Michael Huffman writes:

I cobbled "BrickBuildr" together using phpFlickr as a way for the AFOL [Adult Fans of LEGO - Ed.] community to share "LEGO only" pictures with one another (for those who had Flickr accounts). [There's also] a way to browse new "LEGO only" photos from your iPhone.

He's selected only certain groups from within Flickr that feature AFOL creations instead of simple just every photo tagged with LEGO. Looks like a great project for finding new builders you like. And by joining one of the groups included, your creations will be automatically slurped up, too.

Project Page [BrickBuildr.com]

BoingBoing Gadgets, in cahoots with Seagate, launched a competition last week challenging you to send us the most ingenious work of art, writing, code or whatever takes your fancy that fits into a kilobyte or less.

We've had some fantastic entries, one of which will win a Terabyte hard drive courtesy of Seagate. Pictured here is Gabriel McGovern's 1k rendering of the Mona Lisa (resized from his original to give a better view).

First tested in Japan under the "Kool Boost" brand, a new cigarette from RJ Reynolds will include a tiny menthol "powerball" in the filter that, when squished, will infuse the entire filter with lung-numbing flavor. They'll be sold under the "Camel Crush" brand and are being tested in a few markets.

Trends in Japan explains why testing cigarettes in Japan works better than testing in the States:

Back in the U.S., people will actually ask someone for a cigarette and then decline it when it’s the wrong brand, but Japanese are far more willing to switch brands for any number of reasons: Cool packaging, freebies, product modifications, limited editions, etc. Sure, the older generation of salarymen stick to their Mild Sevens, but young people treat cigarettes like they do any other FMCG. After all, who wants to drink the same brand of coffee their whole lives?

Camel Crush cigarettes tested in Japan? [Killian-Nakamura.com]

A guy from Nvidia says that its gaming-class graphics chips, not CPUs, now represent the primary component of a modern computer.

"Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam. The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell."

This is just part of a raving email sent to The Inquirer, apparently from Roy Taylor, nVidia's VP of content relations. The Inq just quotes the whole thing and lets it hang out there.

There is a strong element of truth to this chest-slapping, however: in lots of modern computer games, the game logic is extremely simple, with all the hard graft—calculating and rendering the graphics—palmed off on the GPU. Graphics chips, due to their architecture, are also faster than CPUs at certain kinds of calculations.

Windows Vista, for one, can't handle the truth.

Nvidia declares the CPU dead

This design concept jacket from Lunar Design aims to turn your torso and neck into a walking anthropomorphic digital display. The Blu Jacket would be made of flexible, organic e-paper: potential applications are displaying advertisements and broadcasting your mood, as well as more mischievous aims like virtual streaking.

This sort of design is a long way off from being plausible, but I can't wait to see it happen. I think I'd make a point of always showing silent movies on mine: The Lost World and Pandora's Box and Metropolis and the like. I love the idea that the person staring at me from across the subway isn't just some random weirdo or smitten stranger, but a viewer, absolutely engrossed by the silver screen drama unfolding on my wardrobe. Hell, you could take the idea even further: the video portion of a movie displayed on your chest as a ghetto-blaster on your shoulder broadcasts the soundtrack. Obnoxious? Yes. But fun!

Lunar Design Blu Jacket [PDF via DVICE via Gizmo Watch]

The original page's been Duggerized, but here's the money shot: an electrical unicycle in bright orange, the Uno, created by 18-year old student Ben Gulak. It is exactly what it appears to be, though with the addition of Segway-like accelerometers and gyros to help the rider not kill himself within half a mile of the dealership.

And to think that my wife thinks letting me get a motorcycle is too risky...

The new Segway is a Motorcycle [Digg]

During a discussion we three were having today about the use of the ellipsis in manga, anime, and videogames to indicate speechlessness, I remembered seeing the same technique used by Jack Davis in the story "Hah! Noon!" in MAD Magazine issue #9, February-March, 1954 (a parody of High Noon). So now you know: while I'm not familiar enough with Occupation-era manga to say if ellipses were used in this manner during the '40s, it's not a new technique — and certainly pre-dates its use in Japanese role-playing videogames.

