I don’t know why it hasn’t come out earlier… or anyone else has tried to jump into this market. It may have been a niche market before but now, I think it has a great future! What am I talking about?! I’m talking about wireless game controllers for Android devices! :-D While I love touchscreen features, there are plenty of games (my current favorite, Zenonia series) that would be much better with a controller…
Well, Gametel seems to have stepped up to the plate. But I have a good news and bad news. It’s a great device! Bad news? It’s only currently available in England! :-( You can get it for £49.99 on Amazon.co.uk. Here’s one of the first reviews by Droid Den… and it seems promising… guess I have to wait for it to be available in US!
What you are seeing is a brand new world! Being able to print in 3D is going to be the way of the future!! This small printer is less than $1500! That’s a bargain if you ask me!
Don’t risk breaking any bottles next time you carry beer to a party. Now you can make your own 6 Packer, a laser cuttable six pack carrier designed by Thingiverse user timogiles. Since it’s designed in OpenSCAD, an open source parametric 3D modeling program, you can easily change the material thickness, bottle diameter, fastener size, and hand grip size and cut a 6 Packer to your own specifications. [via Pete Prodoehl]
I seem to recall that speaker enclosures should be rigid and massive, generally speaking, but there’s no denying the cool factor in this build-it-yourself project from Quebecois industrial designer Samuel Bernier. [via nerdstink]
Friend-of-Gizmodo Tonx.org has a cute little comic today bemoaning Keurig K-Cups—the little coffee pods designed to brew single servings of coffee. They’re convenient, but they’re ridiculously overpriced, and don’t make very good coffee. You can do better. More »
from Gizmodo
Filesharing as we know it involves transferring 0s and 1s that usually turn into pixels and electronic sounds. But if The Pirate Bay’s latest idea takes off, filesharing — and digital piracy — will get a whole lot more physical.
In what appears to be as much as a publicity stunt as a serious feature, the site has added a new category alongside the usual audio, video, applications, and games. The physibles category is intended for data that either can, or feasibly could, become a physical object.
Specifically the site is thinking of data for 3D printers, a concept that sounds like science fiction but already exists. One company at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show launched, and is now selling, a $1,749 device that can take a computer 3D model and turn it into a physical object using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the same plastic material used to create Lego bricks. The machine also works with polylactic acid, derived from corn starch.
Users can create any object up to 300 cubic inches, roughly the size of a loaf of bread. The standard model only produces objects in one color, though for $250 extra users can have two-color printing. Of course, you can’t make either batteries or mains power cables, so we’re not yet at the terrifying stage when these machines are able to self-replicate.
The PirateBay currently has a dozen torrents for “physible†files, which appear to be largely or entirely compliant with copyright laws. It’s certainly at the demonstration novelty stage, with two of the choices including a toy pirate ship taken from the site’s logo, and a 3D picture of MPAA chief Chris Dodd along with part of the encryption key for Blu-ray discs.
Given the nature of the site and its user base, it will be interesting to see if we ever get to the stage when copyrighted 3D printing design files start getting shared. The Pirate Bay predicts that “you will download your sneakers within 20 yearsâ€, which does make you wonder if one day you’ll be able to get counterfeit Nikes without even needing to find a shady street market.
If your life is anything like ours, it’s in sore need of more pseudo-holographic helicopters. Fortunately, YouTube user programming4fun has come up with a solution, using Microsoft’s Kinect beta SDK and a Windows Phone handset. The system, pictured above, basically consists of a Kinect and a 3D engine; the former tracks the position of a viewer and automatically adjusts the image projected by the latter, creating the illusion of a 3D landscape. In this case, that landscape happened to feature a holographic helicopter, which could be controlled using a phone’s accelerometer and a Windows Phone 7 app (apparently called HoloController). Watch it in action, after the break.
