Wow - Google Sketchup, this is not!

I believe the screen is a Wacom Cintiq, by the way - they’ve been around for a few years.

This thing sucks.

..there are at least two of them..

I can’t get enough of Stuff a Ducks crafty craft goods. Her newest creations on display on her flickr!

Heck yeah, a posse of robots.

For a more comprehensive insight into my appreciation of this lady’s style… click…  (more…)

I’d just like to know what the fuck this is all about?

Quinno’s spotted these skullcandy earphones :

Obviously, I like them (I’m posting ‘em aint I?), but also I’m intrigued by these in a few ways. The first is the $100. That’s the same price I paid for my Etymotic ER6I canalphones, which are pretty good. You can assume you’re paying a premium here for the wood - infact, I think with a product like this, it’s almost assumed. The brand name (Skullcandy) also sort of suggests that form might (!) be taking precedence over function here, but it’ll be interesting to tell. The reason I’m intrigued is because if you realise all this and buy the headphones, and they don’t sound quite that good - yet, as we’ve established, you may not expect them to - they certainly do look good, and so satisfy the purchaser’s main requirement. I do love the look of them though, and - if they were a bit cheaper - would probably buy them just for that reason.

The manufacturing process must be interesting - if we’re to assume it’s made of real wood, not some tricky composite or something. By the way, do you think they deliberately shaped them like nuts or acorns? Personally I might have experimented with a cylindrical or truncated conical shape, to counterpoint the ‘organicness’ of the material with a geometric form.

Actually, I’m thinking of a shape very similar to these, which I bought for Amanda. I didn’t tell her how much they cost (well, would you?) and it was actually very interesting - from a product designer’s point of view, of course - to see her reaction. They look and feel quite expensive (way better in real life, actually) and so she experienced an ‘expensive’ sound from them - although it’s also possible they sound like rubbish and she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings.

I don’t want to crap on about headphones all night but I do want to suggest that anyone looking for canalphones try these - they’re cheaper than the skullcandy or etymotics and by all reports sound fantastic (for the price). And the ears testing these ones actually can tell a difference..

Awhile ago I was at a party where I didnt know anyone, and was chilling out in front of a fire (geddit?) making conversation with another lost soul next to me. I was trying to explain some of my ideas for products in areas I’m interested in but the party was pretty loud, and and after a minute he made some excuse and left.

Don’t tell anyone your ideas.

Edit : Perhaps I should just memorise these and recite them in awkward situations instead.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? - Douglas Adams

So regarding my previous whine about Transperth’s Graffidiot Campaign, I bring you :

It’s transperth’s new bus window.. they have them in the back of the bus. It seems to be stainless steel, with either punched or chemically etched perforations. Anyway, I couldn’t scratch my illegible tag into it, so I pissed into a coke bottle and poured it over the pensioner sitting in front of me.

..but I had to watch the whole thing!

When I see Rose Skinner’s art, I feel like I’m walking through a toy factory in over drive, bubbling under a soup of neon pigments, and I’m looking for my inner child, who I can hear giggling in the distance, but not above the sound of sherbert popping in my ear and an army of small plastic men running over bubblewrap.

She makes really exciting sculptural installation art that makes me very happy to be in Perth.

I wish I could find more stuff on the net about her art, but ripping off her myspace will do for now.

From her time as artist in residence at the Breadbox Gallery.

An installation in the middle of Forest Chase. It drew small children.. like... well... a giant sculpture made of fluro plastics and candy.

One of her pieces was in Hatched, the national grad show. It was like a dome of candy... a DOME people…

Rose recently did a crazyarsehuge installation using popular foods (cheezels, mee goreng) and a whole lot of coloured sugar at the Breadbox Gallery. It smelt like a lolley store. The clean up was icky, but it means we’ll be seeing a lot more of her stuff, and for that, I am glad to haul bins of dubious gook.

Ok, so steph doesn’t seem to realise the name of this blog is NO robots.. so I don’t know what she is doing posting about robots!! Sheez.
Anyway, the bastards at festo are making more robots for steph to add to her freaky collection. (All I can say is .. Come the revolution..)

