Makoviney.com » Cool Gadgets

I saved up my paper route money for one of these bad boys!

Don — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:35:53 +0000

What’s even cooler about this Commodore Vic-20 commercial is that it is hosted by William Shatner! What a time capsule!

Don — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:55:24 +0000

Jamming at Ben’s

Sitting here thinking about how insanely awesome computers are nowadays from when I first started programming back in 1997.

Right now my computer is doing the following:

Streaming KEXP.ORG College Radio station at 128kbps
Downloading my songwriting blog via FTP.
Reading the morning news in Google Reader.
Downloaded the latest version of Wordpress and am extracting.
Downloaded a Wordpress plugin and extracting.
Editing a contact form in Dreamweaver.
Writing this blog post!

Geez. 10 years ago doing all this would have been impossible, but my processor is humming along at 8% and I’m not even close to touching my 2GBs of RAM on the laptop.

Wonderful stuff.

Threadless Back-To-School T-Shirt Sale

Don — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:00:08 +0000

Threadless is having a Back-To-School T-Shirt Sale.

Here are some of my favs:

Awesome.

Bad Apple.

Cookie loves Milk.

Legos, a Star Wars fetish, and too much time on your hands will truly make you this geeky

Don — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:06:29 +0000

USB missile launcher

Don — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:25:03 +0000

If I still had a Dilbert/The Office/Office Space – styled day job, this would definitely have the prominent place on my desktop:

USB Missile Launcher

The USB Missile Launcher is the latest desktop weapons platform that elevates your status from mere code-monkey or BOFH Sysadmin to a true Digital Dictator. Laugh maniacally while you zero in on your unsuspecting target. Rain down foam punishment upon him with a click of the mouse. Watch as, one by one, three spring-loaded missiles arc 5 to 8 feet gracefully to your quarry. Giggle girlishly at the realistic sound effects with every launch.

This launcher can pivot 180 degrees horizontally, and 45 degrees up. Controlled by the included PC software, point the missiles at your foe, and press the big red shiny delicious button on screen. FOOM.

The USB Missile Launcher stands approximately seven inches high, is gunmetal grey, with three white foam spring-loaded missiles on top. It requires 3 AA batteries, which are included. Also includes PC Software (currently Windows XP only, but there is third party software available ‘out there’ for Mac and Linux).

Available at ThinkGeek.com

Cape Coral Yard Sales – Every week in your inbox.

Don — Sat, 05 May 2007 11:18:18 +0000

Jim Davis at Raging Smurf in Cape Coral put a cool page together that allows people to add their own garage sales and then it automatically goes to Google Maps and draws a map so people can find your place. Excellent! You can sign up and get an email every Thursday with a complete listing of all the yard sales in Cape Coral (and parts of Fort Myers).

Check it out:

Cape Coral Yard & Garage Sales

Of course, that reminds me of 2005’s Cape Coral Garage Sale Adventure .

Yeah, so this guitar pretty much rocks

Don — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:33:11 +0000

It is a Gretsch Tennessee Rose. Yeah. For real.

Chindogu: Word of the Day

Don — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:44:54 +0000

According to Wikipedia the definition says …

Chindogu is the not-so-ancient Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindogu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindogu are sometimes described as ‘unuseless’ – that is, they cannot be regarded as ‘useless’ in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called ‘useful’.

Examples of Chindogu include the hay fever hat, commuter’s helmet, the automated noodle cooler, and the portable crosswalk (shown above).

Consider yourself educated on this Tuesday, March 28th!

Tilt Shift Photography … Whoa!

Don — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:04:59 +0000

Maybe it is just my fascination with model trains, but I think this type of photography is just TOO COOL.

No, this is not a model. This is the REAL THING … taken with a tilt shift lens.

Flickr has whole galleries of tilt shift photography.

Tilt Shift Photography is pretty cool and desirable. More photographers would probably take tilt shift pictures if tilt shift lenses weren’t so freakin’ expensive.

How expensive, you ask? Check out shift lens prices At Amazon.com.

Also the real thing. No fake poo here! In fact the original image is located here.

More at Flickr.

Tilt shift lenses at Amazon.

Flipping cool new gadgets at ThinkGeek.

Don — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:43:24 +0000

I just took a look at the What’s New page on ThinkGeek.com and found some pretty cool items I thought I’d blog about – especially this cool iPod case. Great protection – even when dropping. (Although I wouldn’t recommend dropping your iPod very often.

Ribbed for iPod pleasure.

Check out the iPod FunSkin at ThinkGeek.com

There are a couple of other cool items too …

Retro Phone Handset:

Dial “R” for Retro.

This is a new production replica of the Western Electric 500-series model, which was the classic phone handset for several decades. It’s been slightly modified to work with the headset jack of most cell phones (or via a “hands free” adapter kit, sold elsewhere).

Check out the Retro Handset at ThinkGeek.com

Check out the retro phone.

Marshmallow Shooter:

The Shooter comes equipped with 20 foam pellets (non-edible, but squishy) which are also fun to shoot. Marshmallow ammo is sold separately to maintain freshness. Each Ammo bag is 4.4 oz (the bag we counted had 247 rounds) of some of the tastiest (and deadliest) mini-marshmallows imaginable