Hasta La Gadget!

Unlicensed, un-defeatable, and undoubtedly awesome. Toot-toot is his death cry, and he will crush you as he screams his sweet revenge, all in the voice of Ringo Starr.

Thomas the Transformer is actually a man-mashing mix-up of Thomas the Tank Engine and two of his train-shed friends. The toy has already sold for a whopping $10 (Singapore dollars, which is about $7 US) and there is no mention as to names of his companions. Digging into the flash-heavy official Thomas site (which of course makes no mention of this toy), I can see that the friends appear to be Percy (in green) and, wait. The red is James, surely, if I remember my books correctly. James, it appears, has been offed from the official lineup.

Of course, just because the toy flouts intellectual property law (and I’m sure all the money from the official merchandise is making its way to the Rev. W. Awdry’s family) doesn’t say anything about the seller, who has a top-end 98.8% positive rating on Ebay. But that doesn’t stop us relishing his wonderful, spy-movie like offer on the auction page: “Can meet you at MRT station (if pass by) for delivery without delivery charges.”

Auction page [Ebay via Oh Gizmo and Geekologie]

James May, presenter of the show Top Gear, is planning to build a house entirely out of Lego bricks. No big deal, you say. We’ve all done that. Mays is planning a little bigger, and is making a life-sized house out of the plastic bricks, including a staircase and a fully plumbed, working toilet.

Why? Because he can. Mays has another show called James May’s Toy Stories (the creative department was out playing Nerf the day the name was decided), which appears to be a kind of Top Gear for toys. Recently he built a garden from Plasticene (a non-drying Play-Do).

May has no idea how many brick’s he’ll need, but is said to already have “thousands”. We have a feeling it’ll take a few more than that, but we wish him luck. When it’s done, May plans to live in the house for a couple of days to try it out.

Top Gear star to build Lego house [BBC. Thanks, Chuck!]

Photo: Mirko Macari/Flickr

Kids these days, they’ve got it made — wouldn’t you agree? While our tot-hood was filled with low-end luxuries like Etch A Sketch and Lite-Brite, our offspring are expanding their minds with things like the LED Illuminated Message Board. Much like a traditional dry erase board, those with the appropriate pens can simply draw up whatever they please on the white display, but flip a switch and the whole thing goes psychoactive. Talk about getting the message across. Slap one on your own refrigerator right now for around 20 bones.

[Via ChipChick]

Filed under: Displays

LED Illuminated Message Board makes ordinary messages psychedelic originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The $30 Ecoblaster is a rechargeable Air Horn. It is also something I need, and I need right now. But first, let me explain why.

One of the banes of living in a city which attracts as many tourists into such a compact center as sunny Barcelona, Spain, is that the place is often crawling with clueless wanderers who stray not only into the path of pedestrians but also regularly back out in front of cyclists as they stare into their cameras’ LCD screens. Worse, the constant looking up at the beautiful architecture means they never look down and to see the bike-lane markings.

This has led me to develop the anti-social but satisfying sport of guiri-scaring (guiri means foreigner). First, speed toward the sap who has wandered into your path and, at the last minute, hit the bell. The goal is to get them to leap, terrified, out of your way. Bonus points for catching the English, as they always shout out “Sorry!” even though it’s all my fault.

I tried it with a Groucho Marx-style honk-honking horn, but nobody associated the sound with oncoming two-wheeled doom. A bell is a little wussy, though, and this is why the EcoBlast may save me this summer.

The air-horn puts out a teeth-rattling 115dB of honk, and is good for 70 blasts before a recharge is needed. The package includes a pump but any bike-pump or gas-station air-machine will do the trick (careful filling the plastic bottle with this last one, though: I have managed to burst race-bike tires by over-filling due to faulty pressure gauges).

Right now I have no way of knowing how long it will last (the two comments on the product page tell us that “it sucks” and that “my dad […] said that he loves it”), but it’s going to look awesome on my handlebars and scare me some pedestrians real good.

Product page [Things You Never Knew Existed via Oh Gizmo!]

We’ve documented several examples of the cooking-meets-family entertainment product trend propelled by toy makers like Bandai and Takara Tomy (see here and here). The products do keep coming, but they are hardly new and novel anymore. Bandai’s latest Savon à la Mode, however, takes the trend in a new direction: to the bathroom. Like the popular food preparation toys, Savon à la Mode turns a chore into a game, and in this case the task is hand washing.

Released on June 27th, this brightly colored set includes all the tools and material necessary for kids to make their own “aroma soap” in attractive fruit or dessert shapes. The kit is part of Bandai’s “Hobby Girls” collection, which includes sets for other crafty projects like weaving wristbands and studding accessories with rhinestones. The marketing cleverly combines this DIY spirit with an appeal to precocious little princesses who covet grown-up looking bathroom products. And might those covetable bathroom products be these ones we blogged about ages ago?

Savon à la Mode is also a neat way to promote hygiene for kids, which is attractive for parents too. As for the French title, which certainly gives a fashionable slant to the product, the word “savon” (pronounced “shabon”) plus the Japanese word “tama” (“ball”) means “soap bubble” in Japanese. Savon à la Mode retails for ¥3,990; Bandai plans to sell 100,000 items by the end of March 2010.