Laser Target Alarm Clock
You know how you can turn off your alarm without even opening your eyes? Not with this laser target alarm clock, you can’t. You need to open your eyes, point and aim the laser gun at the target in order to silence the alarm. If you miss the target, the alarm won’t go off.
PermalinkFlying Alarm Clocks
When the alarm goes off, the helicopter like propeller flies out. You need to get out of bed to retrieve it, because it has the key that you need to turn the alarm clock off.
PermalinkFans Without Blades
Known as “air multipliers”, these fans by Dyson produces a breeze without the use of any blades. This has the benefit of giving you smooth flow of air without the buffeting that chopping blades would give. Plus the safety is a big plus. You can not get your finger caught in the blades. In fact, you can stick your whole hand through the aperture opening where the air comes out. The aperture size comes in 10 inch or 12 inch. The fans can tilt an swivel like conventional fans.
It uses airfoil technology.
Reference:
Animation of how it works
Explanation by the designer Sir James Dyson
Alarm Clocks That Runs Away
This alarm clock known as “Clocky” has giant wheels enables it to run away ringing so that you have to get up to go after it. It actually looks like it has two eyes and a mouth with two wheels where its ears would be. Comes in Aqua, Almond, Chrome, or Coco.
PermalinkThree Dimensional Chess
Is standard two-dimensional chess not challenging enough? Try three dimensional chess, also called Strato Chess.
Remember the three-dimensional chess seen on some episodes of Star Trek TV shows. You can get the “Official Star Trek Tri-dimensional Chess Set” with certificate of authenticity. Re-creation produced in limited quantity by Franklin Mint.
PermalinkUsed to Be World’s Largest JigSaw Puzzle (at the time)
Forget about your typical jigsaw puzzle. With 24000 pieces, this puzzle called “Life, The Greatest 24000 pcs Puzzle” was in the Guinness book for being the largest commercially available puzzle in terms of number of pieces. The official record is “for the most pieces in a commercially available jigsaw puzzle”. We have to qualify that. It was the largest at the time of the record. It has recently been surpassed by another puzzle made in Germany with over 32,000 pieces.[reference]
Yes, the puzzle “Life, The Greatest…” is commercially available. It is not just a museum piece. You can order it from Amazon.com
The box that it comes in weighs 28 pounds.
And the finish puzzle (if you finish it) measures about 14 feet by 5 feet. You need a pretty big table. If you are really planning space for this puzzle, then the exact dimensions that you need to allocate would be 14 feet and 0.5 inch by 5 feet and 1.8 inch. In other words, 428 centimeters by 147 centimeters.
More info at worldslargestpuzzle.com
Date of article: Jan 2011.
PermalinkMoney Maze Bank Puzzle
It is easy to put money in, but not so easy to take it out. You have to solve the puzzle to get back your money.
PermalinkEgg and Muffin Combination Toaster
Making egg muffin is a snap when you can cook both at the same time.
PermalinkStainless Steel Coffee Mug that Looks Like a Camera Lens
This is really a stainless steel coffee mug. But it is designed to look like a Canon 70-200 lens.
Great gift for photographers.
PermalinkTech Tee Shirts Explained
Have you ever seen a tech tee shirt with technical saying or equation but didn’t know what it meant? It is almost as if someone is having an inside joke. Well now, here are some explanations of some of those tee shirts.
Caffeine Molecule Tee-shirt: You know how much people likes caffeine when you see them wearing a picture of the caffeine molecule on their tee-shirt.
GeeKISSexy Babydoll Tee: A tee-shirt for females (who can be geeks too). The tee-shirt has the words “Geek is sexy”. But if you join the three words together, dropping the spaces, you can see that the middle letters spells the work “kiss”. To highlight this “kiss” word, the letters are capitalized and in a different red color from the base white text color.
PI Tee shirt – PI is a mathematical constant which has the numeric value that is infinitely long and starts out with 3.1415… This tee-shirts has the numeric value of PI written out to some length. The numbers are placed into the shape of the Greek letter PI which is usually used to denote this numeric value.
Binary People – The tech tee-shirt says “There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understands binary and those who don’t.” The “10″ is the number two in the binary number system. So the sentence is really saying that there are two types of people. But that is only apparent to those who understands binary enough to realize that “10″ is the binary number for “2″.
SQL Query tech tee shirt – It shows a SQL query: “SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0″. A SQL query is a database query to retrieve records from the database. Loosely translated, the query is trying to find users that have a clue. Then the tee-shirts shows the answers of that query to be “0 rows returned”. Translated it means “There are no users that have a clue.” Or to put it in another way, all users are clueless.
Geek Love Poem T-Shirt: This shirt shows … ROSES ARE #FF0000 VIOLETS ARE #0000FF ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO YOU #FF0000 is the hex color code for red. And #0000FF is the hex color code for blue.
No place like 127.0.0.1 tee shirt: This tee-shirt says “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″. It is a play on the phrase, “there is no place like home”. The IP address 127.0.0.1 refers to home because that is the IP address of “localhost” or your own home server.
Tee shirt of a Capsaicin Molecule – This T-shirt basically says “Hot”. The capsaicin molecule shown is the active ingredient of hot chili peppers.
Man Woman Tech Tee-Shirt: In UNIX, the command “man” means to look up the manual reference of a command. The command “man woman” means to look up “woman” in the “manual” in an attempt to “figure out woman”. The results shows “Segmentation fault (core dumped)” indicating that the computer crash and is not able to return an answer. It implies that man doesn’t understand woman.
Half Programming T-Shirt: The shirt says “Half of programming is coding. The other 90% is debugging”. For those who have programmed before, they may see an element of truth in this. It is easy to write code. The hard part (90% of it) is fixing the code so that it works (this is called debugging). The irony is that half plus 90% doesn’t add up to 1 — which implies there is a bug in that statement.
I blog to differ tee-shirt: The phrase “I blog to differ” as seen on the shirt is a play on the phrase “I beg to differ”. So instead of begging, the wearer is “blogging”. This implies that the wearer is a blogger (one who writes blog, or using the verb term “blog”).
I have a blog tee shirt – This tee shirt reads “I have a blog, a MySpace page and a YouTube video; all I need now is a life.” which implies that having those things and a life is mutually exclusive.
“What Would Joel Do” T-shirt: The shirt says “WWJD? What would Joel do?” Joel Spolsky is know in the tech circles as the programmer who write the blog JoelOnSoftware.com and the book “Joel On Software” which has a really long sub-title of “And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity”
Sudo Tech Tee Shirt: This shirt shows a cartoon where one person asks another to make a sandwich. But the other refuses. Until the first precedes the command with “sudo”. And that worked. The other must comply. Afterall, he did use the “sudo” command, which in UNIX is command that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user such as a super user. Many times programmer will run a command which fails and then immediately run the same command using sudo and it works.