Russian crafter Roman Booteen modified a United States dollar coin to mechanically grip and ungrip a sword with the press of a button. His pieces usually sell upwards of $10,000, though he doesn’t list prices and only sells when somebody makes him an offer he likes. He also only sells to people in the Russian Federation, so unless you’re also reading this from Russia there’s probably no way to get your hands on one. Which is the only reason I haven’t made an offer yet. Not because I’m broke and the idea of spending $10,000 to buy a $1 coin makes me physically vomit. Also, I’ve been trying to sell people my dollar coins for years and I just get the cops called on me. I guess things really are backwards in Russia.

Keep going for more shots and a video of the gripping mechanism in action, which is totally worth seeing. You can also check out Roman’s Instagram for more of his work.

Source: Geekologie – Modified dollar coin that mechanically grips and ungrips sword

Steve Jones, a former technician for the Royal Air Force, converted an engine from a decommissioned VC10 jet plane into a camper trailer. He estimates he spent about $5,000 and 1,000 hours over the course of three months on the build. From the project’s Facebook:

I had the unique opportunity to turn #4 engine nacelle off VC10 XV104 into my new 4 berth caravan pod. Enjoy my journey from aircraft to pod.

This is one of the coolest campers I’ve ever seen, rivaling the full scale LEGO VW Camper Van. I thought I nailed it when I drilled some air holes into my refrigerator and tied it to the back of my car, but this thing is way more impressive. I bet it’s also way less cramped and people probably don’t laugh at you as much. Look, not all of us have “time” or “money” or “skills”. Some of just have a fridge, some rope, and a drill.

Keep going for some more shots and a video touring the inside. You can follow the entire build on his Facebook page.

Source: Geekologie – Man turns jet engine into a camper trailer

YouTube channel MetaBallStudios (previously comparing asteroids and spaceships) made this animation showing what the moons of our solar system would look like if they were on Earth. They start from Saturn’s smallest moon compared to New York City and work their way up to Jupiter’s largest: Ganymede. Although they left out the real largest moon of all: your mom’s butt. Get it? Because she’s fat. Your mom is fat.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – The moons of our solar system as if they were on Earth

Time-lapse photographer Daniel López stacked seventeen 30-second time-lapse images of the Neowise comet and the resulting image was completely covered with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. Starlink has already launched 540 satellites and has been approved to launch 30,000 by the FCC. Combined with all the other satellites and airplanes flying around it’s not hard to imagine that pretty soon it’ll be impossible to take a picture of unobstructed space.

The photographer is obviously making a point here, since normally you stack photos to remove non-essential parts and it would’ve been trivial for him to remove the satellites. Most programs can do it automatically for you and it’s pretty par for the course for any photographer. It’s kind of like when I wanted to Photoshop everybody out of the picture at my birthday party so I could get a solo shot, only to realize I didn’t have to do any Photoshopping at all.

Source: Geekologie – Photo of Neowise comet photobombed by Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites

This is a video of Code Bullet creating an AI to beat the world record for longest Tetris game. In doing so he also had to write his own Tetris program. Even if you don’t care anything about AI or coding, it’s a pretty interesting glimpse at the mechanics of Tetris. I never even thought about it, but the pieces obviously can’t rotate around their center because it would move pieces in between block spaces. And what do you tell an AI is a good move? Filling holes is good, but obviously filling some holes is better than filling other holes. There’s an obvious joke to be made there but I’m a sophisticated man of sophisticated tastes so I’ll move on.

There’s clearly zero legitimacy to the world record since it’s not an official Tetris game and just a program he wrote himself, but it’s still pretty damn impressive he did the whole thing from scratch. Keep going for the full 17 minute video which is full of swear words if that kind of thing bothers you.

Source: Geekologie – Guy codes own Tetris program and then creates an AI to beat it

Herman Miller and Logitech have teamed up to create a line of gaming products, including a $1,500 gaming chair they’re calling The Embody Gaming Chair. I guess because it embodies how broke I’d be if I actually bought one? They also have a $1,300 gaming desk they’re calling the Motia and a $235 monitor arm they’re calling the Ollin, because edgy gamer products need edgy gamer names.

