If you’re into big bicycles with weird, multi-tipped legs, have I got a project for you. Called the Boneshakered Bigwheel (sic), this one-off project by creator Ronald L. Schroer is an unusual trike with legs instead of back wheels. It’s made almost entirely of wood and he’s added an internal “hypno-wheel” to make the experience more pleasant. Read More
If you have a knackered old SLR lying around, are game for a project and fancy adding a little quirk to your front door, why not think about creating a photography themed peephole?
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Do you spend too much time on Facebook? Why not administer non-lethal shocks to your body when you click over to your News Feed! Two Ph.D. candidates at MIT, Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff, did just that when they realized that they were spending over 50 hours on the service per week combined, and the results – and questions their project raises – are quite interesting.
“The shock’s unpleasant but it’s not dangerous,” said co-creator McDuff. However, they do hurt. The system watches your actions and sends a signal to an Arduino board that, in turn, administers the shock. Over time the user will tend to avoid Facebook and/or rock silently in the corner, quietly weeping. The system uses a specially wired keyboard rest to send the pain.
Did it work?
“We’re not sure,” said Morris. “To be truly effective, many shock exposures are probably needed. Proper conditioning procedures should be followed. Sadly, we found the shocks so aversive, we removed the device pretty quickly after installing it. Anecdotally, however, I did notice a significant, though temporary, reduction in my Facebook usage.”
The pair also created a less invasive version of the system by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to ask strangers to call the Facebook user’s phone and tell them to get off Facebook. The results, at once frightening and hilarious, are far less painful than the shock treatment. Callers would read off prepared scripts that berated the Facebook user for using Facebook.
You can look at the entire project here and even download the plans and scripts. Morris said that Facebook is as bad as cigarettes (to a degree.) He writes:
Facebook is junk Internet – it’s not good for us, it’s pleasant but vaguely dissatisfying, and it makes us feel good for a short while and then bad for the rest of the day. This project, as tongue-in-cheek as it is, addresses some important issues that all of use face in our online behavior and, more important, makes us reconsider just why we’re visiting Zuckerberg’s Timesink every few hours in the first place.
“While this whole project is intended to be somewhat of a joke, we believe a serious discussion is needed about how communication technologies are designed,” said Morris.
If you’ve ever tried to glance at your computer screen and read something from across the room, you know it’s a pretty futile effort, no matter how hard you squint. This demo website has a solution: dynamically changing font size based on your distance from the screen. The catch? It wants to watch you read. More »
One of Steve Jobs’ biggest pet peeves was external LED lights on cellphones. Oh how he would storm through the Apple offices, harrumphing at the thought of a Motorola KRZR lighting up like a tiny Christmas tree. He’d probably be really angry at this new product, myLED, which is a tiny LED that’s designed to light up when you get an iOS notification.
The product will blink red when you receive calls, emails, Facebook notifications, Tweets, and Skype messages. It works by plugging directly into your headphone jack and they’ve included a little clamp to hold the LED when you’re not using it.
The little LED and the app needed to run it will cost $10 for early birds and they’re looking for $18,000 in funding.
Obviously this kind of takes up your headphone jack but it seems like a good idea if you’re not into having your camera flash twinkle when you get a call. Much like the Blink(1), this product reduces notifications to its barest element, which is useful and important, even if it might have pissed off Jobs.
Created by Federico Nitidi, Sean Lewin, and Ralph Wilson, the project came about when the team “became passionate about solving the lack of convenient notifications on iOS.” The project is currently in beta but they should ship in April.
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.
