Work: the dehumanized symphony of cycling photocopiers, ringing phones and muttered greetings. Old fluorescent lights flicker and hum, Gutmann-shredding your hypothalamus with ones and zeroes at 60hz. Backwards laughter comes from that lady down the hall, echoing ever-louder in the baked echo chamber of your skull. If only you could crawl in a box and get away from it all ...
... only to find that you have to work on a HP Pavilion inside it. God help you!
This commercial from Thailand, featuring a variety of what I presume are traditional monsters in Thai culture, is really fantastic. I can never get enough television featuring motile, glowing internal organs floating free of body but still attached to a malevolent head. Or transvestites, which are also features. And it actually makes me want to buy Sylvania lightbulbs, not because the commercial has a bit to do with the product, but just because I'd like to support a company that sanctions something this wacky.
[via Animal New York]
Craftster publishes a how-to, penned by someone by the name of "Fluffypants."
Duck Hunt zapper lamp [Craftster via ShinyShiny]
Designer Tim Sugden claims that the inspiration for his Giger Chair came from the anamorphic aliens of its namesake, Mr. H.R. Giger. This does not grok: it is not pieced together from nearly enough rotting animal skeletons for that, nor is it shaped like an extraterrestrial vagina. Rather, it looks more like the sort of chair that Buck Rogers might lounge in while receiving futuristic, twenty-fifth century lap dances, or the sort of chair into which Dr. Heywood Floyd might strap himself during a flight aboard a Pan-American space plane in order to scrutinize a mysterious obelisk on the surface of the moon.
Giger Chair [Tim Sugden via Born Rich]
Kyle Michaelson's Rocket Chair allows any user ensconced within its orthopedic fold to thumb a button during a moment of wild-eyed panic, triggering a five hundred pound thrust hydrogen-peroxide rocket motor to spew out seven gallons of fuel in forty five seconds, sending him hurtling through the roof and into the stratosphere. A pilot ejection system for the nervous desk jockey, then, although it's worth mentioning that with only 45 seconds of counter-gravitational thrust, the Rocket Chair barely affords more lift than your generic flatulent World of Warcraft enthusiast.
Blast Off With The Rocket Chair [Gizmowatch]
The exercise-while-desk-jockeying initiative is a valiant idea for a sedentary age, but despite assertions to the contrary by the companies selling gizmos, it's actually harder to concentrate on that spreadsheet when your heart rate has popped your eyeballs out of their sockets and a miasma of your own foul drippings has turned your screen jaundice-color. There is a reason why physicists don't crack superstring theory when in the middle of a series of hundred kilo clean-and-jerks: it's pretty hard to pay attention when you're about to puke out your heart.
Nevertheless, TrekDesk is selling an adjustable desk add-on for your treadmill which they claim will increase concentration and productivity. No, it jolly well won't, but it's a valiant effort, and I like their bouncing chair accessory. It's an exercise ball attached to a seat, and TrekDesk claims it allows you to work on your core muscles while sitting, but upon seeing the pictures, I immediately thought: "Hmm. Bouncing while working does sound like fun." This is Boing Boing, after all.
TrekDesk will be available in Q3 this year, price undetermined.
Trek Desk [Official Site via Oh Gizmo! via Uberreview]
If the reproductive therapy worked a little better than expected, keep the litter entertained with Amstel's gargantuan foosball table, created for a Champions' League promo event. Big enough for 22 players—a full soccer team—it has 24 legs, dozens of little plastic men, and requires 6 flight cases to be shipped.
Source [Home Airworks via DVICE]
Let's admit it: we all like to imagine the perfect workstation. Perhaps yours is a metal slab in a stone cellar packed with blinking hardware and writhing mountains of cable; maybe it's a Mason Verger-style bed surrounded by enormous LCD displays and stock tickers. BornRich's list of luxury workstations is food for thought, packed as it is with a wild variety of overpriced desks and computer racks.
Many are nerdy. All are silly, in their own way. If you like number 3 the best, however, seek immediate help.
Luxury Workstations [Born Rich]
They say that technology is lifeless silicon and plastic. And yet the piles of it around my desk—the creeping kipple that surrounds every tech writer—seem to fester like a mountain of meat. This is the stuff that comes unsolicited to our door, with a covering letter addressed to "Hi."
This is not how quality gadgets turn up. Laptops, DSLR cameras, audio components and the like are pitched; we are either convinced to cover them, or solicit review units ourselves. Sony Vaios and $1,000 Yamaha keyboards don't get dumped in the lobby with a "please review me" note.
No, this stuff is the junk. It's the gear one feels may warrant a blog post, perhaps, but which one never gets around to writing because it's junk. Digital thermometers, $5 Skype handsets, CD polishing trays, USB decorations...
