Hasta La Gadget!

One of the disadvantages of vinyl records is that they degrade each time they’re used. Breakbot’s record exacerbates that, but it’s also better in one aspect: you can eat it after you’re sick of listening to it, because it’s made entirely out of chocolate.

The yummy storage device contains songs from the French DJ’s latest album By Your Side.

Here’s one of the tracks that comes out of the chocolate:

The chocolate record is limited to 120 copies and is available from Colette for about $22 (USD). You can get the non-edible but longer lasting record on Amazon.

[via Incredible Things]

We’ve seen a handful of wacky concepts for refrigerators entered into the Electrolux Design Lab competition over the past years, and this year is no different. What you see below is the Impress, a refrigerator that has no doors. Instead, it has honeycomb-shaped receptacles that you push inward with whatever you want to refrigerate. You can easily see – and grab – everything that’s in the fridge.

The Impress was conceptualized by Massey University third year student Ben de la Roche, who claims that the refrigerator’s power consumption scales according to its contents – the less items stored in it, the less power it consumes. If there are no items inside, the refrigerator won’t start cooling.

Most importantly, de la Roche claims that his concept is “quite grounded in that the technology’s quite available and it’s quite realistic.” Sadly I don’t have the details to back up Ben’s claim, but I bet he does. He’s one of ten finalists in the Design Lab competition who will present their concept before a jury of design experts in Italy on October 25.

[via NZ Herald & Electrolux via DVICE]

The latest in a long line of completely unnecessary gadgets from Japan lets you pretend you’re carrying around a lit piece of fire wood. Why, because it’s something that hasn’t been done before, that’s why.

TakaraTomy Arts’ FireWood Pocket is a keychain gadget that simulates the crackling sound and shimmering light of a real fire. And in case that wasn’t enough, blowing on this fake fire will actually make it glow more brightly – as if you’re giving added oxygen to your virtual flame. It also simulates a chunk of wood, for those of you who don’t have any real wood lying around.

There’s also a desktop version of the FireWood, which simulates an entire miniature bonfire. It also has a “music mode” which will respond to sounds from your MP3 player or smartphone. I found a video of the larger model in action over at Amazon Japan that’s so cheesy that I’m surprised it wasn’t shot with Vaseline on the camera lens.

You can find the FireWood Pocket for ¥1,080 (~$13 USD), and the desktop model for ¥5,800 (~$74 USD) over at Nigishow (JP). Chances are you’ll be able to find them soon over at worldwide exporter Strapya-World, since they are affiliated.

Well, here’s an odd little story that happened over in jolly old England recently. A woman living in Paignton, Devon started hearing strange clanking noises on the roof of her house, and decided to go outside and have a look. After investigating, she found a couple of orange practice golf balls sitting on her yard. She figured it was from some neighborhood kids playing around, and moved on with her life. But then the balls kept raining down.

Turns out that after much puzzlement, the brightly-colored plastic golf balls were coming not from kids, but from gulls flying overhead and dropping them on her roof.  Apparently, the seagulls think that the balls are mussels, and that dropping them will crack them open so they can get at the tasty morsel inside. I’m sure the gulls are very disappointed when they find out there’s a whole lot of nothing inside of them. Now why they decided to repeatedly use this woman’s house for target practice is anyone’s guess – maybe she ran over a seagull in a past life. So far, more than fifty of the balls have found their way onto the woman’s home.

What’s even more confounding is that nobody seems to know where the balls are coming from – after checking with many local golf courses, none of them use such balls for practice. Perhaps she can start her own driving range now.

[via Daily Mail]

We’ve featured LEGO mad scientist akiyuki and his Great Ball Contraption before, but the updated version of his machine is too awesome not too share. The machine is about 101 feet long and shuffles 500 balls around. It took akiyuki a total of 600 hours to finish this machine.

Nope, that’s just a third of the whole thing. You’ll have to watch the video below to see all of its parts:

The basketball area is amazing and hilarious. The arms are so accurate, but I can’t help imagining them in a real factory, shooting packages through a hoop.

[via NOTCOT]