’ and a playing card like display of applications are laid out before you.  If you’ve added too many applications to the ’stack’ it transforms the window to a grid like layout similar to your iPhone’s default screen.

Wired notes that there are a few draw backs to the current interation, such as the lack of icon badges (unread email), visual notifications and a few other minor hiccups.  Problems aside, I think it’s a great idea, though it might defeat the purpose of having four dedicated buttons to choose from.

If you’ve got a Jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch you can grab ‘Stacks’ now, you’ll just need to make a $1 donation to the developer.

Video after the ‘leap’

[via Wired]

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So a strange development took place on Sunday–a Dutch hacker is currently holding what amounts to several jailbreaked Apple iPhones.

Just in case you’re wondering about the terminology here, a jailbroken phone is basically a hacked iPhone that allows you to install software from other sources besides Apple’s App Store.  The need for jailbreaking has fallen off somewhat in recent days, but there are still plenty of phones out there already that have been jailbroken.

But when you jailbreak an Apple iPhone, you force the resetting of a password that controls remote access to the general password coded in at the factory level.  Now, if you’re smart, you’ll quickly change that password to something you know well.  But a lot of people either got lazy or busy or just plain forgot, because they left their iPhones in the ORIGINAL PASSWORD SETTING.

And that’s where the Dutch hacker swung in.  He changed the passwords, effectively locking people out of their own phones until they pay him a ransom of five euros via PayPal.  Meanwhile, Apple considers jailbroken phones to have voided their warranties, so it’s pretty much either pay off the hacker or lose your phone until he’s arrested and forced to confess.

So if you’ve got a jailbroken Apple, you may want to switch that password around before the Dutch hacker gets you…if he hasn’t already.

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It’s always pretty interesting to see other things besides the Wii get controlled via Wiimote.  Some have hooked it to Airsoft guns or what have you, but today I’ve dug up a little something interesting.

Thanks to the Casmobot lawn mower, developed by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark, you can now use your Wiimote to tackle lawn chores.

The mower is synced to the Wiimote with Bluetooth, and allows you to not only steer the device, but also engage the cutting action (just tilt the Wiimote forward) or set the device on autopilot where it makes passes inside a previously established zone.

The grass cutting equivalent of a Roomba is a sweet enough idea, but tying it to your Wiimote?  Now that’s just entertaining!  Plus, for all the kids in the audience, next time mom and dad get all bent out of shape about your gaming time, just tell them you’re getting in practice for lawn mowing season.

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If you’ve seen a Wallace and Gromit cartoon lately, chances are you’re familiar with at least something vaguely like what I’m about to point out today–the Breakfast Machine.

Breakfast Machines aren’t exactly new.  There was one in the old Pee Wee Herman movies.  Doc Brown had one in Back to the Future, even if it didn’t work right.  But now, thanks to two design artists at the Royal College of Art, there is now a real live Breakfast Machine.

The Breakfast Machine cooks omelettes, toast with butter and / or jam, coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice all within the confines of its own framework.  Even better, the Royal College of Art folks claim that this project can actually be replicated, at home, for less than two thousand dollars.

The device is currently disassembled, but its creators are hoping to take it on a world tour for exhibition and then bring it to London.

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Chances are you’re going to wonder why I’m even bothering to talk about a Sega Saturn joystick at least ten years after the system went the way of the dodo, but I tell you that there’s a very good reason.

Because, you see, in the grandest old tradition of original Nintendo belt buckles, someone’s taken that old device and made it into something new and interesting: art.

James Ian Killinger took apart an old Sega Saturn joystick and noticed that, if he just added a few extra screws–three, to be exact–we’d get the thing you see above, a giant space bug.

Let that sink in for a second.  That’s a big bug sculpture made from only the parts of a Sega Saturn controller and three extra screws.  No extra parts were brought in, nothing was taken out.  That thing is just a Sega Saturn controller with three screws.  It’s easy to wonder what Killinger could’ve done if he’d had a FOURTH screw.

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WTF.  Top speed of the Mac G4 Motorcycle  is rumored to be about 30mph.  That’s a hell of a lot faster than my current G4, which currently sits idle in my bedroom due to a bunk hard drive.  I’d like to see the douches at the Genius Bar diagnose this Mac’s problem when it breaks down.

More pics after the ‘leap’

[via Technabob]

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Well, that’s it for me, folks–my science fiction lobe has officially collapsed on me, because I was just reading about a new military project that’ll probably change the way war is fought forever.

I read about cyborg beetles.

