Geek In Me

by Shawn Schuster via greendaily.com

According to a recent study by the University of Utah, the age of your home directly relates to your level of obesity. In fact, women’s risk of obesity dropped 8 percent for every 10 years older her house was, and men’s risk dropped by 13 percent.

So is this the answer to everyone’s problems? If you’re overweight, can you simply move to an old house and you’ll instantly look like Kate Moss? Well, that’s not exactly how it works, although admittedly, researchers are not completely positive what the reasons are. The most likely cause is the way these older neighborhoods are built: to accommodate an active, social lifestyle walking to shops and interacting with friends and neighbors.

by Andrew Liszewski via ohgizmo.com

While technically you can turn anything into a ‘fireplace’ with just a pile of fuel soaked rags and a book of matches, this Travelmate portable fireplace is probably a much safer alternative. While it looks like a briefcase, it’s actually made from black powder-coated steel with glass panels on the sides and weighs about 55 lbs, so it’s not exactly the lightest thing to carry around. But it’s completely self-contained and is smokeless since it burns bio-ethanol liquid fuel instead of firewood. And as an added bonus, if you do choose to use it as a briefcase, it seems like the perfect place to permanently “file” any incriminating documents you don’t want falling into the wrong hands.

It’s available from Unica Home for $3,300, and at that price you’d think they’d at least throw in a bottle of liquid fuel, but I’m afraid it’s not included.

by Jonathan Kimak via ohgizmo.com

Jetpacks have always seemed extremely cool, even if the prospect of going hundreds of miles an hour with only a set of goggles protecting you from a speck of dust that could gouge your eyes out. Yesterday a real jetpack was revealed to the people at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture, a weeklong air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

The Martin Jetpack, which is technically classified as an ultralight aircraft, can hover for 30 minutes and can theoretically reach 8,000 feet. So far the jetpack has only gone as high as 6 feet with someone wearing it. No one is allowed to fly this $100,000 machine without having 15 hours of training and a safety screening that presumably keeps the Bond supervillains from getting their hands on one of these.

via ubergizmo.com

The folks at BestofMedia, the parent company of TomsHardware have set a new overclocking world record by pushing a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (65nm) normally running at 2.4Ghz to 5.11218Ghz, which is a new record. They have been using liquid nitrogen cooling (-41°C) and have spend a fair amount of time finding the best voltage setting. Multipliers details here. Video from bestofmedia. This setup is not practical for a real-life use, but you should know that overclockers have pushed the Q6600 to 3.5Ghz or even 4Ghz for a real-world usage. Do it at your own risk, of course…

via ubergizmo.com

Tokyoflash has yet another watch to adorn your hand with a piece of style - the Zero-G. This timepiece comes in a sleek and slender profile, featuring a mirrored LCD face that points to the hour just like how any other analog watches do. In addition, it comes with a segmented curve around the edges to mark the minutes. It will take slightly more practice to tell the time, but at least this is one of the easiest Tokyoflash offerings to decipher to date. The Zero-G will come in black or silver colors and tips the scales at a mere 60 grams. It will retail for approximately $98 if you plan to import one.

via ubergizmo.com

PS3 owners, there is a new firmware for you to download - version 2.42 is now available, but it doesn’t look like anything major was thrown into the fray. Apparently, the official stand on this firmware would be “This update improves the playback quality of some PLAYSTATION 3 and PlayStation format software.” Sorry, don’t expect any groundbreaking features here, but at least it has not yet burnt as spectacularly as the previous firmware release.