flying

Much ado has been made about Marty McFly's self-tying sneakers from "Back to the Future Part II." What's been forgotten is his groovy hat of the future...until now.

That's right, McFliers, you can now dress even more like your hero thanks to the Marty Hat Replica at ThinkGeek. At $24.99, it's a lot cheaper than the $37,500 a British rapper paid out for a pair of McFly replica sneakers.

The hat is made from a super reflective fabric that shimmers and glimmers with swirls of color. It looks like a herd of unicorns upchucked some rainbows all over it. The hat is one-size-fits-all-geeks with a Velcro closure at the back.… Read more

The AudioQuest DragonFly is a USB-powered (it doesn't use batteries or an external power supply) digital-to-analog converter. I usually need some time to get a handle on the sound of a component, but within minutes of plugging in the tiny $249 DAC I knew exactly what made it so special. It sounds clear and clean, so there's less standing between the music and my ears.

The DragonFly is a bona fide audio component, designed by Gordon Rankin, a man known in audiophile circles as a great tube electronics engineer, but Rankin is also a computer audio guy. He's one of the few DAC designers with equal depth of knowledge in analog and digital audio technology.… Read more

Since in-ear headphones sit in or near the ear canal, they don't interact with the pinna, the bends and curves of the outer ear that direct sound to the ear canal. The pinna also serves as an acoustic filter, enhancing the frequency range of human speech, and it also supplies directional cues, so we can localize where sound is coming from. That's how our ears and brains process sound in real life, but in-ear headphones don't interact with the pinna, so they can't sound as realistic as full-size headphones or speakers. In-ears can still sound great, … Read more

Some friends of mine recently bumped into a member of the Canadian Secret Service. He said he spent most of his time gardening because Canada doesn't really have enemies.

Perhaps the northern sister of the U.S. has decided to give its security forces a little more to do, as Ottawa airport will now be graced with bugging microphones.

No, these aren't necessarily being strategically placed where suspicious people might gather -- wherever that might be. And yes, they will be capable of recording conversations between any travelers (or airport employees) who happen to fall within their range.… Read more

When watching a fly smack into a window over and over -- buzzing and falling and climbing again -- most people probably wind up doing one of two things: reach for a flyswatter, or, if they're a bit more compassionate, open the window.

Members of a robotics team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne did a third thing: they got inspired.

"We were looking at insects and how they fly and how even though they manage to avoid most obstacles, they still manage to fly into windows and fly into walls, yet it's OK. They don't break..." team member Adam Klaptocz says in the video embedded below. "So we thought instead of making robots that just avoid obstacles, why don't we make a robot that can crash into things, get back up again, and keep flying?"… Read more

Head-Fi is a national headphone club, and I went to the local meeting in Babylon, N.Y., last Saturday.

The vibe was friendly, and it was great to hear Head-Fi members' home-built gear, but there were a few surprises popping up from the headphone and electronics manufacturers in attendance.

Logitech Ultimate Ears' Personal Reference Monitor in-ear headphones feature a new twist on custom-molded-to-your-ears headphone design. Lots of brands now make custom in-ear headphones, and Logitech's have been among my favorites for years, but the upcoming Personal Reference Monitor takes the personalization to the next level. Once your ear canals' &… Read more

You're probably familiar with the concept of the hovercraft, an inflatable craft that glides over land and water on a cushion of air. Now add wings, a sweet yellow and black paint scheme, and a $190,000 price tag and you get the Flying Hovercraft from Hammacher Schlemmer.

The Flying Hovercraft can get up to 20 feet off the ground and hit a top speed around 70 mph thanks to an assist from a 130-hp twin-cylinder, liquid-cooled gas engine. It has both a thrust propeller and a lift fan to help it leapfrog over obstacles like floating logs and lake monsters.… Read more

Video games are an expensive hobby. A typical new release for a console like the PlayStation or Xbox costs about $60. That might not seem like a lot relative to the number of hours of entertainment you can reasonably expect from a game, but it's still a pretty big chunk of change.

For example, when LEGO Star Wars III and LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean came out last year, they were priced at $49.99 apiece. My kids desperately wanted both.

Sorry, kiddos, but in my day we dropped a quarter in a slot and liked it. No way … Read more

With all the James Bond theme song-playing and tower-building quadrocopters these days, it's a little hard to get excited about new personal-size automated aerial projects. But how can you not get worked up by a bird robot that can cross a room and land gracefully on someone's hand?

Aerospace engineering researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have "duplicated the control functions that allow birds to successfully perform a soft landing--in this case, perching on a human hand."

The above video's a bit scientific for the average layman (read: me) but suffice it to say, the researchers -- Soon Jo Chung, Aditya Paranjape, and Joseph Kim -- have created a micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) that can fly nimbly across a room and then pull up at just the right moment for a soft landing at a specific place, or on someone's hand. … Read more