One of the things that most FPS gamers are used to are bullet counters that tell you how much ammo is left in your digital weapon. I reckon that is an important bit of info to know in the real world too if you are in some sort of firefight.

If real bullets were coming my way, I would be too busy screaming like a little girl to count my shots. I would need something like this sweet bullet counter. It attaches to a weapon and counts the bullets as they are fired.

It is able to count the bullets using an integrated microcontroller and an accelerometer. The accelerometer registers a single bullet when it recognizes recoil in excess of 22.5g. It has time out so rounds fired aren’t messed up by vibrations after the shot. It’s apparently accurate enough that it could count automatic fire better than the people shooting and filming could.

Via Kotaku

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! If you are a PC hardware geek an AMD spokesman causally showed off an unannounced video card on Monday called the HD 6990. The card has dual GPUs and should be very fast. We heard a bit of early detail on the PSP2 from Nikkei that claimed the new portable would have an OLED touchscreen, 3G and a new CPU. That would make for a very impressive portable indeed.

NVIDIA will be sampling its new Tegra 3 T30/AP30 mobile quad core processors by the end of 2011. These things will bring a whole new breed of portable devices and more with loads of power. One of the coolest DIY projects I saw last week was the pedal-powered snowplow that a guy built. He used a couple old bikes and some wood to build the plow that appears to work pretty well.

The 10 billionth app was downloaded last weekend and Apple called the person who made the download to give the $10k gift card price that was offered. The catch was that the winner hung up on them. Luckily for her an Apple rep called again and she ended up with her gift. Samsung conducted a strange experiment early in the week where they launched a bunch of paper airplanes in space. They launched 200 paper planes from 36,500 meters above Berlin and each plane had a card with a text message that the folks who found it could enter online for others to read.

The Verizon iPhone 4 will cost the off-contract user $50 more on Verizon that it does on AT&T. The upside is that that extra $50 should let you talk without your call dropping if you hold your face wrong. The Acer Aspire One E100 Android netbook turned up this week and the thing dual boots Android and Windows. The netbook has a 10.1-inchscreen and is your basic netbook.

Notion Ink issued an update for the Adam tablet that was bricking some of the tablets that installed the update. The update was later pulled and only a few users were affected. It was confirmed this week that Verizon will offer a $30 unlimited data plan for the iPhone 4. The catch is that it’s a limited time offer and will go back to the normal tiered plan after a while.

NVIDIA unveiled a new video card this week called the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The card promises to be 46% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 that is already on the market and the new GTX 560 Ti sells for about $250. Ben Heck took a flashlight with a crank, a USB charger, and some geek mojo to create a cool kinetic charger. The charger puts power into the battery of your phone as you turn the crank.

The tiny Compulab Trim Slice nettop turned up this week with Tegra 2 inside for desktop PC use. This thing would make a really good HTPC; it looks more like a memory card reader than a computer to me. Details on several new Samsung smartphones turned up this week including the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Fit, Gio, and Mini. The Ace is the coolest of them all with a 3.5-inch screen, 800MHz processor and more.

The HTC Facebook phone that we keep hearing about has been tipped to land at MWC next month. The phone will reportedly use the Facebook color scheme, branding, and push the Facebook news feed. An awesome 12-foot long DIY LED matrix display turned up mid-week. The thing is really cool and uses 512 blue LEDs to show your text message.

A Verizon BlackBerry outage rolled on mid-week and to start with the blame was placed on an update by Verizon. Apparently the outage spanned a number of states and users that were affected only received email in batches an hour or so apart. The Sony Xperia Play was the subject of a pre-release preview video this week. This is the PlayStation phone and the thing looks really cool.

Thursday the Sony PlayStation Suite and PS Store for Android devices landed. The store is for Android 2.3 and up devices and has a lot of cool games for mobile gamers to download and enjoy. The Sony NGP “Next Generation Portable” went official this week. The device is the PSP2 we have been hearing about for a while and has an ARM Cortex A9 processor, 5-inch OLED screen, and a lot more. This should be one seriously cool portable game console.

