Keeping the dog out of the garbage can or your cat from going through your underwear generally calls for a lock and key scenario.  But that’s hardly a geeky answer and won’t condition Rex to think twice before he digs through bacon grease and chicken bones.

Enter the SpyNet Laser Trip Wire.  Yup, the same tech we grew up watching in movies – Catherine Zeta Jones comes to mind – is now ready for your kitchen, living room, heck even your cubicle.

The system includes a transmitter that beams a laser to a receiver unit, as well as 2 mirror units to expand its reach around corners and through door ways.  If someone, or something crosses its path an audible alert will be sounded, notifying you that there is an intruder in your midst.  You’ll need 6 AAA batteries to power this setup, but they should last up to 5-10 hours with continuous use, at least that’s our best guess based on our laser experience.

ThinkGeek sells it for $34.99.

Apple Store Challenge

Mark Malkoff tests the limits of the kind employees at the Apple Store in New York City. Goats are OK, but they seem to draw the line at dimming the lights.

You’ve either seen the Mentos and Coke experiment on YouTube or you’ve destroyed your kitchen trying it yourself. Wired has come up with a parlor trick that’ll surprise your friends with a delayed explosion time: Mentos, frozen in ice cubes.

Admittedly, I don’t know many people who let their drinks sit long enough for their ice to completely melt, but Wired suggests using warm Coke to help speed up the process. Next time you get some strange looking ice in your drink, I’d suggest you start chugging. [Wired via Neatorama via BoingBoing]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ftgOvheXTI

Japan Boulders, Snowballs, cigarettes and more…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isUFXNYT80k

News anchor licks iPad.

It’s one things to be stupid and it’s something else to be naive.  However, Fox News and its anchors tend to exude both of those qualities and what we have here is a clip to prove it.

Raoul Martinez, a San Diego Fox news anchor tricked his co-host, Shally Zomorodi, into licking her iPad by stating that Shock Top, a popular beer company, had produced technology that works with the iPad and iPhone to illicit taste and smell from their application.

Now most of you would cry poppycock at the first sign of something like this, but just like the running on water video we saw last year, if you want to believe it exists, it will.  Sadly, Shally ended up licking the iPad and walked off set, all be it with humility. But something tells us should we have been none the wiser if it weren’t for the app displaying a message of “happy April Fool’s day”.

No one wants to smell like a skunk so naturally we grow to fear them…. watch the video.

the video, uploaded to YouTube Monday, amassed more than 1.2 million views in four days.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)

Just as I–and many of you–suspected, the viral video claiming to demonstrate how to hack into the huge video monitors in New York’s Times Square was a fake.

The video shows two people: one filming and holding an iPhone with a “video transmitter” plugged into the headphone jack, and the other with a “video repeater” that appears to hijack any screen it comes near, forcing it to display the video feed from the phone. Toward the end of the video, the repeater is attached to a helium balloon, and floated up in front of the Times Square monitor, which also acquiesces to the “hack.”

As it turns out, there’s more of a backstory to the video than its DIY aesthetic would seem to indicate. The faux hack was actually part of a subtle viral marketing campaign for the movie “Limitless.” The only nod to the film comes in the moments before the Times Square screen is taken over–the movie trailer is playing on the screen before it’s replaced with the iPhone feed.

While many people called the hoax, we didn’t get it totally right. I and most others assumed the screen manipulation was the result of video post-production. In fact, Michael Krivicka of Thinkmodo, the marketing agency behind the video, says the apparent video hijack really did play on the Times Square screen.

“We basically rented the screens on Times Square,” Krivicka told InformationWeek. “We had our own footage play on there, which had sync points that were looping every 60 seconds. So we basically synced up the footage on our iPhone and made it look, with rehearsed timing, like it’s being hacked into. It was really simple.”