Saturday, November 19, 2011

iPhone Anti-Thelt Device

How to Go To Your Floor Without Stopping

The Weirdest iPhone Apps

There are many more apps available for the iPhone than a single person could download in their lifetime.
With so many apps there are sure to be some strange ones out there.
Chicago Now has put together some of the weirdest apps.


Hold OnHow bored do you have to be?



Annoyance!Besides the hyena, you'll experience these annoying sounds in my house every day - no need to purchase.



iVoodooYour virtual voodoo doll - no one will piss you off again.



iDrunktxtIt's Friday night and you are out on the town, and of course you want to text your friends that are no doubt sitting around thinking about you too. Here is an app to get rid of all that sloppy fumbling around looking through your contacts trying to decide who to txt. Simply set up a couple custom lists of Friday night txt friendly contacts, and you are set to go.



iPee UrinalPlace your two fingers on the footprints to start the stream. you can even aim, plunge and flush.

Worst Inventions of All Time

As reported on Life.com. From Cat-Meow machines to Sea Shoes there have been many crazy inventions over time which for obvious reasons never took off.
Below are a few of the dumbest inventions of all time.



Baby Cage. 1937


A nanny supervising a baby suspended in a wire cage attached to the outside of a high tenement block window. The cages were distributed to members of the Chelsea Baby Club in London who have no gardens, or qualms about putting a child in a box dangling over a busy street.



Rainy Day Cigarette Holder, 1954President of Zeus Corp., Robert L. Stern, smoking a cigarette from his self-designed rainy day cigarette holder.




Venetian Blind Sunglasses, 1950It was a bad idea then, it's a bad idea now. Sorry, Kanye.




Phone-Answering Robot, 1964A robot designed by Claus Scholz of Vienna answers the phone, though it cannot speak. Halfway there, Claus.



Dog Restrainer, 1940

Clever Spy Gadgets

The International Spy Museum is a privately owned museum dedicated to the field of espionage located in the Penn Quarter neighbourhood of Washington, D.C.

The museum was built by The Malrite Company at a cost of US$40 million. Despite being one of the few museums in Washington that charges admission fees, it has been immensely popular since its opening in July 2002.

Here are some famous -- and infamous -- spy gadgets housed at the International Spy Museum.

Thomas Boghardt, the International Spy Museum's historian gave the following information to Discovery.com. Read the full article here.



Bulgarian UmbrellaA Bulgarian secret agent used an umbrella just like this one on a London street to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. A standard umbrella was modified internally to inject poison into its target with the press of the trigger. In Markov's case, the umbrella contained a ricin pellet, which is next to impossible to trace.

The museum displays a replica, made specially in Moscow for the collection. Boghardt says that in 1991, a room full of similar deadly umbrellas was uncovered in Bulgaria.



Shoe with Heel TransmitterThroughout the 1960s and 1970s, Western diplomats in Eastern Europe avoided buying suits there, preferring to mail order clothing and shoes from the West. In Romania, the secret service used this to their advantage, working with the postal service to install a transmitter in shoe heels. Boghardt says that the recording device was discovered during a routine room sweep that revealed a signal, but the signal disappeared when all the diplomats left the room.



Lipstick Pistol"It's a classic," Boghardt says of this 4.5 millimeter single-shot weapon, presumably taken from a KGB agent in the mid-1960s. While it's unclear whether this dangerous "kiss of death" was ever used, a cyanide pistol was used for assassination in that era. These covert weapons are surviving examples of the "active measures" that were taken in this time period, unlike many of their intended targets.



Coat CameraThis little camera, Model F-21 issued by the KGB around 1970, was concealed in a buttonhole and has a release that the wearer presses from a pocket. Just squeeze the shutter cable and the fake button opens to capture an image.

Hidden, portable cameras could be used at public events such as political rallies without detection. Boghardt notes that the Spy Museum's director Peter Earnest, who worked for many years in the CIA on intelligence, has used one of these cameras.



Tree Stump BugThis tree stump bug used solar power to function continuously in a wooded area near Moscow during the early 1970s. The bug intercepted communications signals coming from a Soviet air base in the area and them beamed them to a satellite, which then sent the signals to a site in the United States. Solar power meant that no risky battery changes were needed. Nevertheless, the KGB discovered this green bug so the museum's copy is a replica.

Amazing X-Ray Pictures

X-Rays are an amazing medical diagnostic tool.
However, some of the items they reveal are literally unbelievable!
This article on DigitalBusStop takes a look at some x-ray images that will amaze and horrify you. The victims were either amazingly stupid, or incredibly unlucky.




Coke bottleThis poor man was actually assaulted (and inserted) with the Coke bottle.



Bullet in the faceDuring the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1967 Hou Guoying was shot in the face. She didn't seek medical treatment until 1975 and she didn't have the bullet removed from her face until 2010.



Swallowed engagement ringSimon Hooper wanted to propose to his lady friend. Unable to shell out any money on an engagement ring he swallowed it while the jeweller looked the other way. Unconvinced that the ring had vanished into thin air, the jeweller called the police, who detained Hooper, had him x-rayed, and waited three days for the ring to reappear.



Car keysSomehow this poor baby ended up with its parents car keys lodged in its face. Fortunately the little one made a full recovery!



