Offbeat

This week in cheap Stormtrooper costume ideas, we examine Jason’s Stormtrooper trash bin helmet, an idea he was forced to employ after a student of� his promised to lend him a costume for a school event, yet failed to deliver. In a blind panic, Jason grabbed the closest object within arm’s reach and improvised. Here is what you’ll need according ...

Are you down with TMNT? Yeah, you know me. 23-year-old geekette Brittney Schneck transformed her 1994 Dodge Caravan into a real-life Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles van, which I expect she’ll be using to retrieve lots and lots of pizza take-out. Schneck hand-painted and stenciled the exterior colors and fabricated the ray gun, spoiler and other add-ons from scratch, but the ...

Robots can be masterful pieces of art when enough funding, research, knowledge and artistry goes into their designs, but I think it’s important to remember that not all robots are created equal. ChefBot, an entry in SparkFun’s Antimov Competition is not a well-made robot. In fact, he’s down right hazardous. But what he lacks in precision and safety, he gains ...

In our current state of technological evolution, mobility is playing more and more of a role in our kids’ and our own lives, and the way we communicate with each other. Eric Pape writes about this phenomenon in an article on Slate, in which he describes how his toddler son started to mistake his father’s iPhone as his own mother. ...

Unicorns are graceful, gorgeous and delicious, and they also happen to have no sense of humor. Take a comedic jab at a unicorn and you can expect two feet of pure horn right through your chest. The Avenging Unicorn toy comes with a collection of four different horns and three victims, including a mime. Sadly, no hipsters are included. You ...

Imagine a world where Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Usual Suspects and Back to the Future featured smartphones. Watching classic cinema would be a hell of a different experience. Maybe the lack of smartphones is the reason they’re so classic in the first place? So sure, maybe Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart get a few more hours together, and yeah, Chuck ...

Nothing gets me more worked up than a woman in Star Wars-themed apparel. I don’t care whether it’s a full-bodied Stormtrooper costume or this R2-D2 Swimsuit. If she’s wearing it, I’m drooling. This one-piece swimsuit is modest enough for even the most conservative women, but geeky enough to keep me completely interested. James Lillis designed this R2-D2 Swimsuit, which is ...

Right, but when I spray people with DNA in McDonald’s I get arrested. And they call that justice. McDonald’s and other Rotterdam businesses have begun the integration of a new type of criminal deterrent – DNA spray. Each location’s spray carries a unique DNA marker, which is squirted in the form of an undetectable mist, only visible under a UV ...

It all started so innocently. A simple linguistic evolution. Geckus led to geek which eventually led to gleek and all of the numerous off roads. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the word geek became a part of culture, but geeks have always existed, even if the word didn’t. Flowtown created this helpful flowchart infographic to show the evolution of ...

When you walk around your house with your cat in your arms and she decides to have one of her random freak-outs, inevitably jumping out of your arms, your heart skips a few beats. What if she lands wrong? What if she injures her leg? What if she shatters her hip? What if she splinters her organs with bone fragments? ...