Tag: NEWZEALAND

With rescue workers continuing to search for survivors among the rubble from last week's devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of engineers from the U.K. have constructed a robot that could make their jobs a little easier -- thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect. The Kinect's motion-detection sensors can instantly model the robot's surroundings and scan them for survivors, ...

Google has launched a 'Person Finder' app, like the ones for Haiti and Chile, whereby users can submit and find information on any friends or family in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was struck by a devastating earthquake earlier today. At the moment, Google has information on about 5,100 people, so, if you're looking for loved ones, or have information that could put others' minds at ease, ...

At a recent online auction in New Zealand, two glass vials containing neon blue liquid sold for $1,983. Oh, and they also contained ghosts. As we reported a few days ago, an anonymous person originally placed the two vials up for auction last week, claiming they contained the souls of an old man and a little girl, both of whom used to live in the sellers' current house. Now, after the winning ...

Share We've told you about a man auctioning his life on eBay, but what about the afterlife? The spirit has to be worth something, right? One New Zealand man is about to find out. According to GeekoSystem, an unnamed man recently placed on the auction site Trade Me two vials supposedly containing ghosts and holy water. The seller claims the spirits were captured in July during an exorcism at ...

By sea, by air or by land, no terrain is out of the question for a New Zealand inventor's do-all vehicle. According to a Reuters video (watch below), Rudy Heedman has built a homemade hovercraft that uses a set of detachable wings to take flight when it reaches 44 mph. It's a child's (or adrenaline junkie's) dream come true. Once he leaves the water for the sky, Heedman is protected from death or ...

Don't be fooled by all the pretty colors and aromatic bouquets -- the world of floristry can be pretty cutthroat. Just ask any rose retailer in Napier County, New Zealand, where one florist has admitted to changing her competitors' listed information on Google Maps as a way to undercut them. According to Stuff, Kendra Drinkwater, who runs a flower business out of her home, recently pleaded ...

A New Zealand office worker recently learned a tough lesson: When sending an e-mail, be careful with fonts and colors. Someone could interpret that bold sentence the wrong way. According to The New Zealand Herald, Vicki Walker was fired from her position as financial controller at ProCare Health for sending "confrontational" e-mails that included words in red, bold, and worst of all, capital ...

When a New Zealand couple applied to borrow $NZ10,000 (about $6,000) for the gas station they owned, they could not have possibly foreseen the windfall a simple computing error would bring them. And New Zealand's WestPac bank could not have possibly foreseen Facebook's role in the investigation of the $NZ10 million fraud. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, when New Zealanders Leo Gao and ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/Peter_Jackson_s_WETA_makes_working_mermaid_tail_for_amputee';New Zealander Nadya Vessey, who lost both of her legs to the knee when she was a child, has just received a prosthesis that's unlike anything we've ever seen, outside of 'Splash'. About two years ago, she approached Weta Workshop, which specializes in design and manufacturing of costumes and special ...

While used and refurb'd electronics have a long history of delivering more than the purchaser bargained for, like assembly-line photos, MI6 documents, or the phone number to Sarah Palin's hair stylist, New Zealand man Chris Ogle's surprise find is a little more troubling. He picked up the above unidentified MP3 player at a thrift shop in Oklahoma for $18 used. On it were 60 files, many of which ...

This week in New Zealand, the Queenstown police identified and arrested an attempted burglar with the help of an unconventional investigative tool: social networking site Facebook. When police obtained a surveillance video of the would-be safe cracker, they could not immediately identify him, according to CNN. So, using the department's two-month-old Facebook account, investigators posted still ...

New Zealand is a long, long distance away from Switched H.Q., but this story sure sounds like something that could have happened right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. In the city of Wellington, N.Z., a man received a text message offering him an early Christmas present that would be, erm, "presented" by two very friendly ladies. They gave him their address, told him to hurry up, and added that if ...

When researchers at a Washington State fish hatchery implanted one of their tiny steelhead fish with an electronic tag in 2005, they expected to find the little guy to the northwest in the frigid waters near Alaska, where many of the fish end up. The steelhead's tag, a tracking device similar to those used in household pets, was, much to the researchers' surprise, recently found in the stomach ...