News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 114

It's happened to the best of us—a drunk dial or text; a humiliating Tweet or incriminating photo uploaded to Facebook. Spirits are high, gestures are fearless… If only we could take it all back once the cold, sober morning light creeps through the blinds.

One of the creepiest musical instruments ever is undoubtedly the theremin, a device originating from the early 20s that emits eerie sounds with a just a wave of the hand. If you've seen the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know what I mean—freakishly creepy. Playing the theremin can be off-putting for some, since it's a relatively pricy gizmo, but a new geek gadget called the EaTheremin aims to make all of us professional, dinnertime theremists.

The title 333DDD may evoke a familiar NSFW project by the name of 3DD... but, sorry guys, this one isn't about boobs in the third dimension. Artist Mark Beasley's333DDD project is "a javascript bookmarklet that converts images on the current page into red/cyan anaglyphs." Here's a simple (and awesome) way to waste time today:

Matt Reed, a web developer at Nashville interactive ad agency Redpepper, built a massive, real life Facebook Like "button" out of Legos, which lights up whenever someone clicks Like on his Facebook page. The programmer loves LEGOs, and draws an affinity between the legendary building blocks and engineering: "[Legos] are great for prototyping physical objects. I don't manufacture things, but I do click blocks together. Plus, most things I deal with on a daily basis are pixelized. Legos are some...

There are currently two camps on the internet. The first camp—those who are slurping up as much Charlie Sheen tiger blood as possible (hence Sheen's newly bagged Guinness Book of World Records status for most Twitter followers)— drastically prevails. The second camp—those who would rather not hear poor Charlie's ravings—is, however, much smaller. If you fall into the latter camp, Greg Leuch of F.A.T. has a solution for you. Leuch—who is also responsible for the Justin Bieber Mention Blocker—has...

Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.

When the much buzzed Facebook profile page redesign was released back in December, French artist and co-director of ad agency La Bande Originale Alexandre Oudin came up with an innovative way to maximize the visual possibilities of the page. His clever "hack" created a ripple effect of copycats across the web.

This past Tuesday, Amazon pushed a big software update to Kindle users the world over. While the update introduces a host of great new features—secondary page numbers that allow readers to reference real-world editions, for example—, it also takes something away. What?

Click the red play button below for the video.

If you dig case mods and Resident Evil, it's fair to say you'll find Ron L. Christainson's nothing short of epic. Inspired by the renown video game and movie, Ron—an artist and PC tech from Seattle—has already spent a year constructing the mod from scratch, and still has a couple months of work ahead of him.

Too lazy to take your phone out of your pocket? If so, then here's a must-have: a customizable inPulse wristwatch that can check into Facebook Places. Created by inPulse designer Eric Migicovsky, the hacked watch uses Bluetooth to pull Facebook Places from a connected Android smartphone. The app sends real time latitude and longitude stats from the smartphone's GPS to Facebook, which then transmits nearby places to the watch, navigable by a one button interface.

The Clock Bloggers love Angry Birds so much, they decided to transform into... Angry Birds. With a little advice from our jolly bloggers, you too can jump into the video game fantasy vortex.

On Monday, ElectricPig's Mark Cooper became something of an Internet sensation when he posted a video of playable Angry Birds birthday cake he made for his son Ben's 6th birthday.

If you've yet to stumble across Photojojo, it's an awesomely addictive web newsletter for all photography junkies. I'm especially loving their recent photorealistic gadget pouch project because the finished product looks incredibly pro and as Photojojo keenly comments, "We've been seeing these little pouches in hipster gift stores that look like tacos, cassette tapes, pizza, etc. And we thought, 'That's so easy, we could totally make those ourselves!'" Right on. The project is indeed easy to...

Love, love, love it! Pixelfari converts Safari to 8-bit, turning everything into old school Nintendo-style pixely fonts and graphics.

Available for free in the Android Market, Google's Androidify turns your phone into a veritable Android Assembly Line.

Know how some people have a natural way of lighting up a room? Well, hacker i-am-jen has an artificial one—LED sneakers!

If the whale tail cookies and edible undies weren't naughty enough, you've still got about 24 hours left before Valentine's Day to whip up one of F.A.T. artist Randy Sarafan's step-by-step clap-off bras. Inspired by the electronic singing panties and remote-controlled bras of the secret underworld of Syrian lingerie, Sarafan made a mission to "fast-forward lingerie technology in the West".

If you're considering getting the new Verizon iPhone, you may want to check out reliable teardown site iFixit. Although the exterior of the new phone may look the same as the old, the interior shows significant differences.

