Albert Filice

[Credit: phermans.com]There are tons of card games on the Internet, but they all lack something tangible, like real playing cards. If you wanted to play a game of poker with your friend but don’t want the virtual deck to kill the mood, one ingenious soul decided to build a remote card-holding apparatus dubbed Vanna, which reminds me a little of a scrabble tile holder.

The idea is that while you’re playing a card game over a webcam, the device holds the opponents' cards facing away from you at a slight angle. Your opponents' webcam is set up to see the faces of the cards and you facing them across from it. It doesn’t specify if both players can use them at the same time, but I don’t see why not.

3D printers are awesome. There’s a catch, though: The printers are nowhere near inexpensive enough for most people to just pick one up. We’ve seen some cheap ones like the Printrbot, but that will still run you up $500. What if you could get one for free, though?

Ken, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, wants to help you get one on the cheap. He wants to use an open-source 3D printer called the RepRap (Replicating Rapid Prototyper) to print the parts for other identical machines--thus, more 3D printers. He can’t afford one right now, so he started a Kickstarter to help get the money to make one.

After failing to get any ketchup out of the nearly empty bottle at a barbecue, a group of engineers, scientists, and the like gathered to solve the problem of condiment frustration once and for all.

What they came up with was an ultra-effective non-stick coating that’s so slippery that even something like ketchup will slip right out as if it were water. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the video (after the jump); it’s like the ketchup I put on my burgers in my dreams.

[Credit: taulman on Instructables]3D printers generally print using ABS plastic, which is great for most applications--I mean, they make Legos out of it, after all. When printing thin pieces, however, ABS can be quite brittle, and it tends to snap when put under stress.

Instructables user taulman got the idea to use nylon in place of ABS: Nylon shares a lot of the same properties of ABS, like the ability to extrude it (albeit at higher temperatures), but it has several advantages. First off, nylon has a greater degree of flexibility than ABS, so it won't snap as readily. Not only that, but the naturally low levels of friction between nylon means any gears you print won’t need any lubrication.

[Image: Albert Filice. PCWorld]If you’re a regular GeekTech reader, you may have seen our post about an emerging technology that lets you control you phone just by waving your hands in front of it. You also may have heard of this thing called Siri that answers your questions when you talk to it.

Pretty cool right? Not compared to Senseye, which strips out the need for hands and voice altogether, allowing you to do things like scroll through Web pages and play games using nothing but your eyes.

[Photo: Joong Han Lee]3D printing is fun and all, but it’s just so impersonal when you let the computer do all the work. Joong Han Lee, a masters student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, wants to change this and bring a level of craftsmanship to 3D printing, and his creation does so in a very unique way.

For his thesis project, , Joong decided to build a machine that lets you get hands-on with 3D printing. You have to pick up a glue gun-like device that spews out modeling material and, guided by the tactile feedback arm it’s attached to, feel out and print the 3D model yourself.

[Photo: Upgrade Industries]Arduino is a great microcontroller, but when you want the ability to easily scale your project or exchange components quickly, that’s where BoardX really starts to shine.

BoardX is essentially a microcontroller motherboard, very similar to the motherboard inside your computer. Unlike Arduino and some other microcontrollers, the processor isn’t soldered onto the motherboard with BoardX. Rather, it’s soldered to a second board that stacks right on top of the BoardX motherboard. This allows you to easily swap it for a different one, or even add a second processor right on top.

[Photo: Brook Drumm]There are a host of 3D printers out there, but none are as simple and inexpensive as the Printrbot created by Brook Drumm. It’s still in Kickstarter mode, but as of this writing,( the Printbot has already met the pledge goal. So we’re going to be seeing some of these in the future, and I know I already want to get my hands on one.

There are a lot of different Printrbot kits you can order right now by pledging funds to the project: Some kits have only the basic parts, and no electronics, while some are even sparser, not even containing motors and hardware.

[Photo: Takahiro Yamaguchi on Flickr]What is the Senseless Drawing Bot? This robot, created by So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi, is essentially a skateboard with some custom wheels and a motor to rock it back and forth, while an arm with a paint can sways awkwardly from side to side.

When the rocking gets to a certain point, the swaying turns into bizarre gyrations due to the arms hinged design. All the while, a spray paint can at the end of the arm flops about wildly, spraying the walls in random arching patterns. The arm swings parallel to the wall, so paint doesn’t splatter or spew in too many different directions.

The backstory: I was looking for some handlebar tape for my bicycle when I came across some old Ethernet cords I had laying around. I instantly thought I could use them in a cool, creative, and geeky way to wrap by bars. I’m going to briefly go over how to do it yourself, and if you get confused be sure to check out the pictures at the bottom.

I started by using an X-acto knife to carefully cut the cable open lengthwise to reveal the twisted colored wires inside--a tedious process, to be sure. There are 8 wires inside twisted together in pairs, I separated them by color, but left the colored pairs twisted around each other (see the photo below). The color of the wire insulation can vary from cable to cable, and looking at the clear cap on the end of the cord can give you an idea of what’s inside.

[Photo: AI & Robot]If there are two things I love in this world, it’s whimsical robots and fixed-gear bikes. Put together, they’re better than I could have ever imagined: This little robot rides around on its miniature bike balancing without training wheels.

The bot can even steady the bike with his legs when it's not riding around, so you don’t have to pick it up or give it a push to start it. When it wants to stop, it just sticks its legs out and uses its feet as a friction brake, bringing the bike to a skidding stop. The little hipster bot can wave at onlookers too--provided he comes to a stop first--but hopefully it’ll be able to ride without holding on to the handlebars before long.

The changed .plist file.Want to get your hands on the hidden panoramic feature buried inside iOS5, but don’t want it bad enough to go through the pain of jailbreaking your device? It turns out you can turn on this hidden feature without resorting to hacks.

In a nutshell, you make a backup of your device with iTunes, and then use a free program called iBackupBot to edit a file in the backup you just made, adding in a line or two of code. From there you restore that backup with the modified file included, which enables the panoramic mode in the camera app.