Hasta La Gadget!

There’s already an official LEGO calendar, but design studio Vitamins made a more practical version with the help of custom software. Even though the calendar is made entirely out of LEGO pieces, Vitamins were able to make it interactive and sync to the studio’s online calendar.

Each month is represented in the calendar by long rectangular panels. For instance in the image above you can see a three month timeline. Each month is divided into columns that represent the days of the week. To assign a project, employees simply attach a brick onto the proper date. One brick represents half a day alloted to a particular project, with the color of the brick representing a particular project. Should there be a specific employee assigned to a project, that employee will be represented by a minifig.

The LEGO calendar helps employees take note of their schedule at a glance, but what if they’re not at the office? That’s where Vitamins’ custom program comes in handy. Anyone can take a picture of the calendar and send it to a certain email address, and in doing so the studio’s Google Calendar account will be synced to the LEGO calendar. The syncing program was made using openFrameworks.

Vitamins said that they’ve been using their system for almost a year and are very happy with it. They love that they have a tangible representation of how much time they have – the bricks – and that they can literally share their time with each other by trading bricks. They promise to upload the code for their program to encourage more people to adapt or play with their design. Perhaps the syncing can be automated with a camera or a color sensor?

[Vitamins via Creative Applications Network]

I’ve never been a fan of garden gnomes, honestly they are little disconcerting. I always had the sense that they’re watching me and is waiting for nightfall when they’ll creep into the house and stuff Tic-Tacs up my nose until I suffocate. For some reason I don’t find these zombie garden gnomes nearly as creepy as the regular ones – go figure.

These would be perfect decorating your garden for Halloween. ThinkGeek has four different zombie garden gnome styles including the survivor, zombie, rising, and evil versions. Each individual zombie garden gnome is between nine and 11.4-inches tall and made from resin.

The only exception is the zombie version (the one with the blue outfit), which is actually made from terracotta.

I particularly like the survivor gnome because he has a machine gun and it says “Say hello to my little friend” underneath. The gnomes sell for $19.99(USD) each, or you can get the survivor and zombie version in a bundle for $29.99. We’ve seen some other zombie gnomes in the past, but ThinkGeek has machine guns (plus they’re cheaper.)

Earlier this week Valve teased the free, gaming-oriented and Linux-based SteamOS and the PC-console hybrid Steam Machine. It soon completed the establishment of the fundamentals of its living room invasion by unveiling the Steam Controller. As with the Steam Machine, the controller is Valve’s attempt at bringing the best of PC and console gaming together.

The Steam Controller doesn’t seem to have biometrics or gaze tracking capabilities – two features that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has cited as desirable input options – but one look at it and you can see that it’s still quite different from most gamepads. For starters, instead of a d-pad or analog joysticks, the controller has two high-resolution trackpads. Valve added “super-precise haptic feedback” to trackpads in the form of weighted electro-magnets. The feedback will be used not only to add tactility to the trackpads, they can also be used to provide other in-game cues and can even function as speakers. How about that?

Chris Remo of developer Double Fine claims he was able to test a prototype of the controller a few months ago and said “…the cursor pads worked amazingly well.” When asked if the haptic feedback helps, Remo said, “Yes, it makes it feel like you’re actually operating a real physically mechanical device, not just a touchscreen.”

Perhaps Remo was actually referring to the trackpads in the second statement that I quoted, but the controller does have a high-resolution touchscreen. It’s the small square at the center of the controller. When you touch the screen, an overlay of the touchscreen’s display appears on your TV or monitor, so you won’t have to look down at the controller while playing. Makes you wonder why they even made it a screen right? Then again, it could be used to display data that should be kept hidden from other players. Take that Lambert!

Aside from its touch-friendly input options, the controller also has good old buttons. There are a total of 13 standard buttons – four face buttons at the corners of the touchscreen, three narrow rectangles below the touchscreen, four shoulder buttons and two rear buttons – but because the two trackpads and the touchscreen are also clickable, you have a total of 16 buttons.  The image below shows a sample key binding setup for Portal 2. Note that the touchscreen is divided into four buttons in the setup.

What makes this controller extra special in my opinion is that it has a “legacy mode” that fools your Steam Machine or your desktop computer into thinking that the controller is a keyboard and mouse. This makes it compatible with all Steam games, which is why the diagram above indicates the mapped keyboard and mouse buttons and not just the functions. Finally, Valve promises that the controller will be hackable, and that they will provide tools to help people mod the controller.

If you’re interested in owning or building a Steam Machine but don’t want to use the Steam Controller, don’t worry. Valve says you’ll still be able to stick with your trusted keyboard and mouse combo.

Valve will pick 300 lucky Steam members to participate in a closed beta. The beta testers will be given both a prototype Steam Machine and Steam Controller. The prototype controller that Valve will distribute to the testers will be wired and have no touchscreen, but the final version will be wireless and have the aforementioned touchscreen. Check out the Steam Machine FAQ page if you want to know how to apply for the closed beta.

[via Valve via Kotaku]

Pizza with pasta toppings. Pizza infused with lasagna in the middle. Pizza with burgers baked into the crust. Those are just some of the interesting pizza creations people all over the world have come up with.

Another one to add to the list is the Ramen Crust Pizza.

As its name suggests, this delicious pie was made with a crispy ramen crust. That’s right, you won’t find any dough here. The pizza was thought up by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. The recipe is surprisingly simple and easy to follow: cook instant noodles, simmer the cooked noodles in hot olive oil, add toppings, and bake. Sounds delicious.

You can find the recipe here, in case you’re interested in making your own Ramen Pizza for dinner. Or if you’d rather not go through the trouble, it’s only a matter of time before Pizza Hut starts making these, I’m sure.

[via Incredible Things]

Programmer and avid gamer Saar Drimer aka boldport wanted to make a special wedding gift for his friend Mike, who’s also a gamer and a computer scientist. Not only did he succeed in making a great gift with his own hands, the tool he used to design the gift was also his creation. Saar made a wall-mountable PCB that’s accented by 42 RGB LEDs behind it.

Saar calls this piece lifegame. To design the board, Saar used PCBmodE, a PCB design tool that he wrote. Saar made the program to make it easy to create PCBs that are functional, artistic and of varied shapes and sizes.

He used an ATtiny85 microcontroller to handle the LEDs. As a finishing touch, he installed an arcade button as a tittle and a missile launch switch to toggle the power.

It started out as a personal project, but Saar said that his lifegame has also won at a design competition and shown at a museum. Head to his blog for more on how he made lifegame.

[via Hack A Day]