Mosquito swatter gamer mod with kill counter, sound and rechargeable battery | Hacker News Reader

Mosquito swatter gamer mod with kill counter, sound and rechargeable battery

instructables.com

140 pointsGedxx43 comments

I always wanted to do this. I would wire it up with sounds from Unreal Tournament:

Double Kill

Mega Kill

ULTRA kill

I was swatting lots of flies last week, and I was doing my own announcing. A kill counter and automatic UT announcer was all I wanted out my swatter in that moment.

Kilamanjaro!

I live in the south, where the mosquitos are brutal.

You could make a lot of money selling these...

I hate tiger mosquitos. The worst invasive species ever. I hope the government can expedite releasing sterile males into the wild ASAP

I've read that some primates, Homo Sapiens are quite invasive too: Possibly fought all others from the Homo line to extinction, destroyed 80% percent of Earth ecosystems and setting the stage for a pretty swift mass extinction event, possibly before the end of the century, and perhaps much before according to latest literature.

Oh yeah and are in a good way to double their planet's atmosphere CO2 content, which regulates the latter's temperature, making the extinction event even swifter. A definite sign of intelligence.

But you are correct, mosquitos are terrible beings, the second most deadly living creatures on this planet to be precise.

Don't cut yourself on the edge of that butter knife.

I mean it's true

I guess you'll be happy to hear that it wasn't needed to send sterile males for that species, which seems to manage becoming slowly sterile by itself ;)

Almost perfect. For a true gamer mod, it needs RGB LEDs.

There shouldn't be adjectives on kills unless there is a kill streak or multiple at once.

Amazing work, terrible orientation on the recording.

This is a Youtube UI issue to be honest, most other video players don't letter box a vertical video and just play it at the right aspect ratio

I know that people extrapolate this experience to other things they think they dislike about vertical videos, but satisfaction improves with the player itself working well

The ubiquitous mobile device audience is fine too, as the video fits their screens just like the device it was recorded on. With the exception of youtube.

I disagree. Rotating 90 degrees a phone is a lot easier than doing the same with a 27" computer screen. They assume everyone is using a phone completely disregarding people with computers; for that matter vertical videos are in my personal delete/ignore/never produce/never share list.

you can just view it with part of your 27" monitor

That would defeat the purpose of having a bigger screen. The other way 100% of their phone screen estate and our monitors would be used, at the price of a 90 degrees hand rotation on their part.

You are of course free to swim against the current any boycott things as you see fit. This does not change the fact that YouTube needs to fix its player behavior to better accommodate the majority. Solving that issue will not prevent you from yelling at clouds.

Majority? Vertical videos suck from a videography perspective. Even if we were all using phones most videos are better off widescreen because they capture surrounding context and not just a shitload of the sky and the ground.

Yeah, man, I wish we'd stop putting **ing black bars on things

My favorite is when I'm on my phone, and I run across a vertical video with horizontal black bars padding it out to 16x9 plus user-hostile configuration to make it impossible to resize in any way. I end up having to watch a postage stamp-sized version of the video

Vertical videos work against the way our eyes are placed and were introduced only because they work on vertical screens. Sorta because if you ever watched some interesting videos shot with a cellphone then broadcast from the TV, the ones showing important stuff going on -that is, not food recipes or kittens- you immediately realize there's something missing, and that something is the context in which things are happening: the surrounding area. You may complain about the black bars added on the sides and you're technically right, I however complain about the lack of context because the lower part of the picture shows the ground and the upper part the sky or some buildings well above the action. Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space: if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident. There's a valid reason why screens are more large than high, and forcing people to shoot and watch vertical videos goes against any common sense in the name of selling more and more cellphones, services and advertising.

> Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space

The weakest argument regarding this topic

> if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident

Zoom out, create a composition, pan. Same as with a 1:1 aspect ratio or a 16:9 horizontal aspect ratio.

It doesn’t defeat the purpose of having a bigger screen any more than a window manager does.

It is considerably more convenient to record a vertical video on a phone, which is probably the more tangible benefit at that moment.

There had been correctly functioning vertical videos on YouTube for a 3-4 years. That I can watch in full screen on my phone.

So it's possible, but don't know how easy it is for the uploader.

And also youtube shorts are correctly sized

Maybe, i was watching it on my phone, not sure what i can do as a user other than ask people to record / upload their videos in another format.

Pressure youtube into fixing their player by acknowledging they are the problem

Quibi tried to fix this.

It’s 2022.

My poor dog can't deal with even seeing one of these things, let alone the zap. Starts shaking immediately. He's super chill and quiet normally. He's a rescue and I think the previous owners must have traumatized him with it.

It may be from the noise of the electric arc. I have an electric candle lighter and it came with warnings and reviews that the sound of the arc can bother pets and some children. Hope that restores a little faith in humanity.

True. But in this case, I can't even have it in the house. If he even sees it, he freaks out immediately. I am not looking forward to taking him back to SE Asia... they are everywhere.

I wonder if the HV supply emits a high-pitched whine that humans can't hear but dogs can?

Yes that’s exactly it.

This would sell like hot cakes. I want to buy one, not waste my time making one. Somebody sell me one.

This just makes me glad I live somewhere with not a lot of mosquitos.

We could also maybe stop killing things for fun.

The mosquito has no such qualm.

Mosquito needs to feed to survive, and isn't exactly my ethical aspiration. I get the argument that they are not important for ecosystem and that they spread dangerous diseases. But do you think it is a good idea to gamify the act of killing for more enjoyment? Genuinely interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...

Mosquitos kill more people each year than all other animals combined - including humans. I believe violence for fun is evil, but perhaps this is one instance where it is to be encouraged. Perhaps gamifying it in this way distances people from the feeling of ending a life.

Anything that can inspire people to go forth and kill more mosquitos has my vote.

Would you have qualms with the gamification of plucking weeds?

If we had a paddle that let you cleanse the air of coronavirus, would you be against people using it?

Mosquito-borne illnesses are a thousand times more deadly.

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