BOO! It’s Halloween and it’s also a Saturday, so let’s not hear any pathetic excuses for not carving pumpkins. While we’re no experts, we’ve got a few tips for making your jack-o’-lanterns better looking and more unique:
- Always mark where you’re carving first instead of freestyling, especially for the lid. Once the knife’s in there’s nothing you can do about it.
- Want an accurate carving? Draw or print your pattern on paper first and then stick it on the pumpkin, so that you can use a pin to punch an outline.
- Use a scalpel. Seriously, it’s so much better than kitchen knives.
- Be creative: consider using a variety of carving depths instead of just cutting out holes. It’s best to start off with the darkest areas so that you know where the threshold is. If it’s too shallow you can always scrape the trench.
- Don’t use candles — they don’t last and aren’t safe for the kids and animals; many LED candles have a convincing flickering glow, so try those. Alternatively, why not convert a cheap solar garden light into a lid for your jack-o’-lantern? Or go Ben-Heck and try the Cylon mod?
- Keep the seeds for roasting — they make a good snack.
Feel free to refer to our gallery for the whole process. Enjoy and have a happy Halloween!
Filed under: Household
How-to: geek up your pumpkin originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Surface? What Surface? Ideum, which popped out a rather gigantic MT2 multitouch table earlier this year, is now introducing another model that makes that fellow look like child’s play. The 100-inch MT-50 is an outright beast, boasting 86 viewable inches, a 16 x 5 aspect ratio and a stunning 2,304 x 800 resolution. It was engineered for the Space Chase Gallery at the Adventure Science Center, which is one of several high-tech exhibits the company has deployed at the Nashville, TN-based science center. The table itself can support over 50 simultaneous touch points, and while the Flash-based software is obviously tailored for learning applications, there’s nothing stopping this thing from becoming the world’s next great arcade fixture. Hop on past the break for a drool-worthy vid.
Continue reading Ideum’s 100-inch MT-50 multitouch table supports 50 simultaneous touch points (video)
Filed under: Displays, Science
Ideum’s 100-inch MT-50 multitouch table supports 50 simultaneous touch points (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It belts out severe weather alerts as storms are barreling towards your domicile. It acts as a decent bedroom stereo. And it wakes you and the SO up to your own favorite jams — all while charging your iPod or iPhone throughout the night. If those amenities sound like must-haves in your own life, you might be interested in knowing that iLuv’s iMM183 dual dock alarm clock is now shipping, nearly a full year after being originally announced at CES. The pain? $149.99 — but hey, that’s a small price to pay to keep your dear media player / handset out of a tornado’s eye, right?
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video
iLuv ships weather-watching iMM183 dual dock iPod / iPhone alarm clock originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What could be a better feeling than beating a world record? Beating your own world record. The Tesla Roadster has put an extra exclamation mark on its world-conquering single-charge antics by raising the bar from 241 miles back in April to an even more impressive 313 this week. As you can see in that homemade “world record” sign above, that’s 501 kilometers in metric terms, or pretty much the exact distance between Paris and Amsterdam. The Global Green Challenge in Australia — where this feat was achieved — allows only production battery-powered vehicles to compete, meaning that the new record is down to driver skill on the part of one Mr. Simon Hackett, and not some newfound techno mojo. Kinda makes those long recharge times seem like less of a burden, no?
Tesla Roadster keeps on rollin’, goes 313 miles on single charge originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The fine folks at both HotHardware and PC Perspective have run the new ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard through its paces, which has the particular distinction of handling both USB 3.0 and the up-and-coming SATA 6G through controllers by NEC and Marvell, respectively. Lucky for us, both sites’ tests came to similar conclusions. The Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive has almost zero improvement over SATA 3G, other than in some burst speeds due to the fancy cache on the 6G — the bottleneck here is the drive, not the controller. Meanwhile, USB 3.0 has speeds that are roughly 5 to 6 times faster than USB 2.0 with the same drive, a huge win for fans of external storage the world over. Perhaps even better news is that an ASUS US36 controller card with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support is a mere $30, so this stuff is already basically within reach to the average desktop user.
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Read – PC Perspective
Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, Storage
USB 3.0 and SATA 6G put to good use: benchmarks originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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