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Zero Blaster Reviewed
Daniel Rutter writes "I've just reviewed the Zero Blaster, the smoke ring gun that ThinkGeek (among others) sell. It works. It's fun. It's a vortex ring physics demonstration with two triggers and a see-through mechanism. What more could you want for $20?" Thinkgeek and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software.
...did this make the main page on /.? Must be a slow news day if this makes front page, and Yahoo! News has a story about nine comedians on the front page.
ads.slashdot.org
I'll take what's behind door #3 Monty.
moo.
I own it and it's awesome. And if you READ THE DIRECTIONS it shoots the rings much farther than a few centimeteres (I have gotten several meters) and you can also get rings to shoot through other rings. And you can get scented fog solution that disperses in a couple of minutes. In summary, it is awesome and will scare the crap out of your dog.
Thinkgeek and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software. Damn it! Here I was preparing a huge conspiracy post about how VA Software is abusing Slashdot's position among nerds to promote merchandise from one of it's other companies and then you just give it all away. What am I supposed to complain about today then? Couldn't you atleast give me a dupe or some bad grammar?
Head of the Dorks
I think I would be happier WITH the dollar.
my sig
It's $20 and produces smoke rings? Must be an eighth of...oh...nevermind it's a toy. :-P
Keep in mind that someone submitted this. And that the editors of slashdot are too busy on stage three (that's right PROFIT!!!) to care if Thinkgeek makes a couple of extra bucks here and there. Plus, admit it. You want one. Or maybe I'm part of the overarching conspiracy too. Bwahaha.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Oh well, a smoke-ring gun is pretty good.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So can anyone tell me who the among others are? Particularly anyone who might sell this toy from a retail store front? I would rather not mail order one and pay a steep shipping charge, and I do resent the Think Geek website approach of trying to make me "register" before I can even find out what the shipping cost is. (For all I know they might even be like other sites that make me give a credit card number before they will tell me the shipping charges, but I never got that far. I do buy on-line, but I never register or give a credit card number before I find out if I want to do business with the company, and for those that require it, I take my business elsewhere.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...and it's a "smoke-ring gun". I mean, if /. is gonna shamelessly promote their wares (hey, they got bills to pay like the rest of us), shouldn't the product being plugged at least have some practicality (smart drinks, hardware etc)?
Maybe make a miscelaneous department for fluff stories like this.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I saw 'Mr. Wizard' build one of these. Granted, not really as portable, but it worked.
1 Medium size cardboard box (12" cube or better-long boxes with square bases are best)
1 Smoke source. (Incense, fog solution, etc)
1 sturdy plastic bag or thin sheet (to make a diaphram)
Duct tape (Of course!)
Cut 4" hole in base of box. Preferably in a "clean" edge (no flaps or seams). If you can't do that, make a bigger hole and cut the 4" circle in another peice of carbboard to make the orifice. Neatness counts!
Completely remove the opposite end of the box, and cover it with the plastic sheet. Pull it tight and secure with duct tape. Make a good seal!
Place smoke source in box (potential fire hazard? Be careful...) near the middle and wait for the box to fill up.
Aim and slap the plastic sheet to "shoot" a ring of smoke.
The kid on Mr Wizard was able to blow out a candle from about 15 feet away with this thing.
=Smidge=
The Airzooka here looks a lot more fun, being able to fire invisible balls of air at people at around 20ft (& ruffle hair, etc) and it can do smoke rings too, IIRC. Check out the 'Airzooka action video' near the bottom :)
"What more could you want for $20?"
Awww, $20?? I wanted a peanut.
With $20, you can buy many peanuts!
Explain how!
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This reminds me of a DIY vortex gun I saw in a kids science comic thingy when I was like... 13 or something.
Step 1. Get a sturdy cardboard box no more than 6 inches wide in any dimension. 6" by 6" square with 8-12" length is good. Something cylindrical like a Quaker Oats container might be even better.
Step 2. Cut out one end and stretch a balloon over it. Firmly tape or otherwise fasten the balloon over the end.
Step 3. (perhaps the trickiest part) Attach something to the center of the balloon so you can pull it back. IIRC, they suggested that you could use a brass notebook fastener and some tape to do this. The tricky part is not to tear the balloon.
Step 4. Cut a circular hole in the middle of the other side. I want to say it should be about a 3rd the "diameter" of the box. Certainly no larger than that.
