Hasta La Gadget!

Have you ever sat on a chair that seemingly looked sturdy, but eventually gave way under your butt? I have, and let me tell you, while it sounds funny, it’s extremely painful (and embarrassing!) Unfortunately, we only have the chair to blame… or don’t we?

I would say that would be true in most cases, except for the DRM chair. It doesn’t look particularly special – in fact, it looks pretty plain and poorly made, even. But what makes it different is the fact that it self-destructs after eight ‘sits’ or eight uses, whatever you want to call it. It’s fitted with a small sensor that keeps track of how many times it has been sat on. When the counter hits zero, the chair’s structural joints melt down and it essentially falls apart. Watch it in action in the video below:

The chair was made by a group of ECAL students for the worldwide art and engineering competition The Deconstruction.

[via Creative Applications Network via Dvice]

I’ve heard of corrugated cardboard being used to house computers, but this project takes cardboard computing to a whole new level. Niklas Roy used rubber bands, rope and cardboard to create a functional, mechanical computer and plotter.

Niklas Roy taught an electronic media class at Germany’s School of Art and Design Offenbach. The goal was to create a series of mechanical cardboard computers from scratch. Shown here is one of those machines. This fully operational NAND gate and plotter were designed out of Finnish cardboard. The complete system was assembled using super glue, adhesive tape and tie wraps and rubber bands.

The plotter has axles and slide rails made out of welding rods. There are two rotary dials and a switch, which move in a plane, controlling the movement of a pen as it “vectors” to produce low resolution graphics on a sheet of paper.

Be sure to check out Niklas’ blog for more of the contraptions built by the class. This is definitely an awesome project, and it makes you wonder what you could do at home, given enough time and ingenuity.

[via designboom]

The Tesla Model S is an undeniably cool vehicle. The car looks great and has zero emissions while offering very impressive performance. The car has been dinged in recent reviews over its driving distance, but any purely electric vehicle will produce range anxiety. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently showed off a relatively unknown feature that the Model S offers.

It turns out that the high-tech car will play any song you ask for whenever you ask for it. You don’t have to have the music on a connected iPod or smartphone either. You simply press the steering wheel button, tell the car what song you want to hear, and Musk says the car will go on the Internet, find a stream of the song, and begin playing it immediately – presumably using the car’s built-in 3G data connection.

From the video demo, it appears that the whole process happens impressively fast. I’ve owned a car with the Ford Sync system in the past that would play songs from my iPhone using voice commands, and the delay for that system and a local device appears to be about as long as the Model S needs to grab a song from the Internet.

Maybe I’m an old-fashioned geek, but I’m never really understood the interest in a bracelet or a watch that can notify you of what’s going on your smartphone. I mean, all you have to do when it beeps or vibrates his pull it out of your pocket to see what’s going on. It seems like that would be much easier than trying to remember what notification a specific color on a bracelet goes with.

If you like technology that keeps you from the first-world problem of having to pull your phone out of your pocket, a new product has landed on Kickstarter called the Embrace+. The device is a bracelet that has RGB LED lighting inside, which makes the bracelet glow. The color of the bracelet can be customized to notify you of just about anything your iPhone or Android device can do. Simply use the companion app to attach notification colors to events on your smartphone.

For instance, if you want bracelet to turn blue when a new Facebook post is made, it will do it. If you want the device to turn red when someone retweets your posts, you can do that too. You can even set the bracelet to show you a color when the battery on your smartphone is low, or you have an upcoming appointment.

If you want one of the Embrace+ bracelets, you’ll need to pledge $39(USD) or more and can expect delivery in June – assuming the project hits its rather lofty $220,000 funding goal by March 23, 2013.

Want to be part of the very possible future? Google has just announced that they will be giving U.S. residents the chance to be the first to own a Google Glass, the company’s much-hyped wearable computer. But don’t belt out God Bless America just yet. You have to prove to Google that you really want to own their computer.

Aside from being a resident of the United States, in order to be eligible to pre-order (yes, you’re going to pay) the headset you have to be at least 18-years-old, and finally you have to answer a simple question: “What would you do if you had Glass?” You must answer the question in 50 words or less and send your answer to Google via a Google+ or Twitter account with the hashtag #ifihadglass. Google will then choose 8,000 applicants to become “Glass Explorers.” If you’re one of those people, you’ll still have to fork over $1,500 (USD) to finally get a Glass. So what do you get in exchange for all that trouble? Watch Google’s new video to find out:

Head to the Google Glass website for the full instructions of the contest. Be sure to read the FAQ and Terms as well so you don’t screw up your application. If any other company required you to join a contest for a chance to give them $1500 of your money, that company would have been laughed out of business. But this is Google we’re talking about, and the Glass looks like no mere product.

[Google via Acquire]