Guy Builds Fully Functional LEGO Sniper Rifle

Jack Streat went and built himself a fully functional Lee Enfield sniper rifle out of LEGO Technics. And by 'fully functional' I mean the thing can accurately shoot LEGO blocks up to a couple feet. It's definitely not gonna make a terrorist's head explode or anything. Now I'm not saying you could do more damage with a Lincoln Log catapult, but I have eaten a couple LEGO bullets before with little to no damage (they passed just like corn except with a *tink* when they hit the bottom of the bowl).

Hit it for a video demonstration of the plastic pews."

Durex Baby from Peter Ammentorp on Vimeo.

Concept: Communication Gadget Projects A Virtual Keyboard

With powerful smartphones such as the iPhone 4 and HTC EVO 4G, we do sometimes wonder why folks would want a dedicated messaging device, but then again, maybe they own a simpler no-fuss mobile phone. The Communication Gadget concept design looks pretty cool. When closed it looks like a metal tube, but it can be expanded to connect directly to an ICQ server, projecting images/messages onto a flat surface, giving you a virtual keyboard to send off your messages too. Would you carry something like this around with you if you were to hit the streets?

Icon Battery Pack For iPhone

How's this for an external battery pack for your iPhone 3G/3GS? The Icon Battery Pack for iPhone looks just like the iPhone's battery icon, and even shows its visible 'battery power', allowing you to know how much additional juice that it can provide your iPhone. This device is supposed to be able to juice your iPhone up for an additional 3-hours worth of talk time, or audio playback of 18-hours. Would you buy a battery pack that looked like this?

BlackBerry Bold 9650 Gets The ColorWare Treatment

Think that your shiny new BlackBerry Bold 9650 is beginning to look just like everybody else's out there? While you can't add any new features to the cell phone, the folks over at ColorWare can help you customize its colors to make it stand out, and hopefully you won't pick the same color scheme as everybody else out there. You'll also need to lighten your wallet by a good $150 for this.

Shock study: Adult Web sites are filled with malware

Wow, who would have guessed that visiting adult Web sites would be dangerous to the health of your computer? I mean, of all of the genres of sites out there—sports, tech, politics, books, etc.—the last I would have predicted to be dangerous was adult ones. Thanks, International Secure System Lab!

The deal is that scammers and hackers and whatnot know one thing: people sure do look at a lot of adult content online. (One-third of all downloads is adult-related!) So what better way to target people to grab them when they’re the most vulnerable?

What’s going in is that a lot of these sites are desperate for traffic, so they’ll stop at nothing to keep you hanging around. Things like tricky Javascript that locks you into a site, that sort of thing.

Even worse is the so-called “free sites” that are loaded with malware: trojans, viruses, keyloggers—just garbage.

If there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s this: use Firefox and install AdBlock Plus and No Script. You can still do whatever, but the odds of getting bitten by some piece of malware is greatly reduces.

Or use Mac/Linux. I can’t imagine too many of these pieces of malware affect Mac or Linux.