Hasta La Gadget!

Artistic breakthrough? Religious devotion? The work of someone with altogether too much free time on their hands? I vote for all of the above. This recreation of the Last Supper is 14 feet long and four feet high. It took around 1,000 hours to create. Also, it’s made entirely of laundry lint.

Michigan resident Laura Bell is behind the massive remake of da Vinci’s famous work. The piece required 800 hours of laundry, in which Bell washed loads of towels, in order to get the perfect colors for Jesus and his disciples. Once the laundry was done, the Last Supper recreation took 200 hours to actually piece together.

The piece will be displayed at a Ripley’s Believe it or Not–a curator of Last Supper recreations. It also has versions of the renaissance painting remade on toast, a dime, and one recreated with rice.

This 15.6-inch TFT LCD screen from Green House may look like any other LCD monitor (except that maybe it’s a little smaller than we’re used to), but it has a magic trick: It runs on USB, which makes it one of the largest USB display’s we’ve seen.

With a distinctly average 400:1 contrast ratio and an acceptable 1366 × 768 pixel resolution, this monitor won’t out-perform any other screens you may have, but the gimmick is that it not only receives its image through a USB 2.0 port but is also powered by it. That’s right – there’s no external power-supply needed. The Green House monitor can run off just one USB port, which is more than can be said of the power-hungry iPad.

It’s not particularly cheap, though, at around $215 when it ships in Japan later this month. You could buy a decent 24-incher for less. On the other hand, you could use that 24-incher and this one together with just one port. Or, if you’re feeling a little ambitious, it’s possible to run up to six of these things simultaneously from one computer.

15.6 inch USB Sub Display [Green House via Crunch Gear]

See Also:

• Nine-Inch Touch-Screen USB Monitor is a Great Sidekick
• Tiny External USB Monitor Costs Almost $50 per Inch
• Mini USB Monitors Give Pleasure with Every Tiny Inch

Can you really put a price tag on funny pictures of cats? Yes, yes you can. And that price is $30 million. That’s the amount of money a group of venture capitalists have pumped into Cheezburger, the company behind the Lolcats phenomenon.

Of course, we’re underselling I Can Has Cheezburger by simple calling it “funny pictures of cats.” After all, these are really, really popular funny pictures of cats. These are pictures of cats that get more than 375 million page view a month.

Foundry Group, a VC that also pumped a lot of money into Zynga (the social gaming company behind FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and the like), is leading the investment. Foundry Group’s director, Brad Field, had this to say about the deal,

In just over three years, Ben Huh and his team have amassed a treasure trove of websites that mainstream consumers love. Already challenging the online traffic of traditional media companies, Cheezburger has an opportunity to surpass the industry heavyweights to become the world’s largest humor network.”

Cheezburger also runs the sites Fail Blog, Memebase, and The Daily What.

GameStop may think that people still like boxes, but that’s not stopping the company from diving into the digital distribution realm. It bought up Flash game purveyor Kongregate last summer and now that anty acquisition just dropped a big egg on Android with the launch of Kongregate Arcade. It’s basically a separate mobile app store from the Android Market, but with a few important differences. Biggest is that these games, numbering over 300, are all free and are all Flash-based. This is said to “solve the game discovery problem” by popping out of the Market but certainly won’t do much to solve revenue problems for devs working on premium mobile games. Of course to get all the games you’ll still need to find this app, but it’s there. Right now. We checked.

Continue reading Kongregate Arcade hits Android, GameStop shoving free Flash games straight onto your smartphone

Kongregate Arcade hits Android, GameStop shoving free Flash games straight onto your smartphone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know those movies when a filmmaker wanders the streets dressed in a beret and peers at potential shots through a frame made by his fingers and thumbs? Well, the Rec concept camera does just that, only instead of your thumbs the frame swings from the side of the camera, and instead of a beret you get nothing. Nothing at all.

The Rec’s, designed by Dongyeon Kim, is made to be fast to use. The giant viewfinder also features a transparent LCD screen, presumably similar to some see-through game’n’watch games from the 1980s. When in playback mode, this screen can be seen from both sides, letting more people view images at the same time.

I don’t see that this would be any quicker to deploy than a regular camera, as Kim claims, and there’s the additional disadvantage of poor accuracy. This kind of frame-finder depends on you looking through it from the right angle to actually make it correspond with the photo.

Still, it looks like fun to use, and the resolution of the viewfinder is the same as that of your eyes. And putting such a thin and delicate screen in a flexy plastic bezel is also a great idea. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Picture Perfect Shot [Yanko]

See Also:

• Slanted Camera Concept is Face-Friendly
• Concept Case Adds Camera to iPad
• Flip-Open Clamshell Camera Protects Itself