I'm not going to lie. I was Catholic. But one of my reasons for my faithful departure was having to tell my innermost secrets— my sins— to a silhouetted figure behind a latticed screen. With the creepy enclosed booth structure and separation of sinner and confessor, its anonymity was clear, yet deceiving. You always knew the priest and he always knew you. If I wanted total privacy, was there really a need for this intermediary to God?

When choosing a security system for the office, Billy Chasen decided to ditch the traditional lock & key barricade for something a little more 21st century. He hacked together a device that uses a web server, servo motor and some parts from Home Depot to enable locking & unlocking via text message. Chasen maintains a list which gives access to green lit office workers, who enter by simply texting "lock" or "unlock"... and voilà, open sesame.

In the far away land of Japan, gold is out, glow-in-the-dark is in. LED "grills" were recently conceived of by two Japanese designers/hackers for a winter advertising event at clothing store Laforet Harajuku. The LED teeth attachments quickly became a hot item.

If you consider yourself a hypochondriac and subscribe to the "my iPhone can do ANYTHING" set, you may want to consider turning your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 into a digital dermatoscope. The Handyscope by FotoFinder uses hardware and an app to magnify your blemish scares up to 20 times (ew). Simply tag the images with your name and locale, and submit them via e-mail for diagnosis.

It seems like all of us Verizon users have been waiting for EONS, and it's finally happened. Today Verizon officially announced the iPhone 4 will be available for pre-order February 3rd for existing Verizon customers, and will be generally available for pre-order on February 10th. The device will start at $200 for the 16GB version, equipped with a new antenna and hotspot application that will allow you to connect your computer or any other device to the web.

Perhaps the greatest iPad accessory released thus far, presenting the JOYSTICK-IT, an attachable arcade stick to make the most of your iPad x arcade gaming experience. Sorry guys, this one isn't a DIY. Available at ThinkGeek for $24.99.

Though Sony has yet to officially announce the release of their rumored PlayStation cell phone, images of the device were leaked this morning on Chinese website IT68.

What do you get when you take a run-of-the-mill kitchen knife and add a simple synthesizer circuit? Behold, the Syntheslicer!

All hail artist, programmer and human electrocution music-machine, Daito Manabe. He's back, and better than ever:

Japanese artist and programmer Daito Manabe uses the face as an instrument. He makes the human face involuntarily dance using electric stimulators (which, by the way, look like the same kind used for electroshock therapy). The stimulators are taped to the face, and each musical beat delivers a shock, resulting in disturbing face contortions in time to the music.

This past Sunday, a group called Gnosis launched a massive hacker attack on Gawker media, one of the web's most popular blog networks (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot). 1.3 million registered users' passwords were compromised, and 188,279 of them were decoded and made public. The biggest takeaway? Many Gawker denizens use downright dumb passwords. (Guess they didn't see their own Lifehacker's story on avoiding such a thing.)

A group of four giggly Japanese girls put on a digital fashion show with a projector and Google image search. Clever ad spot for Google Japan, directed by Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo.

If you would like to restrict what appears on your Facebook page, here's a novel way to retain ultimate control, coined the "super-logoff" method:

Turkey's been consumed, you've awakened from the food coma, and you've escaped the madness of Black Friday. Isn't it about time you tackle a new project? We've got some great new projects for you to help illuminate the darkness of winter.

Google StreetView is watching everybody. In fact, Google captures so much, Jon Rafman has made art out of it. Rafman's blog 9eyes features the most interesting images found the cameras nine eyes (and no brain).

Far away in Finland, where the ice is plentiful and the temperature is bitter cold, the Finnish Nokia team have created the world's first touchscreen display made entirely of ice. Constructed with massive slabs of river ice, the display was first shaped into neat square slabs with a chainsaw, and then smoothed into a watchable surface with a powerful heat gun.

Who says nothing productive ever came out of doodling? Certainly not the hacker responsible for this fun (and at least somewhat functional) paper-and-pencil touchpad, which takes advantage of the natural conductivity of graphite:

That Kinect you bought for your Xbox 360? More than just a game controller, it's a bonafide hologram generator! In the clip below, UC Davis researcher Dr. Oliver Kreylos demos the process. The fun stuff begins at the :44 mark.

Would it have been possible to build a rudimentary telegraph network in the stone age? Not too long ago, Jamie O'Sheathe of the Office for the Development of Substitute Materials set out to discover just that, venturing into the wilderness to determine whether a working telegraph might be built without the use of modern tools.