Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I saw this on the BBC tonight and just could not pass it up.
Japan snaps up ‘lucky’ Kit Kats
Also mentioned on Metropolis:
” The sale of lucky charms sky-rocketed as high school students prepared to sit their university entrance exams, with Kit Kat chocolate bars (kitto katsu meaning something like “it’s a sure thing I’m going to beat this game”) proving particularly popular, including a chocolate bar designed to recall the calm of matcha tea.”
Metropolis – Lucky charms
I found a Japanese page on energy efficent home lighting fixtures that use LEDs. I’d like to be able to buy lights like these from Homedepot. I bought a set of LED Christmas lights for my brother, I’ll have to pick up a set for myself next year.
Do it Ene it with the lighting of conserving?
I found a few more links to LEDs in the home. The Luxeon lamps are just darn bright, I’d like a few of them. The second link is a great review of high brightness LEDs and other LED applications. Dans Data is a pretty handy site for finding info about stuff.
Luxeon High Brightness LEDs
LED Light Roundup
Import toys for fun and profit? If your serious about collecting Japanese toys you might want to visit here. I’ll have to look into this, I might open my own shop one day. 🙂
Godzilla, Dragon Ball, Chogokin, Transformers, Tomica, Nohohon stationery
I would love to get a few of these and put them in some of the local comic book shops. Some of these toys are down right amazing! The first time I saw these was when I was in japan a few years ago. The Gashapon (I think that’s a Japanese onimonipea, they make a distinctive sound when the knob is turned) machines were dotted in various locations, hobby shops, grocery stores, and even an entire store devoted to them. The place was set up like a laundromat, machines on in four rows two high. It was wild. The place must have been some sort of fan hang out, there was a cosplay shop a few floors above it.
I wonder how you go about getting the toys in bulk so you can stock your own machines.
Gashapon/Capsule Toys
So cool! These are just one of the coolest things ever. I think the ultimate version would have beefed up suspension so you could move over good sized rocks, stereo cameras and a set of VR glasses (with an adjustable parallax so you could either drive a little tank or a full sized one), a set of IR sensors to detect hits and an visible/IR laser on the main gun (with an program that will simulate the reload cycle and maybe windage). A few of those in your back yard would be quite the evening.
R/C Tanks
If I were to play a game on the PS2 it would be Katamari Damacy. Weird, wacky, totaly different than any other game out there. Plus if you go here you can build a paper version of its main character. How cool is that? (A while ago I reported on the PePaKuRa Designer software used to make some of these)
Lump soul (Oji) papercraft
For more paper projects (build the robot, it looks neat):
Funny character coffee papercraft