Hasta La Gadget!

Light painting can be a pretty awesome technique, which involves the capture of a moving light source, using long-exposure photography. Photographers have created some pretty amazing images using the medium, but it can be complicated to pull off unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and have a camera with full manual exposure controls. Now the fine folks at Japan’s Takara Tomy Arts have released a little gadget and app combo which makes it easy for anyone with an iPhone or iPad to make their own light paintings.

This little penlight gadget, thats name roughly translates to “Oekaki: The Night Sky” provides a bright, point source of light, and works with a companion iOS app to let you record long-exposure images. Simply start up the app, place your phone in the included base (or stand up your iPad), and start drawing in space. The penlight itself lets you choose from combinations of cyan, magenta or yellow light in 8 levels each, providing for a total of 27 colors for your images, and you can shoot either stills or time-lapse video with the app.

You can check out the app and pen in action in this clip (though it is in Japanese, it’s pretty easy to follow), or you can download the app itself for free here – though you’ll really want to have the light pen or a good point light source to make it work. I tried it out with a laser pointer aimed at the wall and it worked pretty well.

The app and light pen combo makes it shockingly easy to create light paintings. While the gadget was designed for Japanese markets, you can pre-order one for worldwide shipment over at Gizmine now for $69.99 (USD) with an estimated ship date of November 20th.

Turn the lights out and light your candles. It’s Halloween in a matter of days and we all know that dark houses set the mood for a creepier atmosphere.

And what better candle could you possibly get for this ghoulish time of the year than this Bleeding Skull Candle from ThinkGeek?

The ‘bleeding’ part of its name isn’t just a name, because that’s what the candle actually does. Light it up and watch with horror as blood slowly pours out from one of its eye sockets.

The longer it burns, the more blood there will be.

It might be kind of difficult to clean up but it’s one of the funnest candles I’ve ever seen to date. Priced at $12.99(USD) It’s one of the many fun items you can find at ThinkGeek.

Some people like building machines that make doing some mundane task easier. Others, like Dan Grayber, do so in order for the machines to fulfill their own mechanical needs – whatever they may be.

Dan is an artist based in San Francisco and he builds complex machines that work best without humans. That’s probably because they were built with us humans taken out of the equation. Things might seem a bit harder to imagine at first, but once you see his creations, you’ll have to agree that they are pretty cool.

Objects are invented in order to satisfy particular needs, specifically, human needs. With my sculpture I investigate the concept of need when the human is removed from this equation. I do this by replacing the human with the object itself. My sculptures are invented only to sustain themselves, functioning as self-resolving problems.

Okay, I stand corrected. They aren’t pretty cool. They’re crazy awesome. The gallery below features more of Dan’s elaborate machine sculptures in all their standalone glory:

[via Laughing Squid]

Socks go missing all the time. I don’t know what about socks make them specifically so easy to lose, but every other month or so I find myself having to hit the store to buy a couple new pairs. Nothing extremely pressing, but annoying all the same.

But if you have a tendency to go ape crazy over missing socks, then you probably need the Smarter Socks system.

Created by Samy Liechti of Blacksocks, the system comes with socks embedded with RFID chips so tracking their usage is a breeze. All you have to do is run the sock through the scanner and it’ll show all sorts of useful (or useless?) information, like how many times the sock has been washed, when it was ordered, and if its still got its pair or not.

Really, what more can you want from your socks?

The Smarter Socks system, which includes the scanner and ten pairs of socks, and will cost $189(USD). Now $18.90 for a pair of socks seems expensive, but on the other hand, you’ll never have to worry about losing them.

[via Ubergizmo via Dvice]

Stories are more than just mere words on paper. They have the power to carry you off to faraway lands while making you care for characters as if they were your friends in real life. Stories can also serve as your temporary escape from the real world whenever you need to take a break from real life.

Given the power of said books, I think it’s just appropriate to pay homage to them at least once in a while. That’s exactly what Tori Iannario did by coming up with this series of Wrap Up With A Good Book scarves.

They’re basically lightweight scarves with text from some of the most renowned works in the literary world screenprinted on them, like Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, and Tale of Two Cities.

They’re a great gift for the librarian or English lit major in your life – though they might be a little difficult to read when they’re wearing one. The story scarves are available on Tori’s storiarts Etsy shop for $39.99(USD) each.

[via Buzz Patrol]