Category: Cool sights

LEGO Death Star II deal

It’s no longer a brand new set, but I really dig the LEGO Death Star II set. At the LEGO store, it lists for $300 (minus 1 penny).  For no particular reason, I was looking at this same set at Buy.com and saw they have it listed for $253 (minus 1 penny).

lego_deathstar

Clearly, you need to go purchase one now, and buy one for me as well.  I will gladly accept your gift for no additional charge.

And if you want to see more on the building of this sucker, read up on this crazy detailed and picture-laden LiveJournal (and that’s a good thing) and/or check out this Flickr page where someone documents their build from unboxing to completion as well.  Final assembled set is damn big (approximately 25 inches tall) – not that size matters (I keep telling myself that).

[tags]LEGO, Death Star II, Star Wars, Size doesn’t matter, Crazy big, Cool[/tags]

See toast toasting toasty-toasted bread

Mmmmm.  Toast.  I thought I’d posted about a similar gadget here before, but I can’t seem to find it on the Blahg now, so I must be mistaken.  View the toast-making goodness of the transparent toaster.

engadget-9-3-07-transparent_toaster This transparent toaster allows you to see the bread while it is toasting so you’re never surprised by toast that comes out too dark. This idea is based on the transparent heating glass featured in this issue. Although the glass does not currently get hot enough to toast bread, someday this application may be possible. The concept was developed by the Inventables Concept Studio.


I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that one wouldn’t want to butter their bread before popping it in here, though.  Just a handy tip from my awesome and over-sized brain to you.  (via Engadget)

[tags]Toast, Transparency, Mmmmm[/tags]

New Ngage platform

Catching up on my latest techie/geek news, I saw this news-bit about the new Nokia N-Gage platform update, the N-81 gaming platform. It’s a fine looking update from their awful first- and second-gen gaming phones.

engadget-02_nokia_n81_lowres440.jpg

This is Nokia’s new N-81 gaming device built upon their revamped N-Gage gaming platform. The S60 device packs HSDPA (sorry, no US band support) for on-line gaming, integrated speakers (and 3.5-mm headphone jack), and D-pad navigation for getting your game on. Still, it’s not just for gaming as it fully supports all the audio and video you’d expect in a new “pane-driven,” UI which carousels your windows instead of lining them up in tabs — a UI which will evolve in the coming months in line with Ovi. On sale Q4 in Europe in an 8GB flash model (€431/$585) or €360/$490 pre-bunged with a 2GB microSD card.

The screen and control layout looks so much better than the previous versions. There’s a gallery with more images in the Engadget article linked above. This might even be enough of an improvement to get folks to finally buy in to the N-Gage platform.

[tags]N-Gage, Gaming, Nokia[tags]

Ninjas or pirates? I think we know what this guy likes

With a quote like “Not afraid to punch a man in the nuts. Or a midget in the face.” you know you’re getting expert information from ScrewAttack’s top 10 ninjas guide. Hidden behind an impossible to fake age verifier, here’s the video:

[gametrailers 24269]

Moderately NSFW due to language, it’s still pretty funny and a great guide to gaming’s best ninjas.

[tags]ScrewAttack, Top 10 ninjas, Ninjas vs. pirates, Punch a man in the nuts[/tags]

Insane interchanges – driver beware

I have no idea why I’m so fascinated with these crazy interchanges, but as much as I wouldn’t want to drive them, I do like to check out the pictures.

bad_interchanges-new_zealand

That’s just one.  There are another half-dozen or so on the hosting site.

[tags]Insane interchanges, Driver beware, Who would want to drive there?[/tags]

LED corks

The perfect addition to your alcoholic-drinks section at home, the Boozehound emergency light is a lighted cork for sealing your liquor bottles.

cork_light2.jpgTo prepare for a natural disaster, you need to be equipped. Maximize your survival rate by inundating any and everything that could possibly be used for food, water, and light. In regard to the latter, boozehounds will rejoice to hear that having multiple bottles of “drank” may indeed save them.

Around here, we’re all about the safety. And what’s more important to safety than making sure you have proper lighting for picking your poison in a power outage?

[tags]Boozehound, LED corks, liquor, Safety first[/tags]

The size of us, and other things

While playing around with the incredibly cool StumbleUpon tool last night (using the Firefox plugin for convenience), I found a site which shows the size of various celestial bodies in a super-easy to understand visual manner.

size-of-us.jpg

Makes our Sun look not so big, doesn’t it?