Unlike gaming mice and keyboards that actually include buttons and functions that aid in gameplay, I’m not sure what makes these “gaming” products besides having the aesthetic that’s become associated with gamers. It’s not like adding funky splines and gluing on brightly colored plastic gives your product extra performance. No, you need pulsating lights for that. Where are the pulsating lights? I need my performance gaming chairs to be extreme.

Keep going for a few more shots of the Embody Gaming Chair, which you can buy on the Herman Miller site.

Source: Geekologie – Herman Miller and Logitech create a ,500 gaming chair

Painter Seamus Wray has started a series of paintings of himself painting paintings of himself. He started with the first one above and is currently on his fifth iteration:

I’m not sure how much deeper he can go. Also, that’s what she said. Also, I hope he continues doing these for as long as his outfit will allow. In fifty years I expect to see a hagard old man in blue rags painting a portrait that includes 800 other portraits of himself getting younger and younger and smaller and smaller like a perfect metaphor of his youth disappearing into a minuscule void. Whee!

You can check out his entire progression on his Instagram and I’ve also included them after the jump.

Source: Geekologie – Painter paints himself painting himself painting himself painting himself painting himsef

YouTuber Rachelf tracked her electric guitar playing progress over four years. She started teaching herself in 2016 using the internet and started recording her progress since day one. She actually already sounded pretty good the first time she tried playing, but by the end she sounds like a Guitar Hero level.

Keep going for the full 11 minute video.

Source: Geekologie – This girl filmed her electric guitar progress over four years

Inspired by the structure of shells and grapefruits, a team of international researchers has created what they say is the first manufactured non-cuttable material which they’ve named Proteus, after the shape-changing mythical god. According to SciTech Daily:

The material is made from a cellular aluminum structure wrapped around ceramic spheres and this has a doubly destructive effect on cutting tools. When cut with an angle grinder or drill, the vibrations created by the ceramic spheres inside the casing blunt the cutting disc or drill bit.

“Essentially cutting our material is like cutting through a jelly-filled with nuggets. If you get through the jelly you hit the nuggets and the material will vibrate in such a way that it destroys the cutting disc or drill bit.

“The ceramics embedded in this flexible material are also made of very fine particles which stiffen and resist the angle grinder or drill when you’re cutting at speed in the same way that a sandbag would resist and stop a bullet at high speed.

Sure, it can withstand angle grinders, drills, and even water jets, but have they tried cutting it with, oh I dunno, scissors?! What’s that? Scissors don’t work either? Okay, I’m out of ideas. I guess it truly is non-cuttable.

Keep going for a 3D CT scan of the material, as well as a video of them attempting to cut through it with an angle grinder.

Source: Geekologie – Engineers create first manufactured non-cuttable material

To illustrate the dangers of deepfakes, a team from the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality created a deepfake of President Nixon delivering the real contingency speech written in 1969 for a scenario in which the Apollo 11 crew was unable to return from the moon. The video is called In Event of Moon Disaster and features both deepfaked video and audio. According to MIT News:

The team worked with a voice actor and a company called Respeecher to produce the synthetic speech using deep learning techniques. They also worked with the company Canny AI to use video dialogue replacement techniques to study and replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Through these sophisticated AI and machine learning technologies, the seven-minute film shows how thoroughly convincing deepfakes can be.

You can watch the entire In Event of Moon Disaster video here. The Nixon part starts at about 3:45. It’s fairly convincing, though there are some head nods that seem contextually out of place and the shirt collar feels a bit off. It’s not something somebody would notice if they didn’t already know the video was fake, and honestly it might just be in my head because I’m trying to find flaws. You could play me a real video of a Nixon speech and if you told me it was deepfaked I’d explain in great detail that I can tell because of the pixels. They’re off.

Scientific America has a 30 minute documentary on how the Nixon deepfake was made which you can watch here.

Source: Geekologie – MIT researchers create deepfake of Nixon delivering ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ speech

Engineering grad student Jeremy Chang (upwdesign on Instagram) built this absolutely bonkers Warhammer Ultramarine cosplay. He applied techniques he learned doing suit simulator research at the University of Maryland’s Space System Lab to add mobility to his suit, including the ability to turn and rotate the arms. The result is one of the most amazing cosplay armors I’ve ever seen. The fact he can move at all is impressive. I fall down the stairs if my sweater is too thick and this guy is walking around in an eight foot bipedal tank.

