Tag Archives: shapes

A Heart Shaped Lighter: For Reigniting The Spark In Your Relationship

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Because nothing says true love like setting things on fire together as a couple, this heart-shaped lighter from Draworld and available on Amazon (affiliate link) combines both a traditional butane lighter and electric coil lighter. Obviously, I’ll be using this lighter to ignite all the romantic candles around the bedroom this coming Valentine’s Day. Or, more than likely, the weekend after because I always forget Valentine’s Day and have to try making it up.

Available in red and rainbow finishes, the lighter, much like a Transformer, has two forms: its heart-shape with the left and right atriums (those are heart parts!) containing the two different lighters, or twisted into a traditional lighter shape, with the lighters at opposite ends. The possibilities are practically limitless! Just kidding, it’s one or the other.

The electric coil lighter features a USB rechargeable battery, so you have no excuse to ever be without fire-starting capabilities. I’m going to add this to my list of everyday carry items, which, including the magnifying glass, two sticks, strike-anywhere matches, and a blowtorch, effectively increases my means of starting fires up to six. Let’s go camping!

[via DudeIWantThat]

Tetris Pieces Waffle Maker: Start Playing with Your Food

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Because playing with your food is an important part of a well-balanced breakfast, Firebox is selling this officially licensed Tetris Waffle Maker ($41), which produces seven different Tetrimino-shaped waffles in just minutes. Granted, it will probably never produce one of the long stick pieces when you really need it the most.

It’s fun to think about eating these waffles and then them forming different shapes in your stomach just like in the game, trying to minimize the amount of space they take up in your belly. Wait, did I say that was fun to think about? I meant to say that’s weird to think about.

Now, let’s have a Tetris waffle eating contest! I figure I’m good for at least 100 lines. Just a heads up though, I’ve never lost an eating contest, even if it meant hospitalization afterward. They’re one of the very few things I take seriously in life, along with sleeping in and extreme couponing.

Coronavirus Shaped Ice Cube Molds Are an Actual Product

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Cocktails: sometimes they can help a bad time seem a little better. And unless you’ve been living under a rock this year (any room under there for me?), 2020 has been pretty much an eight-month-long bad time so far. Enter this silicone ice cube tray mold, which creates coronavirus shaped ice cubes, so you can slowly drink the actual virus away. Except they’re technically not ice cubes, they’re spheres with little nubs all over them like the exercise ball in the corner of my living room. I’m going to use that to get fit one day, you watch.

Designed by Misshapen and available on Amazon for $20 (affiliate link), the molds make the perfect ice cubes for your next pandemic party. And just so we’re clear, a pandemic party is making yourself a cocktail at home alone or covertly during a business Zoom meeting. Noisemaker optional.

I actually use spherical ice molds myself when I’m making drinks at home, and due to their large size and a sphere’s decreased surface area compared to a cube, they work significantly better at chilling a drink without diluting it. In this case, chicken broth and vodka. Mmmmm, great for fighting a cold too.

This Robot Lets You Feel Virtual Objects

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Virtual reality headsets use your eyes and ears to make things seem real, but the future of VR is all about incorporating the other senses. Researchers at Stanford University have our hands and fingers covered. They have come up with a way for you to virtually feel virtual objects, with the help of a weird robot.

It’s called ShapeShift. It’s a robot that has a dense grid of “pins” on top, and a set of optional wheels on its bottom. A tracking marker syncs the location of the ShapeShift box to the location of your hands in a virtual reality world. So when you touch a virtual object, the pins extend and retract to form a representation of that object in the real world, thereby allowing you to feel it.

Pretty cool right? Sure, this won’t simulate the softer things, like petting a cat in VR, but it should be convincing enough for other kinds of object. Yes, folks. This is the first step toward being able to feel things in our own personal holodecks. You could imagine a room with walls that are made with this sort of mechanism, and it could be used to create unique terrain underfoot as well.

It will be interesting to see where this technology goes from here.

[via Gizmodo]

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This Robot Plays the Marimba Way Better Than You Can
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