Nitro-powered RC helicopters are breathtakingly expensive, noisy, hard to fly, and dangerous. So why not add a wireless video camera and a .45-cal 1911A1 pistol on the front?

It seems like you’d be better off with something in a smaller caliber with more magazine capacity and less recoil, like a 9mm Glock or even a .22LR, but I suppose that when one is working on a project like this, one uses that which is just laying around the shop at the time…

The next logical step here is to make this thing web-enabled so people from all over the globe can log in and fly it remotely!

What do you get when you combine time-lapse video with a tilt-shift lens? Real monster trucks and demolition derby cars that look like toys…

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo

Tilt-shift lenses, which are commonly used in architectural photography to correct perspective and make parallel lines look straight, can, as the name implies, tilt and shift relative to the plane of the film or image sensor. They also have the interesting property of being able to simulate a very shallow depth of field, which is what makes everything look like a model in the video.

For more videos, visit Keith Loutit’s website.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a job where wearing a pair of pants with a built-in tourniquet in each leg is a good idea…

Blackhawk also makes a matching shirt, which is handy for the tactical needle drug enthusiast, too.

Take your pick - the pants and shirts are $90 each at Blackhawk.

More importantly, would you buy it from Sears? Sure, it’s “Accurate to +/- 1% of reading from 20% to 100% of wrench capacity. Operates in up to 7 common torque units including in-lbs, ft-lbs, in-oz, Nm, cNm, mKg and cmKg. Allows 99 preset torque values to be programmed into the wrench and manually or automatically advanced during use. Stores up to 1,000 torque readings in memory for extended use before download of data is required. Alternately, the data can be downloaded continuously to a PC during use.” But $2500? And Sears? I’ll stick to “a quarter turn before it strips.”

Update: It’s possible to spend even MORE money on a torque wrench from Sears…

First impressions of Sprint’s new iPhone competitor from Samsung

Ok, that subhead was mostly search engine fodder. The new Samsung Instinct isn’t really going to compete with the iPhone Classic or the upcoming 3G version, for a lot of different reasons. As a part of an elite group of early adopters, consisting of “everyone who visited Sprint’s website and signed up ahead of time,” I was able to pick one up on June 19, a day before the rest of the world. By Saturday, I had managed to gum up the email (more on that later), spend 2 hours on the phone with Sprint technical support (three levels of escalation, very sincere attempts to straighten it out, but ultimately no success), and finally take it back to the Sprint store for a hard reset.

Sounds sort of discouraging, doesn’t it?

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