Nails in the skullThis gentleman on the other hand, was not OK. He was shot with thirty nails, tied up with electrical wires and extension cords, rolled in an area rug, and bundled up.



Chair leg through the eye socket!
A night club scuffle ended badly when a young man ended up having a chair hurlded at him. The chair leg impaled the man through his eye socket and lodged in his throat. Luckily for all involved, he lived to tell the tale.

Worst Inventions Of All Time

On this article from Time Magazine, they take a look at the 50 worst inventions of all time and the reasons whey they're so bad.
From the zany to the pointless and downright dangerous here is a sample. View the full list of 50.



SegwayGive inventor Dean Kamen this: he's a master of buzz. A closely guarded secret that was supposed to change the world upon its release in 2001, the Segway never brought about its promised revolution in transportation. Though the technology is pretty cool — very expensive gyroscopes make the thing nearly impossible to tip over (though George W. Bush found a way) — the Segway's sales far underperformed vs. Kamen's predictions. It lives on as the vehicle of choice for mall cops and lazy tourists



New CokeMarketers should have known — don't mess with consumers' sentimental attachment to a product. Especially when it's 99-year-old Coca-Cola. The "newer, sweeter" version, introduced April 23, 1985, succeeded in blind taste tests but flopped in the real world. Phone calls, letters and rants from Coke die-hards flooded in, and just three months after its debut, New Coke was removed, and the word Classic was added to all Coke cans and bottles to assure consumers they were getting their first love.



Ford PintoThe 1971 model is, hands down, one of the worst cars of all time. That's what happens when an automobile has the nasty tendency to literally explode when involved in a rear-end collision. Adding insult to injury was the infamous memo Ford wrote after learning about the problem, arguing it'd be cheaper to pay settlements to victims than to fix the Pinto.



BetamaxBetamax wasn't so much a bad product as a lesson in marketing gone awry. The also-ran to VHS in the video-format wars, Betamax was pushed by Sony as a proprietary format in 1975 before it was completely ready, in a race to get manufacturers on board. But while Betamax could record up to an hour of video, VHS could record up to two hours. That slight advantage was enough for VHS to gain a foothold in the market, one it never relinquished. Betamax became a footnote.



Subprime MortgagesThe flimsy piece of foundation that brought the U.S. economy tumbling into recession, subprime mortgages are risky loans given to people with shaky credit histories. When interest rates dipped in 2004, banks began granting mortgages to people who really, really shouldn't have had them. Even worse, many were structured adjustable-rate mortgages, with interest rates that climbed after the first few years. The result was a wave of foreclosures and banks with a lot of bad loans on their books. In short, financial catastrophe.

The World's Most Innovative Thrill Rides

For many years amusement parks have been trying to outdo each other by installing the biggest, fastest and craziest rides. One common solution is to build a roller coaster which is faster and higher than anyone else’s. But what about the smaller operators taking their rides to inner city areas and small towns across the country? Designers of these rides need to use real innovative thinking to keep the masses happy with new thrills.
As reported on Popular Mechanics, here are some of the strangest and most innovative non-rollercoaster rides around the world. Read the full article here.



SkyRollerThis swing-type contraption allows riders to control the number of barrel rolls they do by manipulating the positioning of the wings as they spin around. The concern often is subjecting riders to high g's for a sustained period, but points out that SkyRoller is self-limiting in many ways, according to Edward Pribonic, an engineering consultant for theme parks and a former design manager at Walt Disney Imagineering. "The faster you roll, the higher the g value would be," he says. "But the faster you roll, the g-force duration becomes shorter. Since you're going through it so quickly, you hit that peak g-force for only a split second and drop out of it." And while there is no limit on how many barrel rolls a rider can perform, nausea tends to be a nice biological safeguard.



FreeFall XTremeA 1000-hp V12 twin-turbo engine generates winds up to 120 mph, allowing modestly sized riders to "fly" to about 8 feet. Custom wind suits and a few minutes of training are obviously required, but riders with some skills can pull 360s and other nifty manoeuvres. According to the website, riders need to weigh between 25 kilograms and 130 kilograms, but the park brags that the engine was able to lift someone who weighed 170 kilograms, or 375 pounds.



Ejection SeatThe two-seat pod in which riders sit is held to the base of the machine by an enormous magnet. After the elastic ropes are pulled tight, the conductor releases the magnet, blasting the pod toward the sky. Technical Park, manufacturer of this particular reverse bungee, says on its website that the Ejection Seat subjects riders to 4.8 g's.



Flying FuryThis massive machine is one of the most interactive rides on the market. A joystick gives riders control of the four-passenger miniature planes, allowing them to pull barrel rolls and rotate 360 degrees while the arms lift them to heights in excess of 120 feet.



ShweebRiders climb into translucent, pedal-powered tubes that hang from a monorail and face off in head-to-head races or compete against the clock. The 2000-foot-long course snakes through scenic farmland and can be powered through in less than a minute. The pods are equipped with sufficient seven-gear drivetrains and seem similar to recumbent bikes. Agroventures says on its website that riders can get up to 28 mph as they swing around 60-degree turns. The current course record stands at 57.1 seconds, but we'd like to see what Lance Armstrong could do on this thing.

In Depth Look at Nintendo