Category: Japan

Kawaii Doraemon Phone

Doraemon Phone

For those of you who arn’t in the know, Doraemon is 35 years old this month and in celebration of this historic event, the motherboard maker GIGABYTE is issuing a limited run (only 5000) of Doraemon themed cell phones. If I had 15,900 yuan I’d buy one for my wife but the chances of that are slim and next to none.

Doreamon is a character from a Japanese comic. This robot cat is the only feline creature that had its ears chewed off by mice. A Doreaphone was launched a few years ago, aimed at children, and their parents could locate them with this phone in case of an emergency. The Taiwanese site ePRICE spills the beans on this new version of the Doreaphone, that is basically a GIGABYTE g-X5 (this company also manufactures motherboards) in blue robot cat colours

[via Gizmodo]
Doraemon Doreaphone

English on a Sony Librie

ebooks

I discovered this while poking around MAKE, if your lucky enough to own one of the Sony Librie eBook readers and Japanese is not your native language then you might want to have a go at messing with whats under the hood and make it speak English.

I’m a big fan of ebooks, eventually we’ll all be reading them in some way. The Sony e-ink Librie is the best device at the moment I think, hence my current obsession. But, that means there will be lots of how-tos and more here. This one is on English-izing the device since it’s in Japanse. The previous and latest version(s) of the Librie English GUI Firmware Patch includes a HOWTO TXT file, a few folks asked me for some help- so here’s the original how-to with my screenshots and comments…

MAKE: Blog: HOWTO – Sony Librie English GUI Firmware Patch

‘Wiardosebn’ Bird robot kit

Weird-7

A little pricey at US$300 but it does have a gob (9) of servos and does not require solder to assemble (?). Nifty! The body is built out of laser cut (just a guess there, but it would be cheap to do) plywood so it will be quite tough. I’m a little foggy on the controls though, looks like it’s either by an RS-232C/USB port or a UHF RF remote. It also looks like the head/beak acts as a pendulum.

Bird type self-made robot of wonder kit products and two walking “Weird-7”
“Weird-7” Homepage