It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA, the guys who started the Internet in the first place) have been working on a kind of “cyborg beetle” that’s been surgically altered and given all sorts of awesome mechanical doodads to engage in fighting and surveillance of the enemy.  They can be controlled remotely by humans in the field, and are actually part of a much larger overall project called HI-MEMS, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electric Mechanical Systems.  HI-MEMS, if I understood correctly, will yield history’s first-ever truly bionic organism.

The article went on from there about what all they could do, but my head started swimming about the time I pictured wasps jammed full of uranium so they gave poisoned radioactive stings to their targets.

They’re the perfect soldier.  Absolutely expendable.  Kill as many as you please, the colony will hatch a few million more.  Heaven help us when they start carrying explosives.

They’re the perfect assassin.  Can you lock yourself down so effectively that even a spider can’t reach you?  And a cybernetic black widow could definitely take out a target, probably without ever being noticed.

I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified, and right now, I’m trending toward horrified.

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Without a doubt the NES Guitar gets the ‘random post of the day award’ (we don’t actually issue that award).  Apparently, this is the second iteration of the mod and it actually works.  Flipping up the cartridge slot reveals the 3 knobs generally found on a guitar and the AV out and power ports have been converted accordingly.  Check the video below for a demo and complete walk through of their work.

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So 3M, those great innovators, have come up with a way to get you to watch 3-D on your mobile device of choice, but without the glasses entirely.  Check THIS out:  they’ve developed this optical film (that you can apply to any gadget’s backlight system) that uses two alternating rows of LED to project left and right images one after the other to the viewers’ eyes.  This in turn allows for a stereoscopic 3-D image but without the need for glasses.

The film works on any device with a viewing size of nine inches or smaller, and to watch video in 3-D via this method requires the video be displayed at 120hZ.

I find myself a bit skeptical to the value of this, but admit from a conceptual level this is blisteringly cool–after all, turning any mobile gadget into a 3-D player with only a strip of plastic?  That’s MacGyver-grade gadgetry right there.

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If you don’t like the color combination’s the PS3 Slim is offering, you’ve got one of two choices–you can wait for the PS4, or you can talk to the folks at Colorware and get a custom paintjob.

For just a hundred and forty nine bucks, Colorware will offer you a complete repaint from any of a whole panoply of available color options.   They’ll even throw in one Dual Shock’s worth of painting absolutely free.  A second controller, however, can be done for thirty bucks.

Now, I’m not sure why anyone would want a color-coordinated PS3–the whole point of the thing is to play it, not to stare at it–but if you’ve really got a thing about room decoration, then this may be exactly the service you’re looking for.

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How do you prevent your hard drive from being stolen?  Simple, you stuff it inside an original Nintendo Gameboy.  At first glance, it looks like a full working Gameboy with a massive amount of storage.  Sadly, it’s devoid of any game operation and that screen shot you see is in fact a piece of paper with a graphic printed on it.  It’s maker then stuffed a 2.5-inch 80GB SATA drive into the portable gaming system’s back along with the hard drive’s LED status light and USB ports.

Now that I think about it this might garner more attention than not, since it very well could be the coolest hard drive mod I’ve seen to date.

[via Hackaday]

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This is a development the folks at Amazon likely weren’t expecting.

Seems that some enterprising soul out there, whom you might recognize when I tell you it’s Jesse Vincent, managed to get his recently-released Kindle 2 ebook from Amazon to run Ubuntu 9.04.

He apparently did it for no other reason than 1. to prove it could be done in the first place and 2. to get some serious geek cred at Foo Camp last weekend, where he showed off his new, previously unheard of Linux Kindle.

The practical ramifications of this do escape me somewhat, but even I’ve got to admit, as a concept, it’s still pretty cool.

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If you’re still thinking that you need one of those uber expensive helmet cams to capture a first person perspective video, think again.  Jesse Rosten has come up with a way to use an everyday bungee cord to achieve stunning results.  Don’t believe me, then hit the video below.  All you need to do is shorten your camera’s neck strap to chest level, wrap the bungee cord around your back and then attach either end to the base of the neck strap.  Ingenious!

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How do you attest your dieing passion for the video game Left 4 Dead? Simple. You request one of your friends to build a custom Xbox 360 in its image.  But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.  FatalJapan, who received the custom art work on his video game console, free of charge, had no qualms with noting that his buddy left out some of the details, such as a Left4Dead logo, but at the very least appreciates that he fixed the E74 error message.

[via Technabob]

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A modder by the name of ‘Bacteria’ took the original Turbo Graphix 16 and manged to convert it into a portable gaming machine.  The irony is, though, that NEC came out with their very own portable system called the Turbo Express.  It was equitable in power to the console system and the very same games could be played on it.  So why one would take the time to convert the console into a portable gaming system is anyone’s guess, but at least it I got to relive all those fond 16-bit memories.  Check the videos below.

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