Twitter’s hashtag feature is trending in real life. Banter Banner’s Hashtag Banner lets you make a custom hashtagged message. It won’t make your room or office easier to find, but it will make you more visible. Tweet, tweet motherflippers.
Don’t even think about posting a full 140-character message with your Hashtag Banner because you can only order a maximum of 30 letters at once. Or maybe you can chain multiple banners together? All Banter Banner says is that they’re attached with brass grommets.
You can order a Hashtag Banner from Banter Banner. It costs between $25 to $40 (USD) depending on the number of letters in your message. I’m sure a few months from now we’ll have a digital picture frame that cycles through Vine videos.
There are lots of games with virtual drawing mechanics. Okami and Max & the Magic Marker come to mind. But what if you could literally draw your own game from scratch? That’s the idea behind Pixel Press, a mobile app that will help you make a short platforming game without the need to code or even use a PC.
Pixel Press has two main components: a Sketch Kit and the app itself. The Sketch Kit is simply a sheet of graphing paper customized for the app. You can download the pdf template for free from the Pixel Press website and then print it together with the instructions. In simple terms, your goal is to make a platforming game with five stages. Your character can walk, run and jump on and over the obstacles you made.
When you’re done with your drawing, you then take a picture of it with your mobile device and the app will process it. You’ll then test the app, polish it with textures and sound effects and finally play it from within the app. You’ll also be able to share your game and play other people’s games.
Clearly it takes imagination, patience and discipline to make a good Pixel Press game, but these are traits that you’ll need before you can program a game anyway. Plus it gives you the chance to be a game designer! You’ll learn the ropes of creating games without grappling with much of the technical difficulties that go along with it.
Pledge at least $10 (USD) on Kickstarter to be one of the first to own the app. The Pixel Press folks hope to raise $100,000 for the iOS apps, but if they raise at least $350,000 they’ll make an Android version as well.
The world has certainly changed over the last few decades. It used to be the case that parents had to manually check if their babies had wet their diaper. Not anymore. Now there is a device that will tell you when your child needs to be changed. It’s calld TweetPee.
Developed by Ogilvy Brasil for Huggies brand diapers, TweetPee is a sensor that looks like a little blue Twitter bird. Just like the name implies, the bird alerts parents with a tweet or text message when their baby has peed.
It’s kind of funny watching the parent stick the little bird on their kid’s diaper in this video. The bird appears to be sweating and almost seems unwilling to serve as the town crier of urine.
People fall in love, plan fancy weddings, and get married in front of friends, family, and acquaintances all the time – only to file for divorce a few months or years down the road because the marriage has fallen apart. This happens more often than most people think, and 15-year old art student Demi Barnes is aware of it.
So when she was tasked to do a project for school, Demi decided that aside from being creative, she was also going to make a strong statement about divorce. The result is the wedding dress you see above that was crafted from divorce papers.
Demi explains: “Originally I was going to make it out of newspapers and magazines, but I thought using divorce papers was a lot more interesting. I think a lot of people rush into marriage quickly and then get divorced – it’s a statement.”
She added: “When I put it up on Facebook, it was just to show my cousin in Italy what I’d been up to. Within a week, it had over 40,000 hits and people were approaching me to design their wedding dresses. I’m passionate about fashion and design and am hoping someone will approach me with a work experience placement so I can turn my passion into a career.”
I think it’s safe to say that people heard her statement loud and clear.
Does it fly? Check? Does it have beer as a payload? Check. Does this robot deploy that beer via parachute to a thirsty human below? Check. I think I have just found man’s best robot friend.
You just order a beer via your iPhone app then the robot drops a parachuted beer to your location.
Sadly, folks on my continent won’t see it dropping beer overhead any time soon. This SteadiDrone octocopter has been specially modified to deliver beers to attendees at the upcoming Oppikoppi music festival in South Africa.
Hopefully they have worked out all the kinks. I’d hate to see a parachute fail to deploy and hit some poor guy on the head. Someone will probably hack this thing and fly some free beer to their place. That would be awesome.
If you have a body odor problem, you’ll want stay away from this disembodied robotic head and dog. The one shaped like a girls head smells your breath and the robot canine smells your feet.
They were made by Kitakyushu National College of Technology and ”Crazy Lab”. These robots were designed to make people more aware of their cleaning habits by making strong remarks about just that. Depending on how bad your breath is, Kaori-chan can say things like “Yuck! You have bad breath!”, “No way! I can’t stand it!” or even the dire “Emergency! There’s an emergency taking place!”
Shuntaro-kun, the feet smelling robot dog evaluates the intensity of odor from your feet, on a scale of one to four. Depending on how strong the stench is, the dog will cuddle up to you, bark, growl or pass out.
