Okay, just humor me and watch the video, please. It’s not like I get paid to describe things with… those… um, you know, the things that make stuff readable. With individual letters, etc. And periods, commas — the things in between those.

This here’s an interactive, outdoor electronic snowball fight comprised of two life size animated characters made from decorative Christmas lights. Two human players control each animated character, making them either duck or throw snowballs (also made from Christmas lights) at the other. You can’t duck and throw at the same time though.

If nobody’s around to play, the two characters will continue to lob snowballs at each other automatically. Say hello to the new coolest house in the neighborhood, all thanks to Arduino.

[via MAKE]

Cideko is a wireless video sharing system. You connect one box to your computer and another to your TV and you can control the computer from a mini-keyboard. Considering that the potential for this device – and ease of set-up – I’m surprisingly impressed.

Sadly, the device isn’t available in the US yet and probably won’t be unless it gets picked up by a local CE manufacturer and rebadged. I’d totally pay for something like this, however, provided it was a little smaller and better looking.

As you moved through the building carrying the clock you would have to fit each key into the watchclock. The clock then noted the time and location of each winding, ensuring that the watchman didn’t just bugger off and drink whiskey.

From a mechanical perspective, it’s a pretty cool system. From a UI nerd perspective, its an example of a rails shooter or a “behavioral control:”

From a behavioral perspective, I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived. The watchclock is a primitive form of technology-mediated interaction design and narrowly-focused social engineering: The “interface” is the whole system: The watchclock, keys, and paper records.

I’m going to get a kit put into my house so I can make the rounds between our two bathrooms during the day.

Wow. Jerry Jalava lost the tip of his left ring finger in a motorcycle accident and made his own prosthetic fingertip which doubles as a USB memory stick.

The prosthetic is removable so, according to Jerry, “when I’m using the USB, I just leave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I’m ready.” Jalava is planning to build a second prosthetic memory finger that will also contain an RFID tag.

USB finger, more details [ProtoBlogr.net via Geekologie]

A guy over on the HyperSpin/HyperPin forums did just that and uploaded the following video to YouTube for the whole world to see. Looks pretty nice, no?

[via Offworld]

I don’t have the time, patience, carpentry skills, open space, or wherewithal to build my own trebuchet but after seeing Mark Winkler’s “Mongo the Trebuchet” launch a flaming ball of fire across an open field under the cover of darkness, I suddenly have the urge to go to Home Depot with a quick stop at the local Fireball Emporium (or wherever they sell fireballs).

If you’d like to get right to the good stuff in the above video, skip forward to about the 2:55 mark to see everything in action. The rest of the video is pretty interesting, too, though.

Geeks are Sexy [via Neatorama]

Wow. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Hatfield Hotdog Launcher that’s brought out in between innings at the Phillies’ games. A lot of work went into getting all the science-y stuff right and even then, sometimes the hot dogs fly out of their wrappers mid-flight (watch at about the five-minute mark). Very cool.

Hats off to Joshua Callaghan of Los Angeles for coming up with a way to not only hide those utility boxes you see all over your neighborhood, but to also turn each one into something of a conversation piece. Callaghan calls it “public art” after answering a call from the city of Los Angeles to somehow disguise the boxes.

More photos after the jump…

Public Art [JoshuaCallaghan.com via Telegraph.co.uk]

I’m not one to get overly excited about the technology behind transportation logistics (or am I?) but this thing from HP looks pretty cool. It’s basically a handheld wireless-enabled barcode scanner that can also print quick-drying ink directly onto boxes.

So if you work at, say, UPS, you scan a box coming in, that info is transmitted wirelessly to your warehouse servers, and then you print another barcode or “FRAGILE” or some other message onto the package itself, all in the blink of an eye.

Check out this video to see it in action.

[via Treehugger]

Jalopnik has a pretty extensive photo gallery of the second-generation Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) from Discovery’s Storm Chasers series. For the uninitiated, the tank-like TIV is able to drive into the middle of tornados, allowing owner Sean Casey to film from the inside out in high definition. If you haven’t seen the show, check it out.

The TIV2 weighs a staggering nine tons and gets 12 MPG from its 92-gallon gas tank. Its key feature is the 360-degree steel turret that sticks out the top of the vehicle. That’s where Casey and his camera spend most of their time.