A mysterious curl of cheap black plastic may appear one day at the base of the pile, having fallen from something within it during the night. Loaded with the cheapest, nastiest double-AAs on Earth, a toy that's been in the pile a long while may froth at the battery compartment with a curious rusty bloom. When all is quiet, a murmur of subsidence inside the pile may result in a single, unnerving beep from deep within. It decays but it grows—therefore, it must be alive.
Anyway, one day I'll get rid of all this crap in a competition, or something. Until then, I need somewhere to store it, and I would like to be able to store it in a set of Magnetique Shelves, created by Andrew Liszewski, which Oh Gizmo! reports will free us from the organizational conformity imposed on us by IKEA. I don't fancy paying $1,230-$2,150 for them, however, so some old cardboard boxes will probably have to suffice.
Hey, anyone want a broken promotional wristwatch sporting the logo of a CES attendee from Shenzhen that you've never heard of?
Product Page [Magnetique via Oh Gizmo!]
There comes a moment in every boy's life of sexual awakening, a moment when hormonal tides surge, when girls cease to be perceived as slimy, purple-faced goblins and instead become slyphs of terrible allure. When this happens, young men tend to turn to their fathers for advice, and I will never forget my father's sage words when I asked him how to go about the seduction of those soft and sweet-smelling creatures, the fairer sex which had reacted to my overtures at every turn with pantomimed vomiting noises. "Son..." my father said, driving me to the graveyard and handing me a shovel. "You look the way you look, and there's just nothing to be done about that. Just you remember: dead girls don't say no."
It's advice that has served me well, so I'm intrigued by these designer coffin couches... the perfect love seat for post-mortem seductions. According to the guys at CoffinCouches.com, they have managed to secure a number of unused 18 gauge steel coffins from South Californian funeral homes and convert them for use in your living room. Due to pesky South Californian anti-graverobbing laws (and I can attest to the fact that California's just maggoty with them), these coffins are entirely unused, so you don't need to worry that yours wasn't hosed off properly. The price of each couch is $4,500.
This is worthy of applause. It's just so rare that the furniture industry is brave and forward-thinking enough to pander to the interior decorating whims of necrophiliacs and millionaire goths. Bravo, CoffinCouches.com. Bravo!
Coffin Couches [Official Site via Born Riches via Presurfer]
"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]
The SOlo Lounge Table is a weatherproof table topped with a solar array that charges an internal battery that can charge laptops, phones, and more. It has a Bluetooth connection that can send updates on its status to computers indoors and has a sliding drawer in which gadgets can be left to charge safe from inclement weather. (And now, they won't be getting much charging then, but it's still clever.)
There's no price listed on the page of Intelligent Forms, but I contacted one of the designers who will be following up with us later to give some more details about the table. I'm sure it's not cheap, but it sure is purdy.
Product Page [Intelligent Forms via Gizmodo via Born Rich]
Update: Just talked to Keith Doyle, a co-founder of Intelligent Forms. Here are the details on the table:
• Currently built-to-order, four to six weeks for delivery.
• Lots of interest since shown at the show.
• Price is $14k.
• German company Schuco built a custom table chassis for the product.
• Off-the-shelf solar panels are wired in series, but the one used in the SOlo is "sub-divided into smaller systems of cells in parallel. If you shade one, you're only reducing [the output of] part of the panel."
I think that the xylophonic percussion of spoons being placed down and breakfast bowls sliding in a glissando across the surface of a musical dining table would be very peaceful. Just such a dining table has been invented by designer Fumikai Goto. Each of the varying-sized, interlocking wooden bars produce a mellow, vibraphonic tone when struck. Maybe I'm just wistful on this exceedingly dreary morning, but I really think waking up and having a bowl of Apple Jacks as my table sings under me could go a long way in turning a crappy day into a pretty awesome one.
Feast of Music [Yanko Design]
You can do a lot of damage with a simple flashlight. One solid swing, connected with the occipital lobe, is enough to detach retinas, and I can tell you from first hand experience there's just nothing funnier than watching a burglar blindly stumbling around your house, his tongue protruding, his eyes wildly googling in their sockets. "Hey honey! Kids! Check it out! Its Cookie Monster!" you can cry out. With peals of delight, encourage your loved one to toss Oreos at the would-be home invader, making moist, mocking "Nom nom nom" noises with your mouths all the while. What might have been a horrific tragedy becomes a midnight comedy!
Yes, its a wonderful invention, the flashlight: giver of light, friend of shadow puppets, entertainer of children and enemy to prowlers, zombies and Draculas. But sometimes a flashlight just isn't deadly enough. Enter the K2 Porcupine Light, a powerful "eye-blinding" 70 lumens flashlight with retracting spikes near the bulb, perfect for jabbing into an ocular cavity and twisting with all your might. Or just for performing that impromptu midnight colostomy during a midnight power outage. See? Flashlights are useful to pacifists too.