Many people associate BitTorrent with piracy, and with good reason. But the revolutionary protocol can also be used for legal purposes. For instance, it’s a cheap way to host and distribute large files. Now the company behind the protocol and the first ever torrent client is also pushing for BitTorrent to become a way for artists to hawk their products. It’s called BitTorrent Bundle, and it is weird.
The idea behind BitTorrent Bundle is for artists to release free content – say, songs, movie clips or chapters from a book – that we can download using a BitTorrent client. When you go to the download page, it will show you additional content that you have the option to “unlock” – either by paying or entering an email address. Sounds neat right? Here’s a promo video for BitTorrent Bundle:
You can check out the download page for Kaskade’s freebies right now. At first glance, it seems like a good idea – give people legitimate freebies and hope that they’ll like it enough to buy the rest of your work. However, I don’t think the protocol is uniquely equipped to fill this otherwise honest marketing tactic.
What I mean is, it doesn’t incentivize the act of either leeching or seeding – the two activities central to BitTorrent. Neither does it leverage the number of seeders and leechers as a way for torrent users to see which content is popular. If you go to a torrent site, you can infer what pirates like to download because they are the files with the most number of seeders or leechers, or both. But BitTorrent Bundle seems to have no such ranking or ladder for people to view.
I think that from an artist’s perspective, having a potential customer learn how to use a BitTorrent client is not worth it. It would be a different ball game if BitTorrent Bundle awarded points to devout seeders, which they can then use to unlock premium content from the store. What can BitTorrent Bundle do for musicians and consumers that existing services like Bandcamp can’t accomplish? If I’m a budding filmmaker and I’m giving away a video for free, why don’t I just post it on YouTube or Vimeo so people can watch it instantly – or whenever they want! – instead of making them fiddle with a torrent client?
I keep thinking I’m missing something here, but right now I just don’t see the killer application of BitTorrent Bundle. I guess at the very least it’s an attempt at erasing the stigma behind the protocol. You can also read a bit more about BitTorrent Bundle on TorrentFreak.
Music boxes are one of the oldest forms of storing and playing back music. Just don’t expect anything fancy. Now the simple music box concept has been taken to the next level. We’re talking huge. If this Steamroller music box ever gets loose, it will flatten you to the tune of The Star Spangled Banner.
Dave Cole completed this sculpture last year, He took an 11-ton steamroller, stripped it apart and turned it into a functional music box. It proudly plays the national anthem of the United States – like a monster delicately playing an instrument.
I don’t know whether to smile or run. Maybe both are appropriate. Just keep away from it’s musical wheel of doom and you’ll be safe.
I’ve seen some offbeat projects turn up on Kickstarter over the years, but a project that’s there now called Glowing Plants is one of the strangest. You can probably figure out what the project is about simply from the name. The people behind the project want to create plants that glow to provide natural lighting with no electricity.
That sounds like something right out of Avatar. Exactly how the people are genetically creating glowing plants is rather difficult to describe. All you really need to know is that if you choose to back the project over on Kickstarter, you can get seeds to grow your own glowing plants.
The project was initially seeking to raise only $65,000(USD). With 28 days left to go, the project has blown through its goal, raising over $295,000 to date.
A pledge of $40 or more will get you your own package of glowing plant seeds. The specific plant is an Arabidopsis. A $150 pledge will land you an already growing plant. If at least $400,000 is raised, people who pledge $150 or more will get you a glowing rose as well. If you pledge $250 or more, you can get your own DIY kit allowing you to make any of your plants at home glow.
We already have devices that augment two our sight and hearing. But a group of Innovation Design Engineering students at the Royal College of Art built a couple of devices that provide a new level of augmentation. One is a headset that applies special effects to what you’re seeing in real time, while the other one is a mask that works like noise canceling headphones. No Typhoon explosives though.
Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim and Yuta Sugawara call their project Eidos. The idea is not just to help us focus on sights or sounds that we consider important, but also to provide totally new ways of seeing and hearing.
The headset for example can apply a long-exposure effect on moving objects – a bit like seeing in four dimensions. The mask on the other hand not only blocks out all sound except for the one you want to hear, it broadcasts the sound through your inner ear. The students claim that this makes it seem like the sound is being sent directly inside your head – a bit like being a schizophrenic.
Obviously the devices in their current state are silly and impractical – the cool use cases shown in the video are all hypothetical and conceptual. Still, wouldn’t be amazing if future sunglasses and hearing aids had these capabilities? I mean I didn’t ask for these, but when they arrive I can see old man Bert buying Eidoses. Eidii. Eidoes. Edeese. Eidosia.
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.