“The festo flying stingray glides swiftly through the cool evening air, silently descending onto your head, inserting its probiscus and extracting your brains with the efficiency and effectiveness of a Festo premium product”

“The festo air jelly floats magically through the air, higher than even your screams will reach, as it transports your loved ones to the Festo Processing Facility”

I showed these to Mel yesterday and thought I’d share them on here too. These are 3 ‘really useful’ (and quite free) Apple Mail plugins, for Apple Mail obviously. Click for..  (more…)

I regards to Jeremy’s previous post about those “boosted” headphones, i reckon boosted totally ripped off these panasonics which were released ages ago.  I’m betting these ones sound alot better though ey. Might just have to grab me a pair!

AudioCubes.com - Panasonic RP-HTX7 Retro Piano Painted Headphones -

Quin showed me this - the Boosted Stiloso Rojo Retro Headphones in Better Red. Very nice, but I wonder what they sound like? The product description mentions an ‘iPhone compatible’ jack, so maybe they’re low imedance, specifically designed for driving from portable players. Or maybe they just include an iphone-compatible jack…

Via Quin.

Can’t read? Click = enlarge.
Via Digg

Gizmodo has, for whatever reason, made a 3 part video of a tour inside the lego factory. Pretty awesome to behold. Lots of robots!

There’s now … 867 creative businesscard photos in dailypoetic’s flickr stream…

Just watch.
Pay attention around the 35 second mark as the feathers fly from the pelican’s bill!

Via Lewis

Quin hasn’t seen this yet so..

I was surprised to see this is actually made by Rollei, and not just a crappy revival of a vintage-looking design - although this is miniaturised (are 1920s design registrations/trademarks even still valid?). The assumption then would be that it produces images which are (aside from the obvious limitations of film vs digital) pretty similar to the original - and I’m wondering if [one of the reasons] they shrunk it was because of the difference in size between film and a CCD sensor (requiring them to shrink the distance of the sensor from the optics, as in a modern dSLR). I would be worried that it was some kind of pinhole camera (the article specifically says ‘autofocus’ which starts to ring alarm bells) but it says it goes down (up?) to F2.8. Nice.

Interestingly (perhaps) I have an old Kodak (I think) camera which I intend, one day, to fuse unnaturally with the guts of a broken olympus digital camera.

Here’s all you need to know.
Via Neatorama

This is just a test, posting from my iPod using the free wordpress app and wifi :)

Here’s a panorama I just made; click to enlarge, click more to see the location.

(more…)

Those crafty crackers at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories came up with this a few months ago - a sawn off USB flash drive. So it’s like, your cable has been ripped apart!
They gave some DIYish instructions and I like the idea so much I even found a similar (identical?) flashdrive on DealExtreme.
However, I give to you : (Click to Enlarge)

I do like Fred stuff actually - sometimes they come out with witty little things.
Via Gizmodo

FunnyOrDie has some 1930s ads - not a lot, but here’s a highlight :

Popular Mechanics has this story on the Top 10 Backyard Inventions of 2008.

Quinno pointed me to Acha.Baba’s photostream :

The video I’ve been waiting for since I heard about it two days ago :

It’s filmed with lasers - specifically, LIDAR - a laser scanning system that captures the 3D point data of everything it ’sees’ (including Thom Yorke). This means there are no cameras involved (just a laser, really) and so it’s not actually filmed. It’s all just 3D data. Which means you can do this crazy shit and manipulate the video in real time, moving the camera around and zooming in and out. Like this :

(Click this image!)

(Click to enlarge)

Gizmodo also posted this video which shows the (sort-of more boring) making of :

There’s a gallery of pretty cool future car designs (if that’s your thing) from the Faculty of Transportation Design, Pforzheim University over at the hilarious site speigel.de.

Image Gallery

Jeff is another young perth designer who is now travelling around and doing his thing. Hi Jeff!
He has a blog and here’s a nicked photo of a surfboard he used as a canvas :

Had enough of the iPhone? How ’bout this bluetooth headset?

From Instructables via HAD

Holy shit - now we all know Banksy’s TRUE IDENTITY. Finally!

download flexhaus.PSD

California Soul

and also wanted to test out the audio player plugin!

(more…)

Digital Portfolio (2.7Mb) - Click to download.
It’s pretty good innit

Click to enlarge :