Books. Who needs ‘em in the age of the Kindle? You may as well do something with these relics right? Maybe put a flatbed scanner inside of one for instance. That’s what datamancer did. It’s much cooler than your boring grey scanner or the one attached to your printer.

You can now copy pages from within a book itself. I think the world just imploded and created a separate reality that seems no different, yet is.

Political statement or just a literary mod? You decide. Most gamers are well aware former attorney Jack Thompson’s stance on gaming. It’s nice to see that his book embraces gaming at long last, with a little help from Mattigus, a user on the Halflife2.Net forums who is simply brilliant.

Don’t worry. He bought the book used on eBay, so no 13-cent royalty for Mr. Thompson. It was also a library book, which not surprisingly, was never even checked out. It is an actual functioning mod.

At first glance you might think this is an awesome way to identify birds in the wild or in your backyard, by the song they sing. After all, it’s got a 54 page song book and a scanner that looks like a pen. This is just what you needed to identify birds by sound. Except it’s not quite what you think.

You scan the barcode for a bird, and then you can listen to a digital recording of the song from the speaker. That’s all well and good if you need to know what a bird sounds like, but it doesn’t help you identify a song you hear just now outside. The only thing to do is scan through all the damn birds in the book! In short, this device is for the birds!