Some genius over at photo.net by the name of Federico Sartorio wrote a tutorial about how to hack a PEZ dispenser to become a hot shoe gadget (a ‘hot shoe‘ is the mounting part on top of certain cameras that enable you to attach an external flash).

I found this over a year ago but it wasn’t till a few weeks ago that I finally went ahead and did it. It is quite hard to find PEZ in Australia, at least, interesting character ones. I got mine from a toy store but Target has an OK range. You can probably also get them at specialized candy stores.

I went with a Shrek one which is very eye-catching and quite a bit bigger than some of the other characters’ heads. The idea behind this is to get little people’s attention when taking their photos and trust me, it really works!

It seems simple enough but I felt like I was going to break my wrist trying to cut through the hard plastic with a box cutter knife. I couldn’t cut it and basically scored it across the top, bottom and sides (about 20 times) enough so I could snap it off cleanly. Then, I rubbed the edges along the wooden chopping board I was using to make the edges nice and smooth.

The before:

The after:

A bit of Did you know? trivia

According to Wikipedia, the name PEZ was derived from the letters from the first, the middle and the end of the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminz, the first PEZ flavor. And, the candy was invented way back in 1927. There you go!