Sarah Mitroff

[Photo: arduino.cc]I have to admit I am fascinated with Arduino, the microcontroller that allows you to build all sorts of devices and projects. Awesome examples of Arduino’s application include the µWave microwave that play YouTube videos while your food cooks and the eSleeper cat bed that glows when a cat enters it.

While people have been using Arduino hardware and software for a while now, to make some of the coolest things I’ve seen, up until now the software has been in beta. On November 30, the official Arduino blog posted that Arduino 1.0 is available for download.

[Photo: dimovi on Instructables]Prying eyes at work? Want some privacy at home? If you have had enough of others peering over your shoulder, looking at your computer screen and judging you for looking at Facebook, LOLcats, or an um, “inappropriate” website, hack yourself a privacy monitor. For little up-front cost, you can have a computer monitor that, along with special glasses, allows only you to see what’s on the screen. Everyone else will just see a white blank screen.

This awesome and easy hack came to me from Instructables member dimovi. Basically, you take a LCD monitor apart and extract its polarized film. The film then goes into a pair of old glasses and voilà, you have a privacy monitor that looks normal with your snazzy new glasses and blank to everyone else.

Editor's note: This is the first installment of 'All I Want for Geekmas', a series where the bloggers of GeekTech go around the proverbial table to share some of the geekiest items on our wish lists. And hopefully, we'll help you find the right gift for the geeks in your life too.

I love the holidays--the latkes, the menorah, the dreidels. Oh, right and then there is Christmas too. Christmas and Hanukkah collide this year so, I will be celebrating both. That means I need to find a plethora of gifts for both holidays. Luckily I was able to uncover a few tech and geeky gifts I want under my tree and next to my menorah. I’ve rounded up eight gifts, one for each night of Hanukkah.

[Photo: ThinkGeek]Leave it to ThinkGeek to deliver some of the best geeky toys inspired by your favorite video games. If you happen to be a fan of Portal, you might love these officially licensed LED flashlights modeled after an Aperture Science turret or Wheatley from Portal 2.

No detail is spared with these flashlights. While the turret will not shoot you if you get into its line of sight, it will light up and say a random quote such as "I don't hate you" or “Target acquired" when you press its button. The classic red color emanates from the turret’s eye. Wheatley boasts moveable handles and shines his blue light from his eye.

In the US, the iPhone 4S comes on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, but one major carrier is noticeably absent: T-Mobile. But a method has surfaced to unlock the iPhone 4S that allows it to be used on the T-Mobile network. A video showing the process has been posted to YouTube, though it won’t tell you how to do it. While it has not been completely confirmed, several users have reported success with the process.

It is important to note that you need to have the AT&T version of the iPhone 4S for this work. This two-step process involves unlocking your iPhone and cutting a T-Mobile SIM card down to the micro SIM card size, which you can accomplish by manually cutting it or by using a SIM cutter. Of course, you need to be careful when cutting the SIM card so you don’t damage it.

Scalpel. [Photo: Jason Freeney]From the outside, they bear little resemblance to humans--simple smiling face, bright yellow skin, strange plastic bump on their heads—but look inside a Lego minifigure and you will see that they have bones and organs, just like us. Well, only if you look inside the Lego man that Jason Freeny has sculpted.

By taking a 7.4-inch Lego minifigure, cutting him open on one side, and molding a clay skeleton and internal organs, he has created a sculpture called "Mini Figure Anatomy". Over on his Facebook page, Jason posted various photos of the very intricate creation process of sculpting each vertebrae, rib, and organ.

The 4004 microprocessor. [Photo: Intel]On Tuesday November 15, Intel held an event in San Francisco to celebrate the fortieth birthday of its 4004 microprocessor--the first complete single-chip central processing unit. At the event, a panel of Intel executives talked about the history of the microprocessor and its future. Federico Faggin, the principal designer of the 4004, was an honored guest who spoke about his work on the project.

The 4004 was conceived when the Japanese company Busicom commissioned Intel to help them produce calculators that contained a microprocessor. At the time, most people working on the project couldn’t imagine using microprocessors in any other application. Faggin however saw a greater potential.

We recently wrote about a new piece of art from British artist Luke Jerram depicting the seismogram from the Tōhoku Japanese Earthquake. Since then, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jerram to learn more about how he integrates technology and science into his artwork.

Jerram’s art goes beyond paint and canvas. His works include performance pieces of flying orchestras, street pianos that anyone can play, acoustic wind harps, and glass sculptures of viruses and sound files. A major theme in his art is to animate hidden phenomenon, be it sound, microscopic organisms or scientific data. His work has been installed and displayed all over the world and he is constantly searching out new inspiration and new mediums to work with.

There is very little that we can control within our bodies. We are for the most part limited to controlling what we eat or drink, what medicines we take, and the movement of our muscles. But we can't control our cells. This may all change, though: Recent scientific research has created a way to control some cells with computers to make them do what we want.

Scientists at ETH Zurich and the University of California, San Francisco have created cyborg cells of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s yeast) that can be switched on or off. Using light, the scientists could turn on the yeast to allow it to produce a specific protein called phytochrome that regulates gene expression. They also introduced a cyborg reporter molecule to keep track of the yeast’s activity.

[Photo: I_Like_Dots on Reddit; see link at bottom for source]I never cease to be amazed by 3D sidewalk chalk art. I could stare it for hours, mostly because I am not a talented artist who could ever draw such amazing pieces. This latest find is no exception; it’s a Lego minifigures army from the Chalk Festival in Sarasota, Florida that just wrapped up.

A street artist group based out of the Netherlands called Planet Streetpainting is responsible for this awesome work of art. Leon Keer, the art director of Planet Streetpainting, was inspired by Terracotta Army of China, a collection of sculptures modeled after Qin Shi Huang’s armies, the First Emperor of China. Inspiration also came from Dutch artist Ego Leonard who makes giant Lego not-so-mini-figures, one of which washed ashore in Sarasota just before the Chalk Festival.

Using the power of several different search engines, Poynt aims to deliver the most relevant and helpful information to you, though it often misses the mark.

When you first open the app, you see a rotating carousel of search categories to choose from--Businesses, People, Restaurants, Movies, Gas, and Events--as well as a handy icon for your local weather. You can choose to let Poynt use your GPS location, or manually enter a location yourself. Poynt uses services such as Citysearch, Eventful, and OpenTable to produce search results that include websites, directions, maps, and reviews.