Hasta La Gadget!

I guess you could say that most old arcade machines were made from wood, but it was mostly laminated pressboard, covered with shiny vinyl decals. Designer Love Hultén’s latest arcade build offers a much more timeless wooden styling.

The R-Kaid-42 is a complete arcade console built into an elegant handcrafted walnut wood box. Inside, you’ll find a pair of high quality arcade joysticks and buttons, at the bottom of the stack is a compact PC with an SSD drive for emulating games. The joysticks themselves are wireless, and have solid brass handles and ball tops.

To play, simply detach the magnetic sections of the R-Kaid-42, screw in the joystick handles, and connect it to a VGA monitor and power. The system comes with a clean and minimal front-end for a variety of emulators which can play over 20,000 different games. All of this can be operated entirely using the arcade controls.

Best of all, you can actually buy the R-Kaid-42 for yourself over on Etsy. It’s selling for $970(USD), and while that might seem like a lot of money, I think it’s a steal for all of the work that went into this thing.

I don’t know about you, but when I travel, I always ask for a window seat. There’s just something about glancing out of the window and seeing the whole world (well, part of it anyway) extending in all directions. That’s the same feeling I get when I spend time with friends and family or when I see the photos that we took from our last get-together.

And what better frame to house those precious memories than with the Air Frame?

It obviously looks familiar, because it was made to look like an airplane window, only instead of being a window to the world, it’s a window to your best and most meaningful memories – assuming you’ve got them printed out in 8″x10″s.

Tuck prized shots and family portraits into the Air Frame and glance out into the world that surrounds your heart when you need a break from the real world.

The Air Frame was designed by James Kim and retails for $59(USD) for one, or $119 for a set of three over at Generate, both of which are a whole lot cheaper than most airfares these days.

Having a good coffee grinder is essential to making a good cup of java. The great thing is that you can get lots of different beans and brew some great coffee to get you going each day. This coffee grinder is something else. It looks like a rocket ship, ready to lift off into space.

The hand-cranked HG one Grinder is supposed to be so sculpturally interesting that you’ll forget the amount of elbow grease you’ll have to put in to get your beans ground. The grinder uses conical burrs, constructed precisely so that you’ll get the best result in each of your grinds.

The HG one sounds pretty amazing for coffee connoisseurs, but you’ll have to fork over $900(USD) to get yours – and that’s a whole lot of beans.

[via NotCot]

Chandeliers add a certain flair to any room you put them in. They can be colorful or glittering with crystals, long or short, and wide or narrow, and fitted with lamps so they can aptly illuminate the room.

Forms of Nature is another chandelier, but it’s more of an art form since the light sculpture does more than just light things up when you turn it on.

Flicking that switch on will cast shadows of twisty and thorny vines and branches on your walls that looks the outline of a very creepy patch of woods. Kind of like the ones Red was running around in when she was running from her wolf of a grandmother.

Forms in Nature was created by Hilden & Diaz, which is a collaboration between artists Thyra Hilden and Pio Diaz.

The light sculpture is described as resembling and being inspired by Darwinist Ernst Haeckel’s drawings and plots of nature. It is described by its creators as “artwork with a light source surrounded by a dense and unruly tree and root system created in minature sculpture. The forest is mirrored around it’s horizontal central axis and forms a circle 360 degrees around the light source and thereby leads one onto the notion of a real world versus an underworld.”

Forms in Nature has been such a hit that Hilden & Diaz are currently working on launching a Kickstarter campaign to produce 100 pieces of the light sculpture.

[via Geekologie]

Tired of having your umbrella stolen or used by some random stranger when you need it the most? Designers Kim Seokhui, Kim Seongjin, and Kim Dasol hear you loud and clear, which is why they’ve come up with the Lizard Umbrella concept.

It might sound like a strange name for an umbrella they’re touting as a “self-protective” one. The inspiration for the name comes from the actual lizard, which ensures its survival by breaking its tail off in life-or-death situations.

The Lizard Umbrella can only be used by its owner when its respective key-slash-handle is inserted onto the end. The secret to the construction of the umbrella is the tip of its umbrella stem, which is embossed with lines that only match its rightful handle.

Without this key, the umbrella is rendered “less desirable”, warding off potential umbrella snatchers in the process. Though it might be better if the handle itself was part of the umbrella-opening mechanism, truly rendering it useless when not attached.

[via Yanko Design]