Category: Cool

Lost in Space Robot B9

For the guy who has everything your only choice of gifts would be an official Lost in Space robot.

Irwin Allen’s hit TV series, "Lost in Space", had captured the imagination of future "space colonists" across America. Every boy dreamed of being William Robinson… and why not? Never before had "Space" been so cool. It is now 40 years later and we still dream of having our very own Robot! It is with this same enthusiasm that B9Creations is excited to announce our production and sale of Full Size, Limited Edition, Fully Licensed Replicas of this amazing TV Icon!

Personally I’m a Robby the Robot fan myself.

WWW.LOSTINSPACEROBOT.COM

xRez – Extreme High Resolution Images

Wow. Impressive set of photos. The interface is whats nice. Very Google / Yahoo maps like. I seem to remember a freeware app that would let you do this with your own photos. I’m going to have to dig that up… Still, these photos are very nice.

xRez is a consortium of digital artists committed to exploring new creative opportunites made available by the advent of extremely high-resolution gigapixel digital photography. We believe this is clearly the next revolution in photography, allowing photographic experiences with a deeper level of fidelity and impact than previously seen. Further, by combining powerful 3d tools and techniques appropriated from the visual effects field, possibilites arise of new imagery and animation that are truly novel and unprecedented.

[via Red Ferret Journal]
xRez – extreme high resolution images

Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit

Otona no Kagaku Crystal RadioOtona No Kagaku, or ‘Science for Adults’ is a ‘mook’ series published by Gakken in Japan. Each issue has includes a kit that goes along with whatever the issues topic is. I could hardly wait for this one! It’s a crystal radio. Very classy design too, that diamond weave coil design is a real eye catcher. It includes a diode that you can use as a detector or if your feeling like playing with the cat’s whisker a bit you can use the tow mineral samples. The reception isn’t as good as with the diode but you get the true crystal experience with this method. In the base of the radio is a small battery operated amplifier so you can use the radio without a super long antenna. I don’t think it’s cheating, your still using a chunk of rock to rectify the signal. It took me about two hours to put everything together and that’s with a few false starts in winding the coil. As my Japanese is very bad, I did have to look up the characters for some basic colors so I could connect the wires in the right order. This page on about.com proved to be quite useful with this. Now, the selectivity isn’t the best but that can be fixed with a little tinkering under the hood. It does receive the local stations quite nicely and best of all it just looks dead on cool. I took loads of photos of the build to have a gander at them and enjoy.

Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit build  – Flickr photoset

Karakuri Corner

Translated version of the Otona no Kagaku web site

Otona no Kagaku group on Flickr

VictorioNixie Tube POV Display

VictorioNixie Tube I’m liking the looks of this…

This "electrochemical and electromechanical apparatus for the display of illuminated messages" is really a (heavily) modified persistence-of-vision toy. This toy was a pen i picked up at the local pharmacy (Walgreen’s) with a spinning head that displayed whatever message you programmed in. It was only $5.00, so i picked up a couple and let my imagination fly.
This is by far the most sculptural of all my creations, as it really serves no practical purpose 🙂
All in all, it cost me about $20US and two weeks worth of spare time (about 10 hours)
To see the device in action, go to:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BMAc6 jfG0M

[via brassgoggles]
VictorioNixie Tube – a photoset on Flickr

Buck Godot Comics

Buck Godot Phil Foglio’s ‘Buck Godot’ comic series is an all time great. It may be from the 80’s but it is still a good read.

Buck Godot: zap gun for hire is a comic with a noir sensibility. Here you’ll find hard-drinking detectives, prostitutes with hearts of gold, foul-mouthed alien bartenders and lots of gunfights.

  Wikipedia has an entry on it as well. You can read them as a web comic here if you wish.
BUCK GODOT Comics