Aug 4, 2009

Want to be an astronaut? Good news! Apparently all it takes to get the best conditioning possible is being able to bounce around on a trampoline and get beaned by the occasional ball. That's because Spaceball is — according to Scott Carpenter, one of NASA's Mercury Seven astronauts — "the best conditioning exercise for space travel."

As for the game itself, it's a little confusing to figure out — or to figure out which part is fun, at least. You bounce around in your compartment while trying to toss the ball through a little tunnel in the middle and get it by your opponent. Spaceball supports two players under 200 pounds each, and takes up an area of your yard that's 14' by 8½'.

It's all yours for only $700, or quite a few space bucks for you astronauts-in-Spaceball-training.

Hammacher Schlemmer, via Gizmodo, via Geekologie

Aug 4, 2009

Free heat with minimal investment. Having a serious interest in renewable energy, I recently got the urge to try and create a solar insert that would simply slide into my existing window casings to help with the heating of my 1996 mobile. I saw on the local news one night how a local man built a sol...
By: Slezridr

Aug 4, 2009

If you want to move a building a little over to the side and, oh, upside-down, then it looks like all you have to do is set off explosives on just one side. That's what it looks like what happened in this video in Turkey, anyway. Wish it also included what led up to this amazing building barrel roll...

By: fungus amungus

Aug 4, 2009

Cutting a pizza into eight equal slices is difficult with a regular pizza slicer. You always end up with a couple of really large slices and a couple of thinner slices. That's not really fair, now is it? If only there was some ridiculous and impractical implement to solve this idiosyncratic problem!

This Equalizer Multi-Blade Rocker Pizza Cutter guarantees that all of your slices come out exactly even. Of course, it also costs between $190 and $250 depending on the size, so you'd better have a really, really big problem with off-sized slices of pizza to want this thing.

A Kitchen via Book of Joe

Aug 4, 2009

Improving upon the Mimo 710 USB-powered monitor is the 710-S, which adds a stand that's also a protective clamshell cover. The 710-S has the same 800 x 480 pixel resolution for its 7" screen, but with a higher 500:1 contrast ratio. It's got a dual-headed USB cable, which means you can plug it into a second port if you find that it's not getting enough power with just one.

It's all yours for $150 — about $30 more than the older 710. Mimo also has the 740 USB-powered touchscreen for $220, though it still uses the old 710 base — any chance of seeing the clamshell on that one, Mimo?

Check out more of the 710-S in the gallery below.

Think, which plans to make a small all-electric car, expects to secure a fresh round of funding and emerge from bankruptcy next month, according to a company representative.

Settling its debts and boosting its capital will allow Think to start producing its electric city car by the end of year. ...

Aug 4, 2009

Now you can give a scientifically accurate answer when someone asks what kind of mutt you're walking on the end of that leash with this Genealogy Kit. Just swab some goo from your dog's cheek and send it into the lab, and they'll do some sophisticated testing to figure out exactly what breeds are present in your dog's DNA.

The $59.95 price gets you a fancy certificate, spelling out exactly what percentages of 93% of the most common breeds in the U.S. encompass the ancestry of your beloved bowser. Or, if you're an A.K.C.-registered purebred snob, this will be further proof of pedigree. Now you can strut around, confident that your dog is what you say he is.

Just hope when someone asks what kind of mutt that is on the end of that leash, the questioner is not talking to the dog.

Via Hammacher Schlemmer

No, this Speaker Phone doesn't make calls. It's literally a speaker, and an awesome one at that.

This homemade speaker is crammed inside the body of an old phone. The sound comes out from behind where the number pad used to be. Even cooler is the fact that you turn it on and off by taking the phone off the hook. Simply plug in an iPod or other audio source and it'll do the rest. I want one.

Flickr via Make