For $129, though, you might just be better duct taping razor blades to the edge of your Eveready.
K2 Porcupine Light [Pentagon Light via OhGizmo]
Tor Clausen makes these fantastic Musical Rumba Series tables in his Olympia, Washington studio, each one topped with interchangeable percussion instruments that lock into a flat grid. Prices start at $800 for a 2-by-2 configuration, but I say go for the gusto and get the 4-by-4 model for $2,900. If I were the sort of person who had friends over to play music and sing songs I'd order one in a heartbeat.
Product Page [MusicalFurnishings.com via Oh Gizmo via Cribcandy]
This "Red Hot Laser Light Show" is the standard Spencer's Gift sort of home laser show, but shows a commendable amount of zazzle in its flame-inspired plastic molding. I should hate it but I can't.
It's $25, plus shipping, from Scientifics Online. Who knew sciences had gotten so sport?
Catalog Page [ScientificsOnline.com via Oh Gizmo]
What do you get when you cross a tech blogger with someone intelligent? Why Daniel Rutter, who has run the numbers on the Gravia Lamp concept which won second place at the Greener Gadgets competition. Turns out the gravity-powered LED lamp pretty much could never work.22.7 kilograms falling 1.22m in gravity of 9.8 metres per second squared gives you a grand total of 271.4 joules. That, once again ignoring losses (which are likely to be considerable, seeing as there’s a ball-screw and an electrical generator in the Gravia), will by definition run a one-watt lamp for 271.4 seconds, or four and a half minutes. If you downgrade the lamp to one tiny 0.1-watt LED night-light, you get three-quarters of an hour. The maximum possible luminous efficacy for any kind of lamp that will ever exist - if every quantum of energy going into the thing is used to make visible photons that come out - is 683 lumens per watt. And that’s for a lamp that emits monochromatic 555-nanometre green light, not white (the world record for white LEDs in the lab so far is less than 150lm/W), but never mind that for now. So if your tenth-watt lamp is just such a perfect device that can never actually exist, it will emit 68.3 lumens of light.Look at all the shiny maths! Another critic pointed out that the Gravia would either need a 4,000-kilogram mass to drop 1.5 meters to power the lamp for four hours or to extend the design's track for its 50-pound mass to 259 meters.
In fairness, the inventor has published a retraction and will give back the $1,000 Greener Gadgets prize. And I certainly didn't realize there was anything wrong with the design. I got about as far as "Huh, I wonder why nobody ever used such a clever weighted system before?" and never gave it any more thought. I mean, if science can invent magical pipes that whistle when you invert them, surely lamps are just a step away?
STOP PRESS: Pixie dust unsuitable for household lighting [Dan's Data]
While I can often resist round-up posts for the linkbait they are, Freshome's "30 Most Creative Bookshelves" post hits me right where I live. (My house, durr.) If I weren't leaving my apartment in a few months I'd consider building some of the more creative options. Instead I'll just stick with shelves I can build but still easily break down for moving.
30 of the Most Creative Bookshelves Designs [Freshome.com]
This "Space Shuttle Bed" looks vaguely like our aging reusable launch vehicle, likely complete with suspicious creaking noises. It's $2,600 for the bed, but can also be upgraded with a full "Launch Tower" playset on the side for an additional $5k. Call me cynical, but do kids even really know what NASA is anymore? It's not like it's ever in the news unless something blows up.
Also, parents: When I was a youngster my mom got me a "bed tent" similar to these $50 ones on Amazon. I think mine was in the shape of a apatosaurus, but it served as a secret fortress, a space ship, and a wandering barbarian's cave just fine.
Product Page [MyMoonDrops.com via Oh Gizmo via Nerd Approved]
Even though I am planning on packing up most of my stuff and leaving New York next year, I still keep thinking I'd like a new easy chair for the living room. Something nice enough to keep with in storage even as I move around. (More on that in a few months!)
Two have caught my eye over the last couple of weeks. Sadly, neither have had prices listed, which means they will be far out of my reach. Come on IKEA knock-offs!
The DS-166, designed by Hugo de Ruiter, is said to make those who sit in it "feel most profoundly." I just like its space lounge good looks.
The Lobster Chair [right], designed by Lund & Paarmann, is less plush, but the segmented walnut veneer over the back is striking. Eames by way of Giger.
If anyone lives in Europe has a few thousand dollars with which to buy a random blogger some furniture, I'll be happy to provide a shipping address. (Please do not touch or even look at any of the chairs before shipping, as I have a debilitating fear of psychic dustballs being caught in between the folds of cushions. This is why all visitors to my apartment must stay in the fraternization chamber.)
