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.

Don Lee makes paintbrushes. Only his brushes aren’t designed to go anywhere near paint. Instead, the only surface the Nomad Brush will stroke is the glassy screen of an iPad.

The Nomad Brush, which will go on sale in February, works just like any other capacitive touch-screen stylus. It has a conductive shaft and tip, only in this case the tip is made from fine bristles, not a foam or rubber nubbin.

I have been using the rubber-tipped Alupen stylus on my iPad for the last few days, and it makes a huge difference to drawing and writing on screen. Would a brush be even better?

Maybe, but perhaps not this one. A painter will use many different brushes, and not just for size but for feel. I prefer a short, worn and stubby hogs-hair brush for oil-painting, and if you’re painting watercolors you’ll need something like a sable brush that you can load up with liquid and smoothly lay it onto the paper. The Nomad looks more like a watercolor brush, and this might make it too soft to give a good feel on a screen.

The only way to find out is to test it, but as the iPad’s screen doesn’t allow for any kind of pressure variations, a pen will probably do just fine.

Nomad Brush product page [Nomad Brush]

See Also:

• Korean iPhone Stylus: It's Made of Meat
• Fingers-On With The Chunky Alupen iPad Stylus
• An iPhone Stylus to Save Your Fingers From the Cold
• Pogo Stylus: The Most Useless iPhone Accessory. Ever
• Pointless iPhone Stylus Gets its Own Case

The cat is out of the bag, Sony! We just walked into Sony’s CES press conference and look at what we found hanging around in the back? It’s Sony’s Xperia Arc, and it is one slim smartphone. No, like it is really thin and it has a concave back, which reminds us a lot of the Nexus S. According to the placard it has a “Reality Display” with a Mobile BRAVIA Engine. We’re not sure what those fancy words mean, but the display (we’re assuming it is 4.2 inches) is definitely extremely bright and crisp — like AMOLED bright and crisp. We don’t know the exact measurements of the handset, but it looks just as thin as the iPhone… if not thinner. Other than that we know it has an mini-HDMI port and runs Android 2.3 (confirmed on the device itself!). It also has a Sony Exmor R camera. We should be learning much more about this thing as soon as it becomes “official,” but until then hit the break for some hands-on shots.

Update: Ah, finally some confirmed specs. The Arc does in fact have a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 4.2-inch display, 8.3 megapixel camera, and measures just 8.7mm thick. Hit the break for the full PR and specs.

Continue reading Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc first hands-on!

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc first hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 19:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bike rack should do two things. It should be secure, and it should be easy to get your bike in and out. A secondary consideration is the amount of bikes that can fit onto one bank of racks, and last comes aesthetics. Thankfully, the just-installed artist-designed bike racks in San Francisco conform to all of these requirements, and they do it with some clever and sometimes site-specific style.

The racks are the winners of the Treasure Island competition, and the designs are inspired by the SF Bicycle Coalition’s plans for this reclaimed island in the San Francisco Bay. Here they are, along with some pros and cons.

Todd Gilens’ sloped (and winning) design (above) is based on the diagonal street plan of Treasure Island, although it looks like it could be inspired by the hundred of abandoned bikes found in any city, fallen and stomped into death. You can find it on Market and 6th.

Pros: Locking points are almost identical to those of a standard staple-shaped rack.

Cons: Too tempting for drunken vandals to mash a bike until it matches the bends of the rack.

Kirk Scott’s Map Rack is shaped like Treasure Island, and the conceit is that an internal cross-hairs pinpoints the actual street location of the rack on the island. You can find this one in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: Almost identical to a standard rack. Easy to line up a lot of them in a small space. Extra cross of metal for better locking.

Cons: The extra bars are thin, encouraging bad locking. Every rack is different, making it harder to lock-up with your routine style.

Ryan Dempsey’s Wave Rack represents the waves that will engulf Treasure Island when the next big earthquake strikes, just before the very island itself liquifies due to being built on soft, reclaimed land and its building sink into the earth. Actually, it just references the waves in the Bay. You can find it near Scott’s rack, in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: The main legs are vertical enough and close enough to work like a proper rack.

Cons: Takes up a lot of space. Has annoying crest section to catch on handlebars and baskets. Reminds residents of impending, unavoidable doom.

New Artist-Designed Bike Racks in San Francisco [San Francisco Bike Coalition. Thanks, Teri!]

See Also:

• Our Bike Racks, Ourselves: Crowdsourcing Two-Wheeled Parking …
• Over-Designed Petal-Like Bike-Rack
• England Gets NYC-Reject Bike Racks
• Bike Rack Art Installation Shines in New York City
• Cyclehoop Turns Every Street-Sign Into a Bike Rack
• Bike Coalition Wants to See Your Rack

Some of you, dear Gizmodo readers, have lovely families who celebrate the holidays with Hallmarkian rigor. Others…don’t you realize that duct tape wasn’t meant for lips? More »