All we know is, he’s called The Stig. And that now we can race through the air with an RC mini-helicopter styled after the mysterious Top Gear cast member’s iconic helmet. More »

“Locksport” is an emerging form of competitive lockpicking. Participants strive to open locks that they’ve never seen before as quickly as they can:

Locksport fans compete in several formats, including head-to-head contests that determine the fastest lock picker. In the so-called Locksport Wizard, each contestant is given a burlap sack containing an identical set of locks and is required to blindly pick them using only tools they have put in the sack.

In other challenges, participants have to pick their way out of handcuffs before attempting to defeat a set of locks. There also are competitions to disassemble locks and reassemble them properly.

Some police officers are concerned that criminals could use these events to learn lockpicking skills, but enthusiasts say that criminals are unlikely to invest the time necessary to develop them.

Link via Make | Photo by Flickr user robertdx used under Creative Commons license

Billionaires entertain themselves differently than everyone else, case in point at St Tropez last week when two partying tycoons got into a competition over who could rack up the highest champagne bill. The competitors were Malaysian billionaire Zhen Low, little brother to the more famous Jho Low, and Winston Fisher of the prominent New York real-estate family. The competition to see who could order more £600 bottles of Cristal took place at Les Caves du Roy nightclub and the winning bar tab, belonging to Zhen Low, came out to be a whopping £1.77 million ($2.6 million). That’s a lot of champagne.

And among the guests witnessing the competition and helping Low to celebrate his win was none other than the infamous Paris Hilton who has been spotted all around St. Tropez this summer with her sister Nicky.

Filed under: Wine

Billionaires Compete to Get Highest Champagne Tab originally appeared on Luxist on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Saint-Tropez – Paris Hilton – St Tropez – Wine – Champagne

Campbell Mithun’s fast-paced back-to-school ads for Famous Footwear use a time-slice filming technique to freeze everyday teen moments of fun. New to this mid-tier, shoe-retailer category, the process involves using a 20-camera rig (all cameras snap simultaneously) and Canon 5D camera.

Supersized panoramic photos of cities are the flavor of the season. After Prague and Dubai, it’s the turn of Budapest to get a detailed online photo that you can zoom in and out of and play around with–almost like Google Earth.

The photo shot over four days has 70-gigapixels. If the finished picture is ever printed, it would make a a poster 156 meters (511 feet) long and 31 meters (101 feet) tall. The amount of paper it would take would cover two apartment blocks at least 10 floors tall.

To shoot the photo, two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras were fitted with a 400mm Minolta lens and 1.4 X teleconverters and placed on a robotic camera mount. 20,000 test images later, the file was processed to create a single interactive photo.

Check out the Budapest photo here. It’s a tad blurry and sometimes pixelated if you zoom in too much but still fun to play around with.

See Also:

• Gigapan Robotic Camera Rig Goes Pro
• World’s Largest Panoramic Photo Is the Size of 1200 Billboards …
• 18-Gigapixel Panorama Offers Breathtaking View of Prague
• Hands-On With the Gigapan Epic 100 Panorama Robot

Photo: 70 Billion Pixels Budapest

[via Engadget]

Maker Faire Detroit opens tomorrow [Saturday] – the first ever held in America’s cradle of industry and what many view today as a post-industrial laboratory for the future.

The two day event will be packed with inspiration and enjoyment for people of all ages and walks of life, including Maker Faire favorite The Life-size Mousetrap, hot-rodded Power Wheel racing, demonstrations on everything from circuit-bending to screen printing, rocket building and cheese making, and lots of robots. Lots and lots of robots…

(more…)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Walt Disney will rely on a cable-network executive to boost performance at its ABC broadcast outlet. The company has installed Paul Lee, who has led an overhaul at its ABC Family channel, to take the reins as head of entertainment for the network that airs “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey's Anatomy.” Mr. Lee's ascension comes after the sudden departure of former ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson earlier this week

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Walt Disney will rely on a cable-network executive to boost performance at its ABC broadcast outlet. The company has installed Paul Lee, who has led an overhaul at its ABC Family channel, to take the reins as head of entertainment for the network that airs “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey's Anatomy.” Mr. Lee's ascension comes after the sudden departure of former ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson earlier this week