The Santasizer: 11 Synchronized Synthesized Dancing Santas

Crafted by musical mad scientist Sam Battle of Youtube channel Look Mum No Computer, the Santasizer isn’t an antibacterial hand gel to help keep the coronavirus at bay, but eleven dancing Santa toys from the 90’s connected to a synthesizer that reacts to the input being played through them. Fingers crossed, my company booked them for this year’s holiday party!

In the video, Sam and the Santas perform a funky rendition of the Christmas classic ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ complete with all the Santas’ sunglasses moving up and down as they bob to the beat. I only wish I could dance that well, then maybe people wouldn’t point and laugh so much when I hit the dance floor, usually with my head or face.

Now Sam just needs to install lasers in all of Santa’s eyes, so whenever they lift their sunglasses, they produce a laser light show, and he’s got himself a Christmas concert I would pay to go see! Not that I’m not excited to go see my nieces and nephews sing a bunch of carols off-key, there’s just always a very noticeable lack of laser beams.

[via Laughing Squid]

Geek Builds Electronic Counter to Count to a Googol (1 Followed by a Hundred 0’s)

Think a billion is a big number? Well by most comparisons it certainly is, but a googol (10¹⁰⁰) is so astronomically large that it contains 10⁹¹ number of billions. But did its ridiculously large size stop YouTuber Look Mum No Computer (aka Sam Battle) from building an electronic counter to try to count to it? It did not. Honestly, I can’t even wrap my head around the size of a number that large. Although to be fair my head isn’t very pliable, and my wife often argues it’s hard.

Sam tried to build the counter with “as much redundancy, durability, repairability, and upgradability as possible,” with the intention of keeping it running his entire life. Which, provided he lives a long healthy one, he estimates will end around when the 14th numeral from the bottom right has changed. For reference, the total number of grains of sand on earth is around the 22nd numeral, and Carl Sagan’s estimate for the total number of elementary particles in the universe is around the 80th. Oh cool, my brain just exploded.

The farthest left digit on the third row from the bottom will tick over once every 100-million years or so, and Sam admits that by the time the counter would ever reach a googol our sun will have long exhausted its supply of energy, his machine forgotten. Eventually, it will be discovered by Jawas, who will salvage the machine for parts to repair stolen droids or sell at their next swamp meet. And that, at least for me, is a very comforting feeling.

[via BoingBoing]

Hacked NES Power Glove controls a modular synth with finger wriggles

Never mind controlling a modular synth by twiddling knobs. If one modder has his way, one of Nintendo’s legendary controllers is the way of the future. Look Mum No Computer (aka Sam Battle) has hacked an NES Power Glove into a gesture controller for...