[tags]The size of us, Celestial bodies, Visual guide to universal sizing[/tags]

Another of my new interests

After years of not playing around with it, I have gotten back into POV-Ray. I am working through the tutorial that comes with the program (also available in HTML format) and another cool tutorial I found online that looks helpful. So far, here is the best image I have achieved on my own.

MySpheres_480.jpg

Unimpressive to most, I am sure, but I am trying to figure out how to make marbles. A scene of mostly clear, slightly internally reflective, colored glass balls (with a couple of reflective metal ones for effect) is helping me to understand a little how some of the lighting settings work. I know there are lots of folks who could crank out this kind of thing in minutes, but I still know so little about the scene description language that I am taking it slowly and learning just a tiny bit at a time.

And most importantly – I am having fun learning something with no obvious career motivation.

And I still don’t know why posts are showing up 2-3 times each.  They are only in the database a single time.  I’ve had to go to a couple of Dr. appointments today with my youngest son to find out he had a fleck of metal in his eye and to get part of the metal removed, so I haven’t had more than about the 3 minutes I’ve spent on this post to worry about the site.  Perhaps tomorrow the wife will actually do something useful and allow me time to do things for me.

[tags]POV-Ray, Ray Tracing, Marbles[/tags]

Refrigerator LED signs

fridge_lights-1.jpgOn Instructables, there is a guide to making your own refrigerator LED light kit, so you can put up cool (no pun intended) signs or images. It seems to be a pretty easy project, requiring just a few out-of-the-ordinary things to make.

Turn your fridge into a canvas for LED art. Any passerby can place and relocate the magnetic LEDs any way they wish to create illuminated pictures and messages.

It’s great for high traffic kitchens and It’s fun for kids and adults alike.


fridge_lights-2.jpg

. . .

  • Super Shield conductive nickel paint
  • 1/4″ copper tape used for circuit board repair (optional)
  • Spray Paint
  • 10mm LEDs in quantities and colors of choice
  • 330 Ohm surface-mount resistors
  • One 4.5 Volt, 500 milliamp AC power supply
  • 1/8″ diameter x 1/16″ NdFeB Nickel plated disc magnets
  • 1/4″ diameter x 1/16″ NdFeB Nickel plated disc magnets
  • 5 minute epoxy
  • Masking tape
  • 1/4″ Quilter’s tape

More details on the ingredients listed above as well as necessary tools for the project are available in the full Instructables guide.

As a side-note to those few readers who know much about the late life of the Tandy Color Computer, this project was done by none other than the amazing Sock Master, creator of some of the most amazing (at the time) demo-scene style work ever seen on the CoCo.

[tags]DIY, LED, LEDs, refrigerator lights, Sock Master[/tags]

Colorful Book of skulls

I’m artistically inept, but I love looking at good art. Of course, for me, good art often differs from what many others think is good (and no, I’m not talking about pr0n). As an example, I think the colorful skulls in this awesome book, Skull Project, are amazing and very artistic.

Skull Project, a book based on Skull Reference by Matthew Amey, is a collection of finished pieces created by artists from all over the world. Each artist was given a page from the Skull Reference book and asked to create a finished drawing or painting based on the unique position of the skull they were given. Skull Project is the culmination of those efforts is available here as a limited edition hardbound copy. Each book is individually numbered and comes with a slipcase to protect this fantastic collection of artwork.

I’d try to put more from the site or make all the links work, but the fuck-heads running the site put in extra “protections” (easily worked around, but I spend enough time just getting posts together to bother with that extra effort) against having their work used. I’m taking a fair use clip here to let my readers know why I think this is a project worth spending money on. If the sellers want any more help from outside, they might consider making it easier to provide enough information to my readers to drive some of them to the project.

skull-project.jpg

I had to spend far too much time just to get that image so you could see why this project is worth checking out. At this point, I’m not even sure I care if anyone goes and thinks about buying. I want to buy one of the books for myself (they are $150), but I don’t even care if anyone else is interested enough to look now. I suppose in the future I should just make my HTML img tags point to their servers so I can leech bandwidth instead of assuming responsibility for my digital footprint. (via boingboing)

[tags]Skull Project, Skull Reference, Sellers who make it hard for bloggers to send visitors their way[/tags]