Villain in a buckle, alien power! Let the disembodied villain use you as his exo-suit. Freakshop proprietor Christopher Genovese made this awesome oversized belt buckle featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s sworn enemy. I’m not sure how large the buckle is exactly, but it’s probably as large as a child’s head.
Christopher made the buckle out of urethane resin. Then he painted it by hand and finished it with a polyurethane clear coat.
Christopher can also add a mount to Krang if you’d rather hang him on a wall, but unless you have a person hanging on your wall, what fun is that?
Activate the Technodrome and head to Freakshop to order the buckle. It costs $190 (USD) and is made to order, so give Christoper one to three weeks to make you one.
Artist Rodrigo Costa Alexandrino of the deviantART Corps unleashed this “double fan art” on the hapless walls of the Internet. He calls it Adventure on Titan, and it features Finn & BMO trying to rescue Princess Bubblegum from a wrong-teous Jake.
Rodrigo also made a gif that summarizes how he made the illustration.
Reddit dweller Webberley made an action figure of Yes Man, the Claptrap of the Fallout universe. Webberley made the action figure out of cardboard, wood, plastic and various parts from other action figures. His arms, for example, were from a Dr. Octopus action figure.
Here’s a few more shots of the walking, talking infinite scrap metal mine.
Webberley said he’s made around 50 custom action figures over the years, including ones based on other Fallout characters.
We’ve seen a hexacopter with six legs, but this quadcopter takes after birds instead of spiders. This particular quadcopter is Vishwa Robotics’ test unit. New Scientist reports that the company is developing leg add-ons for “small US air force drones.” The legs will allow drones to perch on branches, wires and other objects in order to survey and conserve energy.
Vishwa Robotics founder Bhargav Gajjar modeled the legs after those of the American kestrel. A computer controls the drone’s landing based on footage from a camera mounted on the drone: “Just like a real bird, the drone has to brake sharply just above its landing site and perform a controlled stall in order to touch down.” The legs’ strong claws allow a drone to stay upright without using any power. In addition, drones can also use the legs to walk short distances.
Vishwa Robotics is also testing its legs on fixed-wing drones, bringing us that much closer to seeing tiny Valkyries.
Medicom has released a 400% (11″ tall) Bearbrick of the 60 meter-tall Colossal Titan, one of the giants terrorizing the poor citizens in the world of Shingeki no Kyojin, aka Attack on Titan. I’m not sure if there’s a 1% bearbrick inside.
This horrifying bear is limited to 500 units and is available only to Japanese residents, going for￥7,140 (~$70 USD) each. Bite your browser and breach Bearbrick’s walls to order.
Jimmy aka 6kyubi6 made a working Star Wars-themed pinball machine using LEGO. Aside from its moving parts and different colored lights, the machine also has various minifigs and figures of Star Wars characters, including Luke, Darth Vader, Chewie, Artoo and even Jabba the Hutt.
Jimmy made the machine for a Brickpirate contest. Here’s a shot of the machine all lit up:
There’s a short video of the machine in action below, as well as more images of the pinball machine on his Flickr page.
Oscilloclock shop owner Aaron’s latest offering is based on a vectorscope, a special kind of oscilloscope used to analyze the quality of television or video signals. Like its brethren, the digital age has reduced the need for vectorscopes, but Aaron can make them useful again as clocks.
Like his other oscilloclocks – one of which we featured last year – the VectorClock uses Aaron’s custom controller board, which draws shapes on the screen by drawing circles, with certain parts of the CRT screen blanked out depending on the desired shape or character. Aaron is proud of this particular build, which is based on a Tektronix 520A vectorscope, because he was able to use nearly all of its exisiting circuits, thus minimizing internal modifications.
As you’ll see in the demo video below, the VectorClock can display the time and date in a variety of ways. It also has dimmable lighting and can even display words.
It looks like something you’ll find at the Darkwaters General Store. Contact Aaron if you want him to build you a VectorClock. He probably doesn’t accept bottle caps as payment.
I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.
According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:
And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:
They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.
Defend yourself from sword strikes and shark bites in the office with Thinkgeek’s Chainmaille Mail Necktie. It’s made of anodized aluminum, so I guess it will offer some sort of protection from corporate get-togethers.
The funny thing is, it’s the necktie part that isn’t genuine. I think it’s more of a choker with a huge pendant.
Ride to ThinkGeek and get the Chainmaille Necktie for $30 (USD). I’ll wait for the plate necktie.
We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.
Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?
If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:
And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.
That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.
Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.
Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.”
There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.
MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.
Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.
Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
