Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve always liked using the clock applications on my smartphone. You never really think about the design of the clock faces, but apparently they can be copyrighted works. Recently, Apple was sued for copying the Swiss Federal Railway’s clock design in iOS.

Apple will pay the Swiss Federal Railway $21 million for using their clock design in iOS without their permission. It’s fairly obvious to even the untrained eye that the clocks are almost identical. The initial iconic design was created in 1944 by Hans Hilfiker, an employee of the Swiss company. It has been in place in Swiss train stations ever since and has been honored by the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and London Design Museum (London).

Mondaine, a Swiss watch manufacturer, currently owns the rights to the analog clock and watch design. Now, since Apple paid the railway, they also have the rights, albeit digital ones.

[via C|Net via DVice]

Most of the 3D printed objects we’ve featured have that 3D printed look: a single-colored material that has sharp and exact edges or grooves, something that looks like a prototype. Which is why I was really blown away by this piece made by Greg Petchkovsky:

Even though he didn’t have a 3D scanner, Greg was able to make a 3D model of this particular section of the sandstone wall by taking pictures of it from different angles, which were then fed into Agisoft PhotoScan to create a 3D model. In case you were wondering, the parts that look like LEGO blocks are also part of the piece; Greg made them from scratch using a 3ds Max. After much tweaking and customizing, Greg sent his custom model to Shapeways to be printed. Greg painted some parts of the model to make it even more lifelike before finally placing it on the chipped corner of the sandstone wall.

Looking at Greg’s work, I can’t help but think of what further questions this will raise about the value of art. We can already make perfect copies of music and movies; what will happen when anyone can print perfect copies of sculptures, clothes and the like? I guess that’s for tomorrow’s artists and consumers to decide. For now you can check out Greg’s Instructables page for more details on his project.

[via Reddit]

I recently had to quit caffeine for health reasons, so I’m always on the lookout for tasty beverages that I can substitute for my old cup of coffee. One of my personal favorites – especially on a cold winter night – is a cup of warm herbal tea. And what better way to be served a cup of tea than by a robot?  I don’t expect to have a personal robot butler in my house any time soon, so I guess I’ll have to settle for this robot tea infuser instead.

Kikkerland’s quirky little robot-shaped infuser is made from perforated stainless steel, and has bendy arms which help it fit whatever size mug you happen to have lying around. Say, doesn’t some other shiny metal robot have flexible arms? Though Bender’s arms are usually found raising a bottle of Pabst Blue Robot or Olde Fortran Malt Liquor, rather than a more civilized cup of Earl Grey.

You can grab the robot tea infuser over on Amazon for just about $9(USD).

Here’s a do-it-yourself project for you this weekend. All you need is an iPhone 4S, a low-power Bluetooth sensor, a balsa wood cradle, a 24-inch Nylon Parachute, an iOS program created in techBASIC, and tons of hard work. Mike Westerfield, who authored the project, says that he wanted to create a rocket that can collect data such as acceleration, rotation, altitude, and pressure. Westerfield used a standard booster and glued plugs into the payload tube. Inside the payload is a balsa wood holder for the iPhone and SensorTag.

In case you were wondering, the SensorTag is actually a Bluetooth development kit for wireless sensor applications and it is manufactured by TI. The next crucial step will be to download the software package that he prepared and to “copy and paste” the contents into the techBASIC program.

Westerfield also used a 24 -inch nylon parachute to support the rocket upon landing. Westerfield has launched the rocket a couple of times already, as seen in the video above. “The rocket lifted off smoothly, arcing into the air. The parachute deployed. Landing broke off a fin, but pulling the payload out, I saw the iPhone was still working, still collecting acceleration, rotation and pressure,” he writes on his blog. To learn more about the iPhone-operated rocket, you can visit Mike Westerfield’s blog.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Samsung Galaxy S3 overtakes the iPhone 4S as the world’s best-selling smartphone in Q3, Jimmy Kimmel pranks passerbys with the iPhone 4S, claiming it is the iPhone 5,

While physical books and magazines are clearly going the way of the dodo bird, one genre of print which is still going strong is the graphic novel. And you can’t mention graphic novels these days without mentioning The Walking Dead. Now, you’ll have the perfect place to stash your issues, courtesy of these zombie silhouette bookends.

Of course, they’re also good for books like The Zombie Combat Manual and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. They’re made out of solid steel, and the only thing better would be if they were splashed with a little bit of red lacquer for blood spatter effect. I guess you could always do that yourself.

You can grab a pair of these zombie bookends over on Fancy for $40(USD).

[via Crnchy]