To "fire" it, just pull back on the balloon and hold long enough for pressure to equalize (this happens almost instantly because the hole is pretty big). Then, release it in a SNAP! all at once.
It's been a long time, but I think they promised a curious puff of air could be felt by people 10 or 20 feet away if you did it right.
An afternoon of scrounging for parts, construction, and experimentation with your kids is probably a more valuable experience than just shelling out for a vortex gun with nasty smoke in it.
For extra credit and to find out if your kids are mechanicly inclined, encourage them to come up with a handle/trigger mechanism for the thing so it can be pointed like a real gun.
If your DIY version works, you can take the kids out for ice-cream and get some dry ice from the vendor. See if you can make your gun smoke with that. A fun afternoon and evening for the entire family!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'd just like to mention somewhere close to the top that you can get one cheaper here, and it is direct from the manufacturer.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Ouch. If it stinks, then you can bet it's not going to impress women much. Besides, I don't think they have the same attraction to rings or holes that we do.
"Derp de derp."
Get an Airzooka. It shoots a harmless ball of air about 20-25 feet. Pretty cool for scaring cats off of TVs, blowing the co-worker's toupee off, or launching a fart at an unsuspecting party guest. Same price too - $20, including delivery by UPS ground. Color me a satisfied customer.
I find it interesting that Zero Toys would use glycol as the formula for the smoke solution, especially a cherry-scented concotion. Kids tend to equate cherries with stuff that tastes good, with perhaps disastrous results when we look at the defintion from wordnet:
glycol
n 1: a sweet but poisonous syrupy liquid used as an antifreeze
and solvent [syn: {ethylene glycol}, {ethanediol}]
Smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Somebody get a hold of President Bush! We've found the smoking gun!
Agreed. What's particularly bad is that the editorial staff clearly recognizes the problem:
Thinkgeek and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software.
The issue I have is that they don't realize what the problem is. It's like they think the issue is readership not realizing thinkgeek is associated with slashdot. We don't have that problem when there's a blinking thinkgeek ad right above the story.
Rather, the problem is that it's a plain and simple conflict of interest. OSDN trumpets slashdot as an "award winning news site", but slashdot editors continuously display zero journalistic integrities. Fact checking, not "reporting" about companies you accept advertising from, etc.
If it were news about thinkgeek, the disclaimer would not only be appropriate, it would be necessary. This however, was entirely a product suck-up....complete with the linkage. All that was missing was a [add this to your cart and check out] link. The disclaimer is for when you think you need to disclaim to readers that there's a potential conflict of interest. The disclaimer does NOT justify posting blatant ads as legitimate news stories.
Please help metamoderate.
My office-mate keeps a rifle that fires ping-pong balls in the office. I keep a Zero Fog Blaster. This means I always win in the intimidation battle.
Why?
I don't mind being pelted with ping-pong balls. But he absolutely can't stand to be subjected to the awful artificial cherry scent of the fog rings...
I tell you what. You go ahead and design a site, pay for the bandwidth, support a couple of million hits on a daily bases. At that point, then you can bitch and complain about your site maintaining journalistic integrity.
Slashdot's editors are not journalists. Well, Roblimo would be, but Timothy, Taco, Hemos, etc. They repost news articles done by others. Journalistic integrity lies on the author of the article. The editors are there to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Besides, this really isn't news. It's a review. Many small manufactures link to reviews of their products. It's nothing new. So they are promoting an item. Who cares. If you don't like it, don't click on the link. Go turn off reviews in your preference. No one forces you to come here. You don't have to pay to get the content if you so choose.
"The editors are there to seperate the wheat from the chaff."
Oh, you really didn't just say that... Do you really want to recount the all too numerous number of hoaxes, spam headlines and just plain assnine stories that have made it to the front page with these so-called chaff seperating "editors" at the helm??? No, their work is more akin to strip-mining. They take stories that grab their attention and dump them wholesale onto this site with barely a cursorary background check at times.
They aren't journalists and I can accept that. But even editors is too rich of a word for what they do. At most Slashdot is a hub where people post stories and the people who run it do the absolute minimum in their posting. In effect, everybody else does their job for them. Not that I have a problem with it, but lets overhype their job here.
And to that other guy, it's only a conflict of intrests if you claim that your organization is some how unbiased or impartial in some way. To my knowledge, Slashdot has never claimed that and has every right to hype their own products on their own site. It doesn't exactly look the best when it comes to credibility, but then, neither do the dupes, spam and other crap that make the front page, so who am I to judge?
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