Today on Modern Mechanix we have a 1956 Mechanix Illustrated article about scientist's plans to redesign the human body, including moving the mouth to the stomach and adding an eye to the tip of a finger. Showing that hucksters never miss a chance to exploit people's ignorance of new technology Popular Science wrote a 1939 expose about sham spiritualists using "Spirit Televisions" to fleece their marks. We also looked at an assembly line technique for rapidly developing color photos, a round-up of cool kids toys and a milk wagon towed by zebras. Lastly there is this theater impresario's 1929 prediction that future theaters will be shaped like an egg with multiple slide projectors providing "sets" for the films. Oddly, he doesn't even mention the idea of talkies.

New Scientist reports that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new super-weapon with an eerie familiarity to the Stiletto, a weapon from Arthur C. Clarke's 1955 novel Earthlight: a "solid bar of light" driven by giant capacitors that pierces through spaceships like "an entomologist [piercing] a butterfly with a pin."

Using magnetic fields it will propel either a narrow jet of molten metal or a chunk of molten metal that morphs into an aerodynamic slug during flight. Unlike Clarke's Stiletto, they will come from a device that generates a powerful electromagnetic field from an explosion, not giant capacitors.

DARPA's little gem is called MAHEM and would be used largely against tanks and incoming missiles. Also, the Covenant, whenever they get here.

Science fiction inspires DARPA weapon [New Scientist]

The wall was a symphony in plastic photoframes, meaningless qualifications and semigloss beige. Vern DeChambliss stared at it while his producer explained to him that the studio was shutting down his movie.

Science fiction just isn't doing well enough at the box office. No, straight-to-DVD isn't an option. Stem the losses. Credit crisis. Nothing personal.

As he shook hands and left and waited for the lift, Vern realized that he really didn't give a damn. The script sucked, the actors they'd lined up were notorious pricks, and he could finally get out of town for a while. Nevertheless, money had been spent on props and costumes: like corpses in the arctic circle, this presented something of a disposal problem.

Most of it could be sold on, but the tubes. What to do about the cryotubes? That shit was too cheesy for even the Sci-Fi channel; he'd be lucky to get rid of them on Craigslist, let alone with an asking price.

As the elevator swooped him to the ground floor, he caught a brief glimpse through its windows of the world around him. Lighting a cigarette, he pondered the question until it became a statement: someone, somewhere, would be stupid enough to take them off his hands.

Product Page [Med-spa]

Tunbridge Wells ushers in the world's first LED spa [BornRich]

Yesterday, the description of a monitor slathered with brass and oxidization as 'steampunk' caused me to get so hysterical that I evacuated myself all over BBG's front page. Please ignore this conniption fit, because as much as I like to bitch, I'm about three stiff drinks shy of trying to fit this wonderful steampunk Nerf gun into my little theory of steampunk purity. I think we can bend the rules here.

Professor Shagnasty is selling his Model 101 Steampunk Nerf Assault Rifle on eBay. It's the typical eBay steampunk listing, accompanied by the usual overly formal, proto-Victorian prosaic wankery. But this is something I really dig about the steampunk art community: it's never enough for them to just make a Nerf gun look like the official ordnance of an airship captain. They come up with their own in-universe sales patter

In phase warp configuration, and with a proprietary steam assisted coil driver set, the 101 is capable of both Ground and Ariel engagements. Dirigibles, balloons and other lighter than air machinery are easily dispatched using the simplest of maneuvers. Yet, with another turn of the switch, the model 101 can eject plasmatical beams tuned to perfection and capable of dropping any apparition, out of body ghoul or spectral anomaly.

Current bid is $224.72, with 12 hours left on the auction.

STEAMPUNK NERF MOD LARP COSPLAY ASSAULT RIFLE Sci Fi [eBay via Gizmodo]

It seemed funny at the time, replacing our innocuous door bell chime with Anita Ward's 70's disco rendition of "Ring My Bell." The first time the UPS guy came to the door, it even elicited a laugh from my girlfriend. But then I began opening the door and jamming the bell with my thumb whenever I wanted to get intimate. A starter horn, if you will. This also seemed to go over well. Months passed. It became part of our coital routine. One day, I came home to see a long line of UPS men waiting in front of my apartment; each would walk up to the door, push the bell gingerly and drop his trousers around his ankles as the slender forearms of my girlfriend yanked him inside.

It appears that a novelty doorbell, no matter how well intentioned, can act as a psychological conditioning device. And, as my little anecdote should make abundantly clear, the novelty doorbell is a technology pretty much solely aimed at douches, much like "Who Let The Dogz Out?" answering machine tapes. Still, if you're okay with that, the iChime will allow you to replace your doorbell with a programmable assortment of MP3s using the headphone jack from your iPod. It costs $90.

iChime [Official Site via DVICE]

Nokia's Internet Tablet, a nifty little handheld, is about to get even niftier. With Nokia buying Trolltech, the latter's Qt Linux dev toolkit will be slurped into the system. Moreover, the popular and consumer-friendly linux distribution, Ubuntu, is also making its way to the pocket-size portable thanks to a Nokia-supported ARM port.

Ars Technica reports that Nokia's got "ambitious plans" for Qt support across its entire lineup, making it easy for developers to create apps that work on both linux and Symbian platforms.

There's a thriving community around these internet tablets, but I've only dicked around with them once or twice at crowded conference booths. Are they close to working like fully-fledged computers, or just fancy smartphones without the smartphone?

Nokia Internet Tablets get Ubuntu and Qt [Ars Technica] (Ubuntu-tan by Piro)

Nearly six-inches tall — in-scale for the tiny dwarf a real-life Mario would be before eating an HGH-infused mushroom — this "Super Mario Singing Glow Star" sold at Thinkgeek for $18 will, when pressed, play the invulnerability theme from Super Mario Bros. while glowing on and off. Watch out co-workers! Dan from Sales is smashing ceiling tiles and landing flat-footed on your sack lunch.

Oh, cheap plastic crap, you're so adorable when making a meta-reference to my childhood! I will resist until someone wires this to an aerosol container of PCP, a blast of which would give me the closest analog to momentary shimmering omnipotence that I'll ever experience.

Catalog Page [Thinkgeek via Technabob via GeekAlerts]

LG's new phone, the Secret, gives the double deuce to single mega-pixel cellphone cameras with a five megapixel sensor. Yeah, yeah. But more interesting is the promised ability to record DivX movies at up to 120 frames per second using the phone. Of course, you won't be able to save much to its slim 100MB drive, but you can expand the Secret's capacity with an SD card. Even cooler: it's apparently possible to edit the video on the phone's screen.

I suspect that last feature won't be a lot of fun to use, but I think it is a great idea. The Secret is obviously trying to appeal to vidcasters and the like. The next iPhone should take this approach: a decent video cam and the ability to edit videos with a portable version of iMovie, then upload your completed video over 3G to YouTube Mobile.

As for LG's Secret, I for one welcome the coming age of high-resolution cellphone porn movies. No pricing available yet.

LG Secret [Official Site]

"Beer Pong" is some sort of drinking-based sport, the object of which is to bounce a ping-pong ball into a plastic cup. (I was the guy trying to explain to dudes' girlfriends the emotional impact of Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII when I went to frat parties, so I may be a bit murky on the specifics.)

Lest you think Beer Pong the sort of game that can be played on any table at hand — or failing that, on the backs of two interlocked pledges bent ninety degrees at the waist — "Pong A Long" would like for you to consider its "Portable Beer Pong Tables," marked with official areas for cup placement and easily folded to fit into the back seat of a taxi.

If you like manhandled plastic balls in your beer, their currently running a $5-off promo, bringing the price of the seven-foot model to $60 and the eight-foot "Pro" model down to $85 (plus shipping) using code "MI-PONG".

Product Page [PongALong.com]

Vertu's latest issue proves again that the rarefied world of luxury gadgets is impervious to good taste. It's been selling cellphones aimed at lottery winners for ten years now, and offers the "Rococo Constellation" in celebration of this achievement.

Offered in blandly loud colors and featuring designs modeled on the dessicated ropes of snot left when a slugtrail dries in the morning sun, these new models aim to conjour the elaborate whimsy of a late 18th-century French masterpiece.

Vertu Constellation Rococo Collection[Sybarites via Crave]

Touchscreen computers installed in the hallways of fifteen apartments in Gothenburg, Sweden, inform the residents the carbon footprint of every action they've taken in their homes, helping them monitor the true cost of leaving the lights on or taking a long shower. They're part of a pilot program from Swedish start-up Manodo; they also give handy updates for things like tram stops, weather, and who's standing outside the door.

But do the screens report the impact of their own construction and operation?

Manodo's Screen Is The Big Brother Of Energy Saving [Treehugger]

Researchers at the university of Heidelberg seem to have perfected the FluidHand, a prosthetic arm with the ability to manipulate each finger individually and provide sensory feedback to its user:

The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg – to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.

An 18 year old born with a congenital limb deficiency is apparently very enthusiastic, prompting Futurismic to muse: "I don’t think it’s science fictional to suggest that we’ll be seeing prosthetic limbs that equal the functionality of the organic originals within a decade."

I certainly hope that's true. But I have a friend who was born deaf. A couple years ago, she got Cochlear Implants, which resulted in her being able to hear, but her being ostracized by her friends in the deaf community as some sort of race traitor. I wonder: do you think, if prosthetic technology becomes sufficiently advanced, we'll see a backlash from the congenitally limb deficient community? I can't imagine it from amputees, but what about those born without limbs? What do you think?

'Fluidhand': Each finger can be moved separately [Physorg via Futurismic via Grinding]

Now this is how shareholders should respond to bad corporate leadership. Quothe the AP:

Lee said Tuesday he was stepping down after 20 years as chief of South Korea's biggest conglomerate, quitting in the aftermath of his indictment on tax evasion and other charges last week. Kim claimed last November that the Samsung Group had 200 billion won (US$205 million, euro130 million) in a slush fund and used it to bribe prosecutors and judges.

Samsung is very nearly a state company in South Korea, so this sort of political-grade outrage is catalyzed by the same sort of feelings of betrayal one might feel if their elected official did something this heinous.

South Korea Samsung [Foto.Rompres.ro]

Image: AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

Sharp's D4 is a two-faced bastard of a UMPC. On one hand, it's the first such device that's small enough to slip into a jacket pocket and still have a standard-looking keyboard. On the other hand, it's so obviously bloated—Windows Vista, hard drive, a Centrino CPU—that one can practically hear the battery screaming as its energy is sucked from it, a charge measured not in hours but in minutes.

More than ever before, the temptation to buy an ultra-mobile burns. And yet the same thing that makes it so attractive reminds us how short these expensive trinkets fall of obsolete analogs from the handheld past, which boasted instant-on and many hours of battery life. Ask yourself this: what might I do with this thing, and why do I need Vista, 1GB of RAM and 1.33 GHz to do it?

Imagine a version of Windows intermediate between CE/Mobile and XP/Vista, with a focus on mobile power-management wedded to compatibility with standard Windows applications; wouldn't that be super? Imagine this thing with the iPhone's cut of OS X on it. Goodness, just imagine it with anything that won't make your eyes bleed trying to decipher 10-point fonts at 250 dpi.

Going over the polished zen aesthetic of Samsung's new Pebble line of MP3 players yesterday, I found myself wanting one. This infuriated me. Shuffle-style players pander to debased musical tastes. It was just one more small, pretty audio player — a seductress, a siren — whispering in my ear, trying to get me to finally give up on that naive platonic ideal: the album. But the album's already dead.

The Pebble, the iPod Shuffle... any of these low-capacity, display-less Flash devices that are flooding the market. The large sub-set of people who opt for these MP3 players over more full-featured models: they simply don't care about albums. Rather, they prefer to listen to their songs randomly and with minimal control. They want song selected, shuffled and spurted out through their earphones. For them, these small, low-capacity MP3 players are like portable, DJ-less radio stations pandering to their tastes. They may not have a lot of control over what's coming up next. They may never hear a full album being played. But they've always got a keychain full of music they like, at all times. Hell, they don't even buy albums anymore: they just load up their music service of choice and buy the tracks they like.

This is all very alien to they way I experience music. Even if I could accept the lack of control, the addition of randomness to my music-listening experience, I can't really accept listening to a song out of the context of the album to which it belongs. I believe that albums should be listened to as complete works, not just anthologies of musical vignettes. Albums should have their own beginning, middle and end: shuffling an album should shuffle its emotional tenor. For me, listening to a song at random without listening to the rest of the album is like reading a chapter randomly from a book. A song might be wonderful, but it is contextless out of its larger body.

I'd be the first to admit that it's a way of looking at music that is completely out of touch with modern music. Who in their right mind looks at a Britney Spears album as an artistically-coherent work within its own right? It's just a collection of singles slapped together with some glitter and PR. Most albums are just semi-random collections of songs crammed onto an optical disc: nothing less and only accidentally something more.

But even worse, my way of looking at albums would have been precious and delusional even a hundred years ago! Since the dawn of recorded music, albums were incidental to songs. In the early days of audio recording, albums weren't much longer than a few minutes anyways, and usually only fit one or two songs per side. It is only as the maximum capacity on audio recordings increased that anyone started playing with the idea of an album as a meaningful artistic entity, in and of itself.

The same holds true for radio: radio is not a format that encourages the playing of full albums, and never has been. And even if you drag me kicking and screaming a few hundred years in the past, I'd find myself looking ridiculous. Most of the music of the world before the dawning of the 20th century did not come in the form of symphonies: it came in the form of short songs. In fact, my way of thinking about albums probably dates back no later than the 1950's Cool Movement, and for most of the history of recorded mucic has only subscribed to be jazz musicians and musical avant gardists.

Still, I sputter and rage at myself. Buying a single catchy song off of iTunes. Purchasing an adorable novelty MP3 player off of Amazon. I'm so tempted: it means I'm giving up on the actual existence of the record album. I'm sacrificing the ludicrous, pretentious self-delusion that there is a musical entity distinct from the song, that an "album" is something more than the means of physical delivery and its packaging.

And then I start thinking to myself, "Actually, I bet one of those Pebbles would be pretty good for podcasts. I don't care what order those come down the pipe." Maybe there's a compromise to be had here, after all.

"SkyCeilings" talk up all the stuff you'd expect about their virtual skylights: their full-spectrum light is useful for treating seasonal affective disorder; cloud patterns and perspective tricks are used to emulate the proper focus depth; the slaves chained in your stygian mine will work up to one-third more efficiently when these illusory portals are installed in the trembling shaft. But while the manufacturer Sky Factory makes a variety of custom installations, I think the neatest aspect is that the default SkyCeiling installation slips into the gridwork of the standard suspended ceiling. That makes it simple to add these fake skylights to most office spaces, even ones on the ground floor of a skyscraper.

I have one suggestion for Sky Factory, though, and while it might sound facetious I mean it genuinely: you should releases a line of SkyCeilings with fantastic imagery: boiling red skies thick with nephilim; a looming fleet of interstellar marauders; even a mostly normal sky with a little pegasus ducking behind a cloud. I'd never consider buying one of these systems for my home or office, but if there was a bit of whimsy involved it might be worth the price.

Speaking of: how much are these things? You'll have to call to speak to a "Sky Designer" to find out. Like I did. Aaron Birlson said the basic units go for about $105-115 a square foot, but the addition of something fancy — say, programmable dimming to a reddish lamp timed to the progression of the actual sunset — costs more.

I tried to blow Aaron's mind with my idea of doing fantasy scenes, but he stopped me mid-blurt, telling me about the large number of installations they've already done in home theaters that feature deep space scenes full of nebula and shooting stars. One of Sony's MMO groups apparently looked into getting one of their game's sky graphics installed in a board room. Another client was an orthodontist redoing his basement as a tribute to Star Wars (including an X-Wing cockpit mock-up) who recreated the little table at which Chewie and C-3PO play chess. Above it? A custom window looking out into a spinning galaxy. (Speaking of, can you imagine how awesome it would be to be an orthodontist in the Star Wars universe? You could retire on a sarlacc cleaning alone.)

Hopefully Sky Factory will be able to dig up more pictures for us of these custom installations.

So now I'll amend my suggestion: more fantastic skies, but this time let's make them animated.

Company Page [TheSkyFactory.com]

Now here's a simple and useful concept: a USB hub sold with a Y-cable. This makes it possible to run power-hungry gadgets that usually don't play well with unpowered hubs—think optical drives, scanners and 2.5" SATA drives—without mains power.

Product Page [Brando via Gizmodo]

One can now order one's Mii—a cutesy avatar system built into Nintendo's runaway Wii—in the flesh. The Miro wax-putty flesh.

"We are specializing in custom hand made sculptures. We have a team of artists, create sculpture base on photo you provided. ... You can even send us your photo of Mii and your Mii number."

They're expensive, at $75, but they're hand-made by a living, breathing artist. That's a low price to pay to transform an empty, soulless simulacrum of the human form into a cake topper!

Product Page [Mii Sculptures]

Cogent's "system on a module" computer, appetizingly named "CSB737," has a 240MHz CPU, 64MB of SDRAM , 512MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, a USB host, LCD controller and a 2D-only GPU.

It typically consumes less than a watt of energy (750-1200mW), making it cheap-running and eco-friendly, but is it good for anything more demanding than a fancy fridge's LCD display?

Worse, it comes with a somewhat larger carrier board, which has the USB and ethernet ports and what-have-you. The initial excitement of "MAME machine inside a joystick!" fades to the realization one can get more muscle, at a similar size, with Pico-ITX.

This little fella is more expensive than Via's miniaturized wonder, too, with a total cost of about $600 for the CSB737 and carrier board together.

"Activate" is a new line of sports beverages that store the powdered "vitamins and herbs" in the cap. Twist the top and a small plastic blade cuts the seal, opening an armature that allows the ingredients to fall into the water. The conceit is that the vitamins will say at "maximum potency" since they are not deteriorating in water.

It's clever...for showing what a rip-off most sports drinks are. You're paying two dollars or more for a tiny little pouch of flavor powder — new-age Kool-Aid — that could be more inexpensively distributed in bulk. Instead, they're using extra plastic to build a mechanism that could be just as easily replaced by a tub of powder and a spoon. Or if beveraging on the go is your main priority: tiny, dissolving gelatin packets.

At least with a proper soft drink you're getting carbonation. (The occasional can of Coca-Cola and Welches' Grape are one of my favorite little indulgences.)

Product Page [ActivateDrinks.com]

Previously • Twist Cap Releases Instant Tea [BBG]

LEGO sells this "Pink Brick Box" for $15, a tub of mostly standard full-sized bricks but with a few pink and green ones thrown in for good measure. I wish there were more beams and pieces I could use in spaceships; even the horse-loving Belville series doesn't have very many elements suitable for space.

Product Page [Shop.LEGO.com]

Spurting meconium, its severed umbilical cord wildly lashing around like an out of control fire hose, the Asus Eee was born: a tiny, albino, physically undeveloped premie, barely capable of processing its own operating system, unable to go without life support for more than one and a half hours. A sad, sorry, adorable thing, but none the less, consumers lustfully dogpiled on top of it.

It was only natural that would get the attention of the other laptop manufacturers... Spartan companies that had gotten used to picking up the runts and weaklings of their development line-up and tossing them in a spike-filled pit. Accounting, of course, for the sudden sure of affordable sub-notebooks.

But at this point, another Eee-style sub-notebook is announced every other day. With few exceptions, they are all roughly interchangeable feature wise. How to drill down to the genetic differences between models? Over at the wonderfully named Liliputing site, they have put together a semi-complete breakdown of all of the recent subnotebooks, including technical specs, prices and release dates.

Bizarrely, the HP MiniNote isn't on their list, which is strange, because my impression skimming through the site was that it was probably the best of the bunch, as far as what has been released and what's visibly in the pipeline. A lot of these so-called Asus killers are pretty crappy.

Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables [Liliputing]

[via Near Future Laboratory]