Hasta La Gadget!

Hobby Inside is a South Korean professional LEGO building crew. They make multi-layered and very detailed LEGO dioramas for display. While most of their work depict cities and landscapes, they also have a handful of dioramas that feature monsters and mechas duking it out on a wrecked city, like this unmistakable nod to Pacific Rim:

I’ve also included Hobby Inside’s two other robot versus kaiju pieces in the gallery below. One features a Mothra lookalike – Hobby Inside calls it Mothle – while the other has a Godzilla lookalike called Legora and a giant robot called Insider-V (perhaps a mix of Gundam and Combattler-V?).

What I really love about Hobby Inside’s dioramas is how they use LEGO to represent motion and objects that I would never have imagined could be depicted with LEGO. Things like the vapor trail behind the Jaeger’s missiles, Mothle’s web, Legora’s flame and smoke rings and the exhaust coming out of Insider-V’s rocket fist.

If you want to see more of these dioramas, Hobby Inside has detailed breakdowns on its website. The site is in Korean, but it’s worth checking out just for the pictures.

[via OliveSeon & Hobby Inside via io9]

If you need to send someone a message but have to be discrete about it, then you might want to give Crypstagram a shot. It’s an image sharing site does more than just provide you with a means to share images with other people.

That’s because the image has to go through their system first before it’s ready for sharing.

What Crypstagram is encrypt your image by embedding a message into it. When I say “embed,” I do mean embed because it doesn’t just add text onto your image as an overlay or caption. It actually incorporates your message into the image and distorts it in the process.

Just select the image you want to use, upload it to the site, and add your message. Once it’s encrypted, you’ll end up with a surreal, glitched out image. You can then choose to share it or download it to your computer so you can email it to the recipient for decryption – which can only be achieved if you have the proper password.

Try it out for yourself here.

Aww, look at the cute little kitty candles… Now light them up and enjoy their warming glow.

Now watch in horror as their tiny insides are slowly revealed…

These nightmare-inducing candles, titled The Devil’s Pet were conceptualized by Icelandic artist Thorunn Arnadottir using a tiny aluminum skeleton inside of a wax casting.

Sweet little kittens are transformed in a fire. Crawling from the ashes come forth grinning metallic devils with sharp claws and fire blazing in their eyes.

Now that’s quite a visual.

Due to popular demand, Thorunn plans on producing these candles via a Kickstarter campaign in the near future. If you’re interested in grabbing some once they’re available, hit this link to sign up for the artist’s newsletter. It’s too bad they won’t be ready for Halloween. Oh well, there’s always next year.

[via Excused from This via Everything Floats]

Like many of us, Terry Burton and Jinna Kim find themselves witnessing – and contributing to – the slow but inevitable death of paper books. The husband and wife team decided to make a functional artwork that bridges the gap between eBooks and their ancestors. Their eBookmark not only lets you save a book page, it also lets you specify the paragraph where you stopped. How does it work? With a minimalist touch interface, of course.

The eBookmark has a balsa wood body. Inside are LEDs, a touch-sensitive strip, a battery and an Atmel 8-bit processor. It also has a switch up top for pointing out either the left or right page and can be extended to accommodate larger books.

I know that Terry and Jinna made the eBookmark as an artistic statement, but it would’ve been nicer if it had a motion sensor that caused the LEDs to turn on only when the book is opened. If you’re actually looking for a more precise bookmark, check out this bookmark by Fred & Friends.

[via 7 Electrons via Hack A Day]

By the time you go to bed at night, you’re pretty worn down from the day’s events. Your life bar must be close to zero. Some sleep will help and that life bar will be full in the morning. If you want a visual reminder of this, just add a pixelated The Legend of Zelda life bar to your headboard.

These 8-bit hearts were attached to a wood headboard with screws and they make this bed look extra geeky. To make one yourself, just make a pattern of the hearts, then use a jigsaw to cut them out of wood. After that, just add paint. You now have a cool life bar on your headboard.

You can get complete instructions on this project over at Our Nerd Home.*

*(Not guaranteed to give you extra lives.)

[via Craftzine via Nerd Approved]