Tamasindo Secret & Technology

I saw this over at the BBC: A breakdown of traffic for the top 100 sites.

Their infographic was helpful, but it needed a slight correction. After careful study (many hard hours), I have concluded that this updated Infographic more accurately represents the traffic breakdown:

Margin of error +-50%

Powered by: Tamasindo Secret (www.tamasindo.com)

Artist/Steampunk da Vinci I-Wei Huang aka Crab Fu made this awesome remote-controlled steam tank. It uses alcohol or solid fuel tablets and can last for up to 15 minutes on a full tank of water. It’s a frankentank made of a Wilesco D49 Marine Double Piston Steam engine, a Mamod SE3 boiler, a Tamiya 1/16 clutch drive, an aluminum chassis, and steel tracks. It’s controlled using a 2-channel Futaba.

Once again, this building and hacking stuff is beyond my understanding, but even so I love how it looks. A little polish, grit and flourish and this thing could be made to look like a 19th century toy.

The steam tank doesn’t have weapons, but it is literally on fire. So maybe it could just stand beside its enemy until the latter melts. Or gets bummed out.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Want more steamy steampunk? Check our Crab Fu’s website for more steam-powered creations and steampunk sketches.

[via gizmo watch]

Video games have had surround sound for quite some time now, but Dolby wants to up the ante and provide surround voice chat with Dolby Axon. Dolby claims that Axon effectively creates a more realistic experience by making the volume and intensity of voices change relative to the location of the speakers’ in-game character. If Leeroy Jenkins’ and his party played had Dolby Axon tech on that fateful day, everyone would have heard Leeroy’s voice fade away as he ran off on a mission to make the whole world laugh.

Dolby says that gamers will be able to enjoy Axon whether they’re on a high-end 7.1 setup or if they only have standard headsets. Axon also provides other effects aside from surround voice chat. I’ll let Spencer the talkative gunner share them with you:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It doesn’t take a genius to know that this technology adds a new dimension to multiplayer games, making owning a headset a requirement, unless you want everyone else to enjoy the added advantage Axon offers. I’m not too impressed by the voice effect feature though. I can see a lot of gamers adopting a high-pitched screechy voice just to be annoying. But at least now you’ll hear where they are, so it’ll be easier to defeat them and shut them up.

[via Xboxic]

For this, our next in the Kitchen Table Talks series, I’m going to emphasize a point I was trying to make about business cards: namely, we shouldn’t just hand them out willy nilly. We do it because we’re not sure what else to do. But we don’t always need to end a face to face interaction with trading business cards. Here’s more:

Can’t see the video? click here.

Direct link to the video

People always ask which camera I used to shoot my video. I use the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 (that’s a review of the camera).

Powered by: Tamasindo Secret (www.tamasindo.com)

With the new Iron Man 2 movie just around the corner, a variety of bits and bobs with an Iron Man theme have started to make their way to stores for fanboys and girls to enjoy.

Take, for instance this full-sized replica of Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor heart. It’s a perfect recreation of the original design from Stan Winston Studios, and even lights up just like in the movie.

The prop is made from aluminum and stainless steel for heft, and can be left in either its desktop Plexiglas stand, or can be installed in your own chest to keep away those bits of metal shrapnel that are just dying to pierce your vital organs and do you in. (I will not be held responsible for any surgery you perform on yourself trying to install this.)

The Arc Reactor replica is available over at ThinkGeek for $149.99 (USD).

[via The Awesomer]