The geekiest news this side of Riften.
Playing with pee #
Usually it’s a taboo to be caught playing with yourself in a public toilet, however, a particular club in south London now encourages it. The club has installed two pee-controlled gaming urinals equipped with twelve-inch screens and an array of sensors working well beyond their original purpose.
The urinals display ads until a lucky punter approaches, and once the flow starts, so does the game. Aiming your joystick at the targets in the urinal moves your on-screen character left or right, with the object of the game being to avoid the oncoming objects. The game lasts only as long as you do, so big-bladdered men have the advantage.
It’s almost a shame that Nintendo beat them to the perfect name.
Bacterial lamps #
Philips has created a lamp that uses no electricity. It’s not solar. It doesn’t even have a bulb. Matter of fact, it’s almost Flintstonian (yes, I can make up words) in execution, in that it’s powered by a living organism. While images of pedal-powered generators coupled to helpful, thick-legged dinosaurs may come to mind, the creatures powering this lamp are actually bioluminescent bacteria.
The benefits of using these bacteria, as opposed to a dinosaur, are manifold. 1) the bacteria aren’t extinct 2) they run on methane produced from kitchen waste, and not the flesh of other extinct species 3) you don’t need to train the bacteria to use the dino-litter tray.
According to Philips, the bacteria produce a low-intensity light that is more suited to “tracing, warning, ambience and indication, than functional illumination”, so won’t replace your over-head lights any time soon.
Another disadvantage is that the organism has to be kept alive, but the lamp operates independently of the grid (presuming you have a no-power way of producing/fermenting methane), and the fact that the source is living “provides interesting possibilities for changing, unpredictable, environmentally responsible ambient effects.”
Skyrim Books online #
It’s easy to get a little upset when you have to walk away from Skyrim and go participate in the mundane duties of RL. Worse, you used to be able to turn to your pocket computer to get a quick gaming fix, but Angry Birds just seems so superficial these days. So, how can you get your dose of Skyrim out on the road? How about a collection of every single book featured on the shelves of Tamriel?
One of the neat touches that give Skyrim the feeling of a complete world is the fact that every book on every shelf can be picked up and read. Rather than continuing to break into NPC’s houses in the night to access their libraries, Skyrim enthusiast, Capaneus, decided to see how he could extract the books from the game to read in his own time.
Turns out that the books were stored in plain text, so all he had to do was move them to separate documents, add some headings, generate a table of contents and a cover, and never have to worry about leaving his beautiful world – nor his copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid – behind again.