Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
“This lipstick size device has an RCA Video Male Plug. Plug this Video Bulb to your Video Input and it will play endless animation of BITMAN on your TV screen. Another creative media art by Ryota Kuwakubo.”
I remember seeing this a long time ago somewhere but there has been an update in the form of an input device that will allow users to create their own 8×8 animations. Pretty cool.
I’d like to have one of these, it would be programmed to follow me at a respectable distance and hand me my cell phone whenever it rings.
Honda’s ASIMO has a new friend on the block now – Fujitsu Automation’s HOAP-3 humanoid robot. Short in stature at 60cm and weighing in at 8.8kg, image recognition and various sensors have been added. With a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor that runs on RT-Linux inside, HOAP-3 would be a prime target for homebrew application developers. Fujitsu Automation has announced that the internal interface information of the hardware/software for the unit will be released. Simulation software for pre-confirmation of control programs is included for those who are into self-programming.
Fujitsu Automation unveils HOAP-3 robot
I though that the living plant key chain doo-dads were weird… Thats nothing, now you can own a little chunk of green algae in a bottle to hang off your phone. The stuff in the bottle is called ‘marimo’. In the wild it will take the shape of a ball as it is moved around in a lake due to waves and curents. Some people use it as decoration in aquariums – I don’t know why, it’s hard enough to keep algae OUT of an aquarium. Anyway, you can now make it part of you keitai if you want to look uber cool.
If a loved one asks for this $400US Japanese ink-jet printer/paper cutter, it might be a sign that they are serious about making paper craft toys. Or that they are nuts. Either way this printer is a bit like the small desktop vinyl sign cutters that you can buy these days – call up the design on its program, load in some paper, and out comes a full color pre-cut paper project. Very neat!
You can run cardstock through it ( “(157g/m 2) and drawing paper * and postcard * mount 0.3mm or less in thickness” from the web site) , thats good because most paper models you build need thicker stock or they look like crud. Looks to only be supported under Windows, no mention of Macintosh at all. Bummer.
I wonder if this printer will make full clean cuts or will it make tiny pinholes in the paper so you can punch it out. Looks like is should make clean cuts from what the specs say but a demo would be nice (someone want to fly me to Japan to check this out?) I’d also like to know what the smallest cut size is, I’ve built some paper models that have some very small parts in them. It could be quite small as I now see that there is a plastic backing film that is rolled on to the paper during the printing process. This must be to keep parts from sliding around and hitting the heads. I doubt that the price per page would be very low but it sure would be fun to use. If the Craft ROBO is too small for your hobby, then you might want to look at this one. The Craft ROBO Pro II (translated page here) takes roll paper and will print/cut sheets as large as 2mx42cm!
You know, some people learn Japanese for the culture, some to understand the Anime, and others to play import video games. I’d learn Japanese to use this printer, as long as I could either make my own designs or import designs and tell it where to cut the paper.
Craft ROBO
[Translated via Excite Japan]
[via BoingBoing]
I’m sure this item will eventualy make it to the ramen noodle museum in Yokohama Japan soon.
Astronaut Soichi Noguchi on Tuesday described his encounter with instant noodles aboard the space shuttle Discovery with zeal.
Noguchi said during a news conference broadcast from space that he tried the instant ramen dish on the second day of his journey.
“I enjoyed it — it was surprisingly close to the taste (of noodles) on Earth,” he said.
The special noodles, Space Ram, were developed by instant noodle pioneer Nissin Food Products Co.
They become edible after five minutes steeped in 70-degree water. To prevent spilling in zero-gravity, the broth is thicker than normal and the noodles are in blocks.
Noguchi helped develop the product in its initial stages.
Noguchi relishes his space-shuttle instant noodles
This is agreat site devoted to a love of pinhole photography. I discovered Xiao Shan’s home page when I was looking at his Flickr photostream. As you can see by the image I’m using for this story, Shan likes to improvise and create unique cameras out of whatever is around, I like the zebra cameras myself but the coffee cameraas are a very close second. Its a great place to kick start your brain if your looking for a photo project and you get to see some beautiful photos too.