Consolejockey

It’s a Trash Bag, It’s a Teddy Bear, It’s Both!

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:52:50 +0000

I saw this over on Dinosaurs and Robots, a company is making trash bags in the shape of teddy bears. An idea that’s time has come! Imagine this on your street corner on trash day. Image it and try not to scream.

C.M.Y.K. on T.V.

admin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:12:42 +0000

A co-worker just sent me a link to C.M.Y.K. - America’s Top Graphic Designer. It’s a reality show about competing graphic designers, like Project Runway only with print instead of clothes. There’s no mention that I can find on when it will air or on what channel, but the site does mention the show will make a stop here in Austin. At any rate, I’ll be holding out for R.G.B. - America’s Top Media Designer.

Ground Control to Major Teddy

admin — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:18:06 +0000

A team of British college students and grade school kids made history with the first sub orbital teddy bear EVA. OK, technically it wasn’t a space walk, but still teddy bears in space!

This is ground control to Major Teddy. You’ve really made the grade. And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear (Shirts? Seriously, why shirts?). Now its time to leave the capsule if you dare.

I’m made of paper, Dave.

admin — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:35:31 +0000

I’ve never really understood the fascination that exists for paper craft. You spend hours gluing or taping something together that is basically a facsimile of, most of the time, an object you could by off the shelf for not a lot of money. And in the end what you get is made of paper. Fragile, shoddy paper. But occasionally I see something, as the marketing and sales folks I know would say, that resonates. Like for example the way too cute paper craft HAL9000.

You can download the file to make you own cute psychotic AI here.

This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

iPhone Flute App Thing

admin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:55:44 +0000

Ocarina is an innovative yet somehow wrong, very wrong, application for the iPhone. You blow into the mic and use the touch screen to tap notes. Here’s the intro to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven played with this, uh, instrument.

WTF of the Day - Cat Flushing The Toilet

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:00:59 +0000

They compiled some video, they wrote a song, they put it on YouTube.

More songs by the same guy.

Nagel + Leia = 80’s Flashback Times 10

admin — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:34:40 +0000

StarWars.com has a brief write up on two great tastes that taste awesome together. Lucas Online senior designer Craig Drake has created a Patrick Nagel inspired print of Princess Leia. It can be yours for only US $49.99. Also, check out the Leia slave girl outfit, which I had no idea you could buy up until I saw the very appropriately placed ad on this write up.

I remember downloading way to many Patrick Nagel prints on my 300 bps modem back in the day. Due to the limited color palette of his work, Nagel’s prints were easily compressed to the GIF format. This made them prevalent on every bulletin board around in the late 80’s and early 90’s. So basically Drake hit a bull’s eye here, combining two things many geeks are very familiar with.

The Segway May Be Lame, But Its Inventor Is Not

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:08:19 +0000

I just got through watching this series of videos of Dean Kamen from the All Things D: D6 conference, where he talks about his team’s work on the mind blowingly cool prosthetic arm nicknamed the “Luke Arm.” Due to the increase in effectiveness of body amour and huge advances military field medicine, wounded soldiers are far more likely to survive serious injuries than they were even in the first Gulf War. Though more soldiers are coming home alive, they often do so with missing limbs. Kamen and his team were tasked to create a new generation of prosthetic arms that come as close as ingenuity and technology can to replacing a missing limb.

The results of Kamen and his team’s work shown in the videos is inspiring and a reminder of two things. Design is all about problem solving and due to that, design, along with engineering and a host of other disciplines, can make a huge difference in people’s lives.

Echoes of Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:48:09 +0000

I’ve known about Dark Side of the Rainbow for years, even saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse way back when, but up until recently I had never known about the mysterious connection between Pink Floyd’s Echoes and the final act of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wired’s Listening Post has a write up along with some YouTube videos of the film synced with Floyd’s epic psychedelic rock song. Talk about when worlds collide.

I’ve been both a Pink Floyd fan and a fan of Kubrick and Clarke for a while. I’ve seen the film a bunch of times and read the first three Space Odyssey books in high school, about the same time I got into Floyd via the live double album Delicate Sound of Thunder (I know, I got on the scene pretty late.) About six months ago I rented David Gilmour’s Remember That Night, which he, with the recently departed Rick Wright, performed Echoes in it’s entirety. Bands just don’t write songs like this anymore. If it can’t be condensed into a three minute top ten hit, the major labels won’t go near it. But I digress.

Forget about Dark Side of the Rainbow, Echoes and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sync up eerily well. And Pink Floyd band members won’t go on record as saying that it’s just a coincidence. I want more. I want Explosions in the Sky to create a sound track for the end of Solaris, Nine Inch Nails needs to score the end fight scene of Aliens, or how about Radiohead re-do the sound track to anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to try and figure what sci-fi film Acid Mother’s Temple And The Cosmic Inferno’s half-hour-plus Starless And Bible Black Sabbath syncs up with.

I Just Cuiled Myself

admin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:58:10 +0000

The web is abuzz with Cuil, a new search engine that claims it’s gonna eat Google’s lunch. One problem I see right off the bat is the name “Cuil”, it does not work well as a verb. Though “Google” doesn’t really either, so who knows.