CrunchGear

CrunchGear Week in Review: Toy Car Cruise Edition
DI-Someone else: Wireless motorized mountainboard (with remote!)
Easy guide to setting up an SNES emulator on your iPad
Happy Sunday! The BP spill could trigger a methane explosion, mass extinction

CrunchGear Week in Review: Toy Car Cruise Edition

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 12:00 AM PDT

Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear:

Doodle doot do do doot! SMB sidewalk is SMB on the sidewalk
Roi de France Henri IV, avec lightsaber
Could I interest the gentleman in a bespoke toy car?
Onkyo presents super-cute Miffy netbook
Solar Impulse flight a great success, flies for 26 straight hours powered only by the Sun

DI-Someone else: Wireless motorized mountainboard (with remote!)

Posted: 11 Jul 2010 10:37 PM PDT

Details are sketchy (but there’s lots to learn if you read the comments), but here’s another college student DIY project. Yes, I know it’s a little old, but it’s Sunday, and this is one of those “in case you missed it” things. Anyway, a college student mounted a snowboard on wheels, added a motor, wireless remote via a PS2 controller, and made a project that pretty much rocks. Just don’t expect to see it available commercially any time soon, because from what the builder says in the comments, it’s incredibly expensive to make. So enjoy the video, and I hope you had a good weekend.

Easy guide to setting up an SNES emulator on your iPad

Posted: 11 Jul 2010 08:08 PM PDT

If you’ve got an iPad but haven’t yet jailbroken it, I don’t know what to tell you. What are you thinking?! There’s a world outside of Yonkers, my friend. Don’t let Apple limit your imagination.

An SNES emulator is a good start — it should run well and of course there is a huge library of games to choose from. Once you’re done there, I’d suggest an arcade emulator like MAME — old-school arcade games are great to dip into while waiting for code to compile or a file to upload. The instructions in the video above are helpfully rendered in text over at Lifehacker.

Happy Sunday! The BP spill could trigger a methane explosion, mass extinction

Posted: 11 Jul 2010 04:07 PM PDT

This is a totes magotes bummer: according to theories posited by the author of this piece, Terrance Aym, and backed up by data from geo-chemists like Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin, the BP oil spill could release massive amounts of methane gas and, as an end result, blow out the entire seabed, leading to “massive venting” and large fissures in the sea bottom. This, in turn, would kill us all just as other mass extinctions wiped out life on earth during similar ruptures 251 million years ago and 55 million years ago.

In short, here’s what’s up:

The bottom line: BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.

Here’s a video from Mega Disasters, which is all kinds of fun:

Basically the sea floor explodes and clouds of methane-infused water start floating over the land. These catch fire and explode quite suddenly, unleashing a massive fireball, killing everything in its path. Sea levels will rise and fall, entire ecosystems will collapse, and we’ll be left with the bill. All because we wanted to fill up on unleaded.

Will this really happen? It seems that Ayn is positing based on previous explosions that the BP deepwater drill could create a catastrophic eruption. This does not mean that the Gulf will explode in a ball of fire, but it does give one pause. It sounds almost like the explosions that rocked the world in The Road and if we know anything about apocalyptic fiction, it almost never comes true.

Anyway, sorry for harshing on your buzz. There’s a picture of a kitten up there if you need it.