Keep going for a few more shots and a video of Nardio’s interview with him.

Source: Geekologie – Absolutely incredible Warhammer Ultramarine cosplay

Researchers at the University of Washington have designed a steerable camera small enough to fit on the back of a bug. According to IEEE Spectrum:

With a focus on small size and efficiency, they started with an off-the-shelf ultra low-power image sensor that’s 2.3 mm wide and weighs 6.7 mg. They stuck on a Bluetooth 5.0 chip (3 mm wide, 6.8 mg), and had a fun time connecting those two things together without any intermediary hardware to broadcast the camera output. A functional wireless camera also requires a lens (20 mg) and an antenna, which is just 5 mm of wire. An accelerometer is useful so that insect motion can be used to trigger the camera, minimizing the redundant frames that you’d get from a robot or an insect taking a nap.

The last bit to make up this system is a mechanically steerable “head,” weighing 35 mg and bringing the total weight of the wireless camera system to 84 mg.

The wireless camera system can stream 160×120 monochrome video frames at 5 frames per second for up to 6 hours. It’s not exactly IMAX quality, but still pretty good for something strapped to a damn bug. They can’t actually control the bug itself, so right now it seems like they’d just be getting low quality footage of whatever it is bugs do all day. Go to work? Get yelled at by their spouse? The usual stuff I guess.

Keep going for a few more shots of the camera as well as a video of it in action.

Source: Geekologie – Researchers design super small camera that fits on bugs

Using what they claim to be the largest 3D printer in Europe, the Kamp C Group in Antwerp, Belgium, has recently built a prototype 3D-printed house with two floors. According to New Atlas:

The unnamed project measures roughly 90 sq m (around 970 sq ft) and is the first 3D-printed house we’ve seen with two floors, though we have previously reported on an office building that also had two floors. It was constructed using a COBOD BOD2 printer measuring 10 x 10 m (32 x 32 ft) and, as with other 3D-printed projects, the construction process involved extruding a special cement-like mixture out of a nozzle and building up the basic structure in layers until it was complete. Human laborers then came in and put the finishing touches in place, like the roof and windows, for example.

It was completed on-site over three weeks but Kamp C reckons this could be reduced to as little as two days in the future.

The interior of the prototype home has similar dimensions to a typical Belgian house, though is not actually going to be lived in as it was created for government-funded research purposes and to highlight the possibilities of 3D printed architecture. It includes an entrance hall, two conference rooms, and a kitchen area. Kamp C also added some sustainable and energy-saving extras too, such as underfloor heating, solar panels, and a heat pump. A green roof is planned for the future.

So let me get this straight. They can print out two story houses but I still live in a ripped cardboard box under the bridge. Sure, maybe my investment in magic beans didn’t pan out the way I hoped, but I’m not asking for much. I don’t even need two stories. Heck, I don’t even need one story. At this point I’ll settle for a new 3D printed box.

Keep going for a few more shots of the house as well as a video of it being put together.

Source: Geekologie – Europe’s largest 3D printer prints an entire two-story house

Japanese artist Takahiro Shibata designed this face mask that mimics a steaming bowl of ramen when your glasses steam up. He writes:

I made a mask for people with glasses.
The more cloudy your glasses are, the hotter you can see the ramen.

Ease of use, no better than this.

Ease of use, no better than this indeed. Now design me one that has actual ramen in the mask and then we’ll talk. Some people feel too dignified to eat out of a horse feedbag. I am not one of those people. I am the opposite of those people.

Keep going for the full Tweet and one more shot of the delicious-looking mask.

Source: Geekologie – Artist designs ramen facemask to match your steamed up glasses

This sexy creepy looking fish was caught in Malaysia by an Indonesian Twitter user with the translated caption, “Her lips are hotter than mine.” The fish looks super Photoshopped, but National Geographic reports it could actually be a real triggerfish that lives in tropical seas around the world. They use their gross human-teeth to flip over crabs and sea urchins to get to their soft underbellies. As for the lips? They use those for smooching. Luscious, steamy, smooching. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some throwing up to do.

