Hasta La Gadget!

Gundam fans, here’s a collectible you won’t want to miss. It’s a clothes hanger that conceals a model of a Gundam.

Our pal Francesco, over at Hobby Media (IT) spotted this bit of epicness over at last week’s Shizuoka Hobby Show (JP). Bandai is selling this along with a limited-edition STRICT-G t-shirt. When assembled, it forms a 1/200th scale replica of a Gundam RX 78-2 mech. But I’m not sure I’d want to ever take the parts off of the hanger. I think it looks pretty cool just the way it is.

If you’re lucky enough to be anywhere near Gundam Front in Odaiba, Tokyo – you might be able to find one – and you can see Giant Gundam at the same time. And if you’re anywhere else, I found a couple for sale up on eBay (without the t-shirt.)

[via Hobby Media]

I was minding my own business, strolling through the hallways of the Chicago Mini Maker Faire this weekend, when I turned a corner and came across this…

Yes, it’s a great white shark, assembled from plastic cups, bags, and other discarded items. In fact, this shark is 90% post-consumer waste. You can even look inside of it to see its shark guts – though they’re not exactly anatomically accurate.

Lovingly named Toothless the Great White, it was made by Deanna LaSusa-Hotchner and a team of volunteers from Discover the Depths. Deanna brings her 15-foot-long junk shark to schools, park districts, libraries and other venues to help kids learn about the delicate underwater ecosystem.

I love how the other side of the shark is made of grey linoleum. It’s perfect for conveying the thick grey skin of an actual shark. It also turns out this isn’t the only creature that Discover the Depths lugs around. Apparently, they also have a 60-foot-long inflatable whale, called Harry the Humpback, which you can actually walk inside of.

In today’s world of advertising oversaturation, it’s really hard to get your marketing message out. Sure, you can try making a “viral” video, but if you really want to get your name out there, you need to do something a little different to stand out from the crowd. How about running your ad in some guy’s facial hair?

Well thanks to Cornett IMS and their new Beardvertising service, you now can. For a fee, companies can now promote their wares in the oversize beards of its hirsute marketers. Ads are placed on “BeardBoards” – tiny billboards which clip into a wearer’s beard, and are sure to grab attention of passersby.

Better yet, if you have a substantive beard, you can make money wearing a BeardBoard, getting paid up to $5 a day for promoting an advertiser’s wares on your chin. If you think your beard might make the cut, you can sign up over on the Beardvertising website now.

So far, Beardvertising has signed on A&W Restaurants and Eagle One Automotive Appearance as clients, but I think that they might want to go after Remington or Norelco too.

This flying robot seems pretty creepy. Not only can it fly around, it can attach itself to walls like some sort of flying lizard. It won’t be long until these things have tentacles and attach themselves to our faces, while we thrash around suffocating. Thanks, researchers, thanks.

Airburr was developed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, a branch of the European École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. It is designed specifically to traverse cluttered environments, like those in the aftermath of a disaster.

The big news here is that AirBurr now has the ability to fly into a room and attach itself to a wall and act as a remote monitoring outpost. While perched, the AirBurr also shuts its engines down, preserving battery power. It uses an instant adhesive pad to attach to smooth surfaces. The video doesn’t show it detaching from the wall, so I’m guessing they haven’t worked that part out yet, though we’ve already seen technology which can do that.

via [Adafruit via DVICE]

I’ve often wished that I could combine the speed of my cable Internet connection with my phone’s data connection to form one supercharged slightly above average connection. If you’ve been wishing for the same thing my wish buddy, take a look at Switchboard. It’s a subscription-based cloud service that will let you tap into multiple Internet connections at once.

The Switchboard service is currently being developed by a company called Connectify. The company claims that its servers can spread the packets that you upload or download across multiple Internet connections. All you have to do is link your computer to these connections; the Switchboard software and Connectify’s servers will do the rest.

Switchboard is actually similar to one of Connectify’s other apps called Dispatch. Dispatch can also send data to and from your computer through multiple Internet connections. The upside to Dispatch is that it doesn’t need to pass through a server. That means you only pay once – just for the client software. But Connectify says that Dispatch is only good for applications or processes that use multiple sockets at once, such as web browsing or peer-to-peer connections. Programs that use single sockets like Netflix and Hulu will gain nothing from Dispatch. Also Dispatch doesn’t have a Mac client, whereas Switchboard will have one.

Pledge at least $60 (USD) on Kickstarter to be one of the first to try out Switchboard. But with great speed comes great expense. Not only is Switchboard a subscription service, its plans also have data caps. The limits range from 10GB to 2TB per month depending on your plan. I’m not saying that’s unreasonable, but now I have another wish: I wish that future computers had this functionality baked in.

[via Tom’s Hardware]