It’s entirely possible that most ordinary people won’t ever have the problem of trying to figure out what to do with two empty fire extinguishers (that’s a lot of fires) but just keep this idea in your back pocket should the scenario ever present itself.

A Russian man has turned a couple of spent fire extinguishers into some pretty cool-looking speakers. It’d be an understatement to say that the process looks a bit daunting for those of us without extensive metal cutting and welding experience.

Oh, and it also might help if you speak Russian, as the step-by-step process is written entirely in that language. So welding, metal cutting, and Russian. If all three check out, you, too, could have a set of awesome fire extinguisher speakers.

[TopMods.net via technabob]

This old girl has been stripped of all over component parts, hollowed out and filled with a CPU and lots of cool audio circuitry. The result? The Fender Bender, more machine than guitar, more monster than musical instrument.

The creator, Dan, even made a pickguard out of an old motherboard, soldering out each resistor with a burning cigarette that he held in his mouth threateningly. It appears he’s using sound gear from here but I’m not quite sure which model.

Here’s a Steampunk phone prototype by designer Arthur Schmitt. You make calls using binary punchcards. Punchcards! There are also some dials and a metal grill-type earpiece. The backside of the device seems to contain some sort of rolling counter that likely either keeps track of call duration or gives you the time.

It looks much more rugged than the old-school Nokia phones that everyone used to get for free but I’m guessing you can’t play Snake on it. Still very cool. Remember, it’s only a prototype, but I betcha there are plenty of people who would buy one of these.

[Arthur Schmitt via DVICE]

They start at around $15,000, so they’re not really hobby machines, and add-ons like GPS-aware hovering and a video-enabled controller make it more robust (good). I’m reminded, however, of the Manhacks from Half-Life 2 (bad). Keep your crowbars handy. More pics below.

There’s lots of them and they are interesting to look at; click below to see ‘em, or go to where they come from.

This might be a little to ambitious for most of us desk jockeys, but Instructables has instructions for creating your own cement-filled lightbulb wall hook that you can create for fun and profit. Note: You do not actually leave the glass part of the bulb intact. At the end of the experiment you break the glass off and then stick the huge lag bolts into your wall. The results, needless to say, are quite impressive.

Last winter after breaking out the serious cold weather gear, I found myself fighting the coat rack next to the front door. It was, to put it bluntly, failing miserably. Tipping over, breaking off, it was a mess. I swore before the next winter I would drive some serious hooks into the wall that would handle all my heavy overcoat needs. I just haven’t seen any kickass hooks yet that I liked enough to justify making serious holes in my walls.

The program is written in Python with OpenGL and you can get the source at the site. Can you imagine this being built right into a wireless-aware phone with GPS, generating a constantly updated heatmap of wherever you are, and adding it to an online repository? [via a sharply critical Reddit]

Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig.

Deep respect to Microsoft Research and UW for putting this together. Check out the higher-res version at their site. [via Reddit and I started something]

Christian Cantrell, an Adobe employee and editor of WatchReport just sent me a link to his latest project. It’s called Apprise Reader and it’s basically a feed reader with two very compelling features.

On the surface, Apprise Reader hits all the right buttons: Adobe Air, Twitter, AIM, RSS. It is, at its core, a feed reader with a dead simple interface. It accepts standard OPML files to import feeds and runs natively on Windows and OS X – Linux support is coming soon.

All of this by itself should make it worth the download but wait, there’s more. Apprise is in beta right now and it’s completely free. You can easily send links from the feed reader to Twitter or to any of your AIM friends. You could also conceivably edit the code to add in any destination you could imagine including blogs and micro-blogs like Tumblr. You simply enter your credentials and Twitter and AIM icons light up on top of the window. Tapping them sends the story to its respective destination.

Sure, it’s not earth-shattering but this is one of the first standalone readers I’ve seen to be able to do this. It’s a powerful and compelling addition to the standard feed-reader repertoire and sure to be soon replicated.

Oh, look at me! I’m DeepNote! I’m the best Guitar Hero player in the world! Jealous? I score perfectly in every game. Watch me beat Cult of Personality on expert mode!

I kid, I kid. DeepNote is cool. It’s a robotic whatsit that uses diodes as eyeballs and can tell what color’s coming when in Guitar Hero. Watching this video just goes to show you how long it takes your own human eyes to process something visually and then translate it into dextrous hand movements. Robots are much faster.

via NWFB