My self-diagnosed mild autistic tendencies cause me to find great delight in things that express order and uniformity. I suspect that's part of what makes me love LEGO as much as I do—clicking the elements together actually calms me down. As does making pixel art, sliding elements into a zoomed-in grid. I love things that stack or that have compartments. I love airline meals, not because of the taste, but because of the way each little slab of food fits into its tray, which in turn slides into a wheeled steam compartment, which in turn snaps into a locker. (It makes me wish my belly were filled with stacks of rectangular stomachs.) If I could, I would live in a sterile white room with no corners and compartments in which to stow every item.
(Or course I'd grow tired of that bubble room in short order. I also like dirty log cabins and Marshall stacks and human genitalia. But I can feel a part of my brain that finds a sense of order soothing.)
Point is, I squealed a little when I saw "Casulo"—a small crate filled with all the furniture one needs to live a modest life—unfolded by its designers in the video below. While it's an admirable bit of prototype engineering, like a thesis project for a Doctorate of Ikea, it's the clear tone its connotive portent sends ringing in my head that makes it most laudable. To be able to cast out all one's things, step into a pregnant room, and unfold a new home in a few minutes? That's a seductive fantasy.
Project Page [Mein-Casulo.de via Treehugger via Design Spotter]
Energizer's "Light On Demand" products are LED lamps with battery backup, able to operate for up to 20 hours when the lights go out. And because they're from a battery company, each of the light sticks' batteries can be swapped with regular alkalines. Three products are designed to be plugged into an outlet: a desk lamp, a tabletop nightlight, and a wallplate nightlight. A motion-activated light and a wall sconce have to be recharged at a docking station.
I initially thought all the products in this series used a single type of lamp, but since different models have different listed running times when they're switched to battery power, I guess the only real innovation is that these are always-charged LED lights.
If your lights go out often I could see these being really nice. It is irritating to discover you're in a blackout but have forgotten to keep a flashlight around. That said, I can imagine that the majority of these lights will never be used as flashlights making the built-in battery superfluous and wasteful.
Target will have the retail exclusive on these until late summer. Prices have not been announced and the official website is down. (Would it be rude to suggest a battery backup for their webserver?) Update: Energizer tells me the prices will be "$24.99 - $69.99."
Press Release [PRNewswire.com via OhGizmo]
The oddly named "Silverfish" aquarium—isn't a silverfish aquarium a bookcase?—from Octopus Studios has six orbs connected by tubes, the better to let your fish reconfigure their own habitat while gargling the theme to The Jeffersons. Each aquarium is made-to-order for $3,400 minus gravel and fish. (Freshwater suggested.)
While the manufacturer says it's not much more difficult to clean than a standard rectangular tank, I think we all know that's a bit of understatement. Still, I like it a lot—although I think I'd like it a lot more if it had a more attractive base instead of something that looks like a TV stand from Wal-Mart.
Product Page [OctopussStudios.com via Oh Gizmo]
The "N Range" Shooting System is an indoor firing range, tastefully concealed in a wooden armoire. While the target is steel-backed to absorb any impact, the manufacturer requires the use of a custom round that is low noise, low smoke, and non-lethal. Where's the fun in that?
A basic model will set you back $1,300, but the "Executive" model pictured is $3,500.
Company Page (Flash, stupid looping music) [NRange.com via BallerHouse.com via Complex]
Dezeen is showing off the work of Dylan Kehde Roelofs, an artist that makes these superlative hand-blown glass light bulbs as "a reaction against the soulless glow of low-energy bulbs."
Prices range from around $200 to $1,300 and the "first filament replacement is free," although the sculptor suspects you'll get many thousands of hours out of a standard filament.
Artist's Page [IncandescentSculpture.com via Dezeen]
I don't know about you, but I think this wall unit from Italian firm MisuraEmme is quite attractive, it's only failing that it's the sort of furniture that tends to dominate a room to the exclusion of any ratty furniture or knick-knacks you may own. But the integrated television unit is an especially nice way to hide a flat-panel when it's not in use.
I didn't bother looking at the price as I'm sure it's painfully out of reach for most—or at least me—but I really like it in theory. The only real issue I could see with trying to make something similar on your own is that most flat panel TVs have a lip on the bezel that would prevent the display from getting right up on the glass, which would be critical for making sure you get the most light through the front.
What do you guys think about wall units in general? I've actually always been a fan, even down to the wood paneled versions of old. Then again I stay in a sort of raggedy hotel in the Florida Keys just because some of the rooms have room controls in a sloped wooden panel between the beds, so I may have a bit of a problem.
Product Page [MisuraEmme.it via Trendir via Crave.CNET.com]
