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At its best, digital rights management (DRM) is an inconvenience. At its worst, DRM is a reminder that the companies selling you digital products don't trust you not to pirate them, and that they're willing to deliberately, actively make those products worse to keep you from sharing them. DRM is so pervasive in the digital things we buy that we rarely think about it, but what if it bled over into the physical world? Meet the DRM Chair. It's a chair that only lets you sit in it eight times before it self destructs, and it makes about as much sense as most other forms of DRM I've seen.

Don't you hate it when you're building the arc reactor for your Iron Man costume, but the Arduino powered circuit board you're using is just too big? Well friend, it sounds like you could use the Adafruit Gemma! It packs most of the wearable computing power you love about Adafruit's larger Flora model into to a one-inch disc. Perfect for all your arc reactor needs. Sure, the Adafruit Gemma could probably be used for a lot of different projects, but if I had one, I'd totally use it to build an arc reactor.

What do you get when you cross the remains of a dismembered guitar with an Arduino powered robotic glockenspiel? In the interest of full disclosure, we've never had occasion to ask ourselves that question. We have an answer to it today, though, and the answer is glockentar, a musical chimera of bells, circuits, strings and light projections that...you know what? Just check out the video. It's one of those "you have to see it for yourself" things.

While at the London Science Museum, Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced that Google would help pay for 100 new science teachers and equip classrooms with Arduino kits and Raspberry Pi microcomputers. Those are some lucky, lucky kids.

You can use arduinos to do a lot of cool things, a lot of cool things that we like to cover on Geekosystem. But what about using an arduino as a means to its own end? John Edgar Park, writer for MAKE magazine, has an answer for that; you can make a really big arduino, one that's six times the size of traditional microcontrollers. Enter the Arduino GRANDE, a macrocontroller, if you will.

So this is a pretty neat idea: An aluminum cube that gives you the physical sensation of tomorrow's forecasted temperature. It's called the Cryoscope, and it's the Arduino-powered creation of Robb Godshaw. The idea is that instead of just looking at the weather forecast, you can put your hand on the cube and actually feel the air temperature thanks to the device's internal heat pump. It's clever, though one wonders how it would handle extreme temperatures. Perhaps if you saw frost forming on your Cryoscope, you'd know that it's best to stay inside. See Godshaw's explanatory video, after the break.

Don we now our gay apparel, and why shouldn't that apparel be primarily composed of Christmas lights synchronized to flash with music? Andy Coulson asked himself that same question and came to the conclusion that he should build a pair of light suits for himself and his friend. You know, for science. Of course, a big part of this rig is the actual lights, but the real important part is the LabVIEW interface that breaks down .wav files into power levels and frequency bands, and the arduino that uses that information to sync the flashing lights. The result is a pair of festive, but flagrantly flashing fatigues that would make you the center of any holiday gathering.

Check out a video after the jump.

One of the hardest parts of using an Etch A Sketch, aside from the ever-continuing line and the difficulty of moving diagonally is that you have to turn a circle knob to make a straight line. I'll admit, I'm getting a little picky here, but I was never good at using an Etch A Sketch, because as a person who gets confused easily, they are positively infuriating. YouTuber Alpinedelta32's Arduino mod might actually make the device usable for someone like me because it translates those pesky knobs to a NES controller d-pad. Finally, Etch A Sketchin' for the rest of us.

Video after the jump.

When eating a ridiculously spicy taco, it's convenient to have a soothing beverage on hand to ease the burn. But what if that soothing beverage was on your head, and what if it was attached to a suite of sensors that worked together to determine how much you were reacting to the spicy food you just ate? Then you're probably wearing the Nuclear Taco Sensor Helmet, presented by Lisbon's altLab at this year's CodeBits conference. Of course, after they built the taco sensor hat, the only possible way to present it was by making a fake Japanese game show. See it, after the break.

After watching the movie Stargate, Jerome Kelty, DIY builder extraordinaire, decided that he wanted one of the masks worn by the Horus Guards. Being an endeavoring designer, Kelty took to trying to make one for himself, and after several different designs, I think it's fair to say he succeeded with flying colors. The mask is made mostly out of papier-mâché, cardstock, spackle, and spray foam, with a detailed paint-job thrown on top. The helmet can also move through the use of 5 servos and an Arduino, which let the helmet look around in a strikingly bird-like way. Video after the jump.

A few days ago, footage surfaced from a group calling itself Project Black Mirror. It showed three guys, one with electrodes on his head, and an iPhone 4S wired to an Arduino board. In the video, the group claimed that they had created a method by which to control Apple's voice assistant Siri using their thoughts instead of their voice. The video shows a successful call being placed, much to the group's satisfaction. However, some people have begun to question if everything shown in the video is really as it seems.

Writing on toilet paper is no easy feat, but Mario Lukas' submission to the German hacker competition “Mach flott den Schrott“ (which Google translates as "make fast the crap") makes it look like a breeze. This Arduino-controlled printer was built almost entirely from cast-off material, like old CD-ROM drives, scrap wood, and ball bearings from inline skate wheels, etc. Using an ethernet shield attachment for the Arduino board, the printer can receive any digital input from a computer. This includes, the creator notes, both RSS and Twitter feeds. It may not print you a sweater, but then again, you can recycle the printed product after you're done reading it. A clever creation or brilliant commentary on the state of media today? Watch the video after the break, and you can decide.

Hello? Are you still there? Programmer Jonathan M. Gruberman and artist Leigh Nunan collaborated to create a plush version of the lethal, adorable Aperture Science sentry turrets from Portal and Portal II. The tot-sized turret is Arduino-controlled, and when it something crosses its line of site, it utters some of the same soothing-voiced dialogue as an in-game turret would; ditto when it's picked up or tilted over. Yet more to get excited about, and possibly a little scared about: Gruberman says his friend Dana Finchan is working with him on a fully functional, life-sized turret: "I think once that’s done we’re going to work on making it fully functional: not just sensors and sounds, but opening side panels and perhaps even throwing some Nerf or Airsoft guns in there." Meanwhile, someone has made a life-sized Portal turret PC case (which, sadly, we didn't see when we made our roundup of the best PC casemods, even though the Companion Cube casemod was one of our favorites). (via Escapist | Creator's blog post)

Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band employ addictive, effective feedback mechanisms to teach players how to work their instruments, but the end result, alas, is being really good at Guitar Hero or Rock Band, with contributions to actual musical prowess a great unknown. The Guitarduino, designed by a UIC engineering student named Andrew, seeks to use catchy feedback to develop actual guitar skills in the player. Consisting of a real electric guitar with more than 130 LEDs wired into the fretboard, the Guitarduino teaches its holder how to play chords and scales by flashing the appropriate lights. Andrew plans to make the guitar MIDI controllable in its next iteration. Video below:

Augmented reality refers to virtually changing a live view of something real. Essentially, reality is being bent to the will of something virtual. Generally, a lot of hacks nowadays feature new and interesting ways to augment reality with technology, but the augmenting social norms didn't stop Michael Winston Dales from making reality bend to Minecraft's will, rather than the other way around.