A “secret” AT&T unlimited data plan is available to keep iPhone users from migrating to Verizon. One user is claiming that when he called AT&T and threatened to go to Verizon they moved him to an unlimited data plan. Hulu is reportedly in talks within the video streaming site to change from a free offering that it is right now to a virtual cable operator where we would all have to pay to use the streaming service.

Scosche shipped its new version of the flipSYNC called the flipSYNC II this week. It is available for USB charging devices and Apple gear for about $20 and the new version has a larger USB plug. The dorkiest iPad accessory ever turned up late in the week called the Assero Defender. It’s like one of those reverse backpacks parents use to carry babies, but the Defender is for your iPad.

Details for pre-orders of the Verizon iPhone 4 were offered Thursday. Verizon is going for AT&T’s throat and is offering some big discounts if you trade in an AT&T iPhone. A 16GB iPhone 4 from AT&T will get you $280 off your Verizon iPhone. Thursday we heard that the Sony NGP console would come in both 3G and WiFi only versions. That is good news since many people have no desire for 3G if they will only use it in the house.

The FCC posted up the teardown pics of the Notion Ink Adam Friday. The Adam the FCC had used what appear to be handmade connections leading some to wonder about build quality. We know the specs on the Sony NPG, but we still don’t know the price. Some speculation has been that the console might cost around $600. Sony has said the NGP won’t be $599, but still hasn’t offered pricing yet.

Microsoft is reportedly working towards 16-core Atom processors. The 16-core Atom would apparently be an alternative to traditional CPUs inside servers. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

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If you need to leave someone a message, you could either entrust it to a Post-It note or you could go the slightly more obvious route and use a 12-foot long LED matrix. That’s what kitesurfer did, using a total of 512 blue LEDs and a slab of frosted acrylic to make a 20-inch high display that runs the length of his home office.

Video demos after the cut

An ATMEL Mega8 controls the various LED arrays, and gets its commands from a Linux-based embedded computer. That also runs a basic webserver, meaning that messages can be set via a website or even your smartphone.

Altogether the project cost around €200 ($273) though half of that was the lengthy sheet of acrylic that covered the front of the matrix.

[via Hack a Day]

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We only get snow once every few years in my part of Texas, but in other states, snow is something that you have to deal with on a daily basis. I would hate to have to shovel snow out of my driveway each day before I could back the car out and go about my business. If you had to do that shoveling with a shovel by hand, it would double suck.

Firefly workshop has invented a cool DIY snowplow that is made from some wood and a couple old bikes. I could see this being the only possible use for one of those full size tricycles that I wouldn’t call you an idiot for driving. The builder of this plow appears to have cobbled a pair of normal bikes together.

The front of the plow is raised and lowered using a pulley and rope system. The guy uses the plow to push the snow down the drive into a few piles that can then be shoveled off into the yard. The contraption is a good way to get rid of the snow when it’s not enough for a show thrower, but too much for removal by hand according to the builder.

Via Make

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One of the things I really don’t like about my Nikon D80 is that the lens that came with the kit has no image stabilization. All is fine and good if you are taking a photo where the shutter is fast, images have no blur at all in that case. If the setting is dark and the shutter takes a bit of time to get the light it needs to expose the pic things get blurry really fast for me.

I could just get a lens with image stabilization inside, but the blur isn’t a big enough deal for me to pay the money a new lens would cost. A geek on Hack A Day has shown off a system that he made that will add image stabilization to your camera even if the lens and body don’t support it.

The geek took an Arduino board, Bluetooth mode, 3-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, and a trigger for the camera and cobbled it all together. The hardware uses a software algorithm to remove the image blur from your pics so they are nice and clear. The downside is that the system is cumbersome and apparently, you lose a bit of resolution when using the system. The extra camera sticking off the side of the DSLR is apparently only there for tweaking the algorithm.

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Remember when you were a kid, and you had a bunch of LEGO blocks lying around you? Whether or not you had just destroyed some crazy creation to make the mess, the mess always happened. But, eventually, you picked up those blocks, and started building something. Something you saw somewhere, in a movie, in a comic book, or maybe from the depths of your imagination. The LEGO blocks made it possible for a kid to be a kid, so to speak. But, now that you’re an adult, you’re wondering just what those LEGO blocks could do for you. Well, how about taking a small device created from LEGO that will roll dice for you?

You probably won’t be able to take the self-loading LEGO dice tower into a casino in Vegas, or at least not take it to a table with you, but it couldn’t hurt to try, right? After all, if you’re a superstitious person, sometimes you just can’t roll your own die, and there might not be anyone around that you trust enough to win you a hundred thousand dollars, or lose it all in one swift throw of the dice.

The LEGO dice tower uses a lever to load the dice into its tower, and then it will roll them out the bottom for you. Simple enough of a design, but one that makes us want to be a kid again and start building crazy contraptions. Check out the video below to see the tower in action.

[via UberGizmo]

Since the launch of Microsoft’s peripheral, Kinect, it’s been flying off the shelves. And while casual gamers are enjoying the device, it’s also been getting a lot of attention from the types that like to do things on their own. The Kinect has been used to let a robot help you work out, and even help in surgery. The hacks are certainly all over the place, and while Microsoft wasn’t particularly warm to the idea at first, the company is certainly enjoying the idea now. So much so, in fact, that it may turn out the company is getting ready to deliver official drivers, and a software developer’s kit (SDK) for Windows.

Microsoft sees the Kinect peripheral as an open platform now, but there’s no doubt that the Redmond-based company would want those out there to use their official drivers, as well as an SDK that they created. Steve Ballmer, at this past Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, wouldn’t give an exact date, but he did say that the company was looking at supporting the Windows-based PC for Kinect usage in the future. His answer was vague enough that the time table is pretty wide open.

The information comes from unnamed sources that are reportedly “familiar with the matter,” and so right now it seems that we’ve got to label this one as a rumor, and nothing more. However, with Microsoft openly saying that they support the open platform that Kinect was built upon, and semi-confirming upcoming support for Windows, it seems like it’s only going to be a matter of time before we start seeing some official PC support. That only seems to further the question: is your Kinect collecting dust, or not?

[via CNET]

I would bet that there are lots of geeks out there that own Nerf guns and have no kids in the house. That’s OK, I use my kids as an excuse to own some Nerf guns. I randomly shoot people as they come in my front door just to keep them on their toes.

One geek decided that he could make a better Nerf gun, which is is a good thing. Some of the Nerf weapons aren’t exactly high quality. The dude scrounged up the parts needed and set about building one that reminds me a bit of a Luger in its shape.

The dude used a 32mm ID PVC pipe for the barrel, aluminum extrusion pipe, wood for the grip, and other plastic and metal bits to fire. He used a cut down AR-15 spring. I wonder where the trigger came from. That seems like it would be the hard part to find.

Via Make

Continue reading GameBoy Advance Phone caught in the wild (by the guy who built it)

GameBoy Advance Phone caught in the wild (by the guy who built it) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Daft Punk is well known for the eye-catching helmets that have become synonymous with the group itself, but that’s not to say a keen DIYer with an iPad and a hot-glue gun can’t compete. DJ Kid Chameleon has given up face recognition in favor of a home-made helmet that mixes a classic Macintosh Plus with an iPad faceplate and sound-activated LEDs.

Video after the cut

A custom video on the iPad, designed to be played in time with other A/V content at the set, was triggered by a Bluetooth keyboard, and the rest you can see in the video below. It’s the handiwork of Terrence Scoville, initially started as a sculpture class project, and now co-opted into musical duties.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via Hack a Day]