Hasta La Gadget!

Field notes goes au naturale. Image: Field Notes

Imagine eating a steak wrapped in fine leather. Preposterous, I know. But Field Notes, the brand behind the precious memo books of the same name, has accomplished a similar feat. Its paper pages, which are of course made of wood, are now also bound in wood. The company calls this new line of notebooks the Shelterwood edition.

The Shelterwood collection features covers cut from hand-selected cherry trees sustainably grown in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Sixty feet of cherry logs yield 5,000 feet of Field Notes’ “sheer veneer,” and waste from the endeavor, in the form of wood pellets, is used to heat the factory. Field Notes documented the process in a video on its site.

Sandwiched between the covers are 48 pages of Finch Fine “Soft White” 70-pound stock, the same paper you’ll find in the “America the Beautiful” edition notebooks. The ruling is a shade of green that Field Notes calls “Maidenhair,” and the inside covers feature text in a pleasing mossy green color. Three gold staples bind the pages together.

Use a Shelterwood Field Notes book to jot down your musings while traversing a pebble-strewn path in the woods, or to feel a bond with Gaia while you sip your organic, fair-trade espresso while jotting ideas for your startup’s next app. It’s $10 for a 3-pack. You’ll have to wait until spring to get them though.

High quality microscopes cost thousands of dollars and can be hard to operate and maintain. A group of researchers from Stanford University are close to changing that with a microscope that’s made mostly out of paper and costs less than a dollar to make.

The Foldscope was conceptualized by Jim Cybulski, James Clements and Asst. Prof. Manu Prakash. They were moved to develop the revolutionary microscope because they wanted to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases in developing countries. In his recent TED presentation, Asst. Prof. Prakash said that right now it can take months for patients in developing countries to get diagnosed and treated partly because microscopes are bulky, hard to maintain and expensive to acquire . So they set out to design a microscope that’s portable, easy to operate and can be mass produced at low costs. It looks like they succeeded.

In their paper, Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash. said that the Foldscope can provide a magnification of up to 2,000X depending on the lens used. All of its components can be packed on a single sheet of card stock, which can also serve as an instruction manual.  Foldscope is also resistant to impact and water. It’s so small that you can carry multiple Foldscopes in your pocket. The only part of the microscope that needs electricity is an LED, which can last over 50 hours on a button cell battery. Best of all, it only costs between $0.58 to $0.97 to make. Below is Asst. Prof. Prakash’ TED presentation about the Foldscope:

How amazing is that? A copy of Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash’s paper is available from the Cornell University Library archive. If you want to get your hands on one, head to the Foldscope team’s website and apply to become one of the their 10,000 beta testers.

[via Wired via Reddit]

Envelopes generally don’t get a lot of love—especially the ones holding big fatty bills that need payin’. Small consolation, but the privacy patterns that line the insides can actually be pretty awesome.

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The printed word is dying, but the printed keyboard is alive and kicking. And no, you won’t need a 3D printer to make one. A company called Novalia has made an incredibly thin Bluetooth keyboard made of photo paper, conductive ink and its proprietary electronic module.

Novalia made the keyboard to show off its advancements in printed technology, particularly the electronic module based on Nordic Semiconductor’s system-on-a-chip and a printing process that allows conventional printers to mass produce capacitive sensors.

Novalia’s technology could be used to make not just keyboards but other input devices as well, and existing printing presses could churn out hundreds of overlays with built-in sensors in a matter of minutes. Nordic Semiconductor says the module can last for up to nine months on a single CR2032 button cell battery.

I’m not sure if Novalia will make the keyboard available to the public. It does have Switchboard, a much simpler version of the keyboard on its online shop . That one’s made of foam board and has eight capacitive keys and sells for £25 (~$41 USD)

[via Geeky Gadgets & Nordic Semiconductor]

Just last week Facebook announced its brand new Paper app which was basically a new way for Facebook users to view their News Feed. The app has since been made available for download but only to those using iPhones and are living in the US. Now if you’re wondering why you might have heard the name “Paper” before, it is because back in 2012, developers FiftyThree announced an app called Paper. The app is completely different from Facebook’s app in the sense that it is a drawing app and has nothing to do with social media (apart from the fact that you can share your drawings). (more…)

Facebook Paper Name Disputed By Developers FiftyThree original content from Ubergizmo.