Keep going for the full Tweet which includes an additional image of the oddly arousing fish. I mean, normal not-arousing fish.

Source: Geekologie – Creepy fish caught in Malaysia with human-like mouth and teeth

This is the closest picture ever taken of the Sun. It was released from the Solar Orbiter mission led by the European Space Agency and was taken using the orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instrument. According to Nature:

The pictures, taken by the ultraviolet imager on 30 May and released on 16 July, were captured 77 million kilometres from the Sun’s surface (Earth is about 150 million kilometres from the Sun). A daring NASA mission called the Parker Solar Probe has flown even closer and will get within just 6.2 million kilometres during its mission — inside the corona itself — but the environment is so harsh that it does not carry a camera facing the Sun. Meanwhile, on Earth, the Daniel K. Inoye Solar Telescope in Hawaii has taken higher-resolution images of the Sun than the orbiter, but these do not fully capture the star’s light, because Earth’s atmosphere filters out some ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths.

Scientists are excited about the potential of the Solar Orbiter, an international collaboration that launched in February and carries ten instruments to image the Sun and study its environment. The spacecraft will eventually switch its orbit to study the Sun’s polar regions for the first time. “We’ve never been closer to the Sun with a camera, and this is just the beginning of a long epic journey with Solar Orbiter, which will take us even closer to the Sun in two years’ time,” said Daniel Müller, the mission’s project scientist, at the briefing.

Well there’s definitely a lot more detail than the time I stared at the sun with binoculars. I couldn’t make out the corona or solar flares or anything. I mostly just saw burning and pain. And weirdly now I can’t see anything at all.

Source: Geekologie – This is the closest photo of the sun ever taken

Tai Star Valianti set a Guinness World Record for the most Jenga blocks stacked on one vertical Jenga piece, beating his own previous record with 485. For reference, a normal Jenga set comes with 54 pieces, so this guy managed to fit almost 9 sets onto a single vertical piece. Which is pretty impressive, but what about the time I stacked 6 pancakes. Where was Guinness then?? Wait, what? That’s not impressive? That’s just breakfast? Yeah, but it was delicious.

Keep going for the full video of Tai building his insane Jenga tower.

Source: Geekologie – Man builds world record Jenga tower

YouTuber Jose Argumedo took the 1941 Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon ‘The Bulleteers’ and upscaled it using Waifu2x, an image upscaler that uses deep convolutional neural networks. Waifu2x is trained on anime (as evidenced by the name) and it works remarkably well for any animation and even pixel art. Just look at the results. It looks better than any remastering I’ve ever seen and was done completely with machine learning. It’s like looking at those botched art restorations but with the before and after images reversed.

Keep going for the full upscaled video, as well as what the original quality looks like.

Source: Geekologie – Fleischer Studios ‘Superman’ upscaled to 4k using neural networks

Stuff Made Here’s Shane made a robot to cut his own hair and he did it the hard way, bypassing trimmers and other shortcuts and going for scissors. That’s right, he designed a robot to cut the hair on his head with scissors. Scissors. If there’s any doubt that that’s exactly as dangerous as you probably think it is, just look at his expression. That’s the face of a man who doesn’t fully trust his creation. Like the time I filled a folded pizza with donuts, hot dogs, and jalapenos. Was it delicious? Obviously. Did it betray me the next day? Obviously.

Keep going for the full video explaining the build process and showing a timelapse of the entire cut itself. Spoiler alert, he doesn’t die or lose an ear.

Source: Geekologie – This guy made a robot to cut his own hair with scissors

A craftsman from Wales put together this whiskey fountain using Jack Daniel’s bottles. According to the maker:

“In the video, I am videoing a Jack Daniels waterfall feature that I made from scratch with everything recycled apart from the pump inside! It’s amazing what you can do when stuck in lockdown.”

Don’t say nothing good ever came from the lockdown. Also, what exactly is happening to all that whiskey? Is it still considered a fountain if the whiskey pours directly into a human mouth? I’m, uh, asking for a friend. A sad alcoholic friend.

Keep going for the full video of the fountain in action.

Source: Geekologie – Homemade Jack Daniel’s whiskey fountain