Hasta La Gadget!

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]

I’ve seen USB flash drives crammed into all sorts of things over the years, but there’s something just so wrong it’s right about these flash drives stuck inside of pink rubber erasers.

They’re made by Etsy seller JustJest, and neatly mounted inside of those iconic Pink Pearl erasers we all used in school at some point or another. As I mentioned in the headline, my only concern would be that actually rubbing the eraser on paper would eventually wear it down to the circuitry inside and start messing with your actual data. Of course, you probably wouldn’t ever use it as an eraser. And it’s not likely that you’ll get too much use out of it as a storage device either, since it only comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB versions.

Still, it’s a cool design, and I’d own one just to see what people said when I pulled it out to use it. The 2GB version is selling for $20(USD) right now, while you’ll need to contact JustJest for other memory sizes.

It’s-a-me! Dovahkiin! This Skyrim mod adds the Mushroom Kingdom to the land of Tamriel and lets you pretend to be a character in a videogame who’s pretending to be a character from another videogame. It’s Super Skyrim Bros.!

The mod was made by Skyrim Nexus member clintmich. When installed, the mod places a house near Winterhold. When your character sleeps at the house, he or she will begin dreaming and enter the Mushroom Kingdom. There you’ll find Goombas, Koopa Troopas, Bowser and the Princess, which of course needs saving. While you can’t just jump on the baddies to defeat them, you’ll find Mario-themed weapons in the dreamworld. You can also pick up coins and exchange them for prizes.

Take a warp pipe to Skyrim Nexus to download the mod.

[via Reddit]

One of the defining features of Diablo III is my utter disappointment with it. Another is its skill system, which lets players shuffle their characters’ learned skills at any point in the game. On the other hand, Torchlight II uses a more traditional skill tree system. Players can only reallocate the last three skill points they used, otherwise they’re stuck with their build. Unless you had an item called a Potion of Respec, which lets you reallocate all of your skill points. This hack lets you have as many bottles of that potion as you want.

The hack involves replacing a file inside a folder in the Torchlight II application with an edited version, which was uploaded by Runic Games Fansite member chewtoy. That edited file will fill the player’s Shared Stash with Potions of Respec. That’s 40 potions, but I guess you can re-paste the file if you need more. Here’s a guide courtesy of YouTuber MaguzEx. Skip to 1:10 in the video for the walkthrough:

You can download the edited file on Runic Games Fansite. Note that doing this will essentially replace whatever is in your Shared Stash with the potions, so be sure to move the contents of your Shared Stash elsewhere before doing this hack if you don’t want to lose those items. I highly recommend backing up your saves just in case something goes wrong. Also, other members of RGF seem to be having trouble making the hack work in non-Steam copies of Torchlight II, i.e. the hack might not work if you didn’t buy the game from Steam.

[via GameRanx]

LEGOs can be used to make all sorts of contraptions, but I never thought about making a record player out of them. But that hasn’t stopped numerous people from attempting the task over the years – as you’ll find if you do a search on YouTube.

YouTuber Old Music on Vinyl’s LEGO turntable is fully-functional, and has LEGO and Technic components for the base, mechanism and the parts that hold the arm. The platter itself isn’t a LEGO part though, and is actually a giant gear from a toy kit called “The Gear Box.” Of course when I say “fully-functional,” that doesn’t mean that records play properly – something about the instability of the player causes records to play with a horrible, warbly tone that sounds like it came out of a horror movie. Or maybe something you’d hear in the background after Rapture floods in BioShock 2.

Wow, I’m going to have nightmares with that song going through my head now. That sounded like ABBA on quaaludes. So maybe LEGO isn’t the most practical tool for building a good record player, but it’s still kind of cool that people are trying.