I hate the sound of alarm clocks. They’re very jarring. Really, any synthetic sound is. …it’s just plain mean.

But, seeing that my inability to wake up at a set hour far out weighs my hate of alarm clocks, I have 3 set around my room (bed side, cell phone on the bathroom counter, and clocky) and while they irritate me every time they go off, I’m a fairly spiteful person while I’m sleeping, so I wind up hitting the snooze button on all 3 of them for about an hour. Yes, this involves getting up, hitting snooze, and then going back to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat 10 minutes later.

Maybe the issue though is the terrible, spite inducing, noise? If that’s the case…. maybe this woodpecker alarm clock by Natalie Duckett (site down at the moment) is the solution.

It at least sounds fairly pleasant while I’m already awake.

[via MAKE]

In my last year of working for Big Printing and Shipping Co* I working in a high volume center that printed large orders for the retail stores. One of the main recurring jobs we got was printing, gluing, and cutting paper back books, often between 100 and 10,000 at a time.

I hated it.

There was a lot of labor involved, and when you sit and think about it, the environmental aspects of all that paper being shipped about (Let alone how long those book were actually going to be used before they went into hopefully the recycling), not to mention the waste aspect (a good number of books failed quality assurance for one reason or another), is just horrifying.

It’s one of the reasons I’m really into PDF documents for most things, and think the Kindle is really snazzy.

But, for those that love the dead tree medium, I really like the idea of the Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books, LLC.

It’s a pretty sexy robot, and takes a big chunk out of the problems with the printing model I described above.

Instead of having a bunch of paper shipped to a printer, and then a bunch of books shipped out, you can ship a bunch of paper straight to where the books are being distributed from (a book store for example) and have books be created as needed. AWESOME.

Also, talk about an easy way to improve selection in small book shops. (Or for that matter, talk about a sweet way to make a book store in a mall kiosk…)

Anyway, I just think this is a really cool robot. (That had I not already left Big Printing and Shipping Co* would be a threat.)

[via Make]

*fictionalized name, just to be safe.

This is a crazy long info graphic. But it’s also crazy awesome. So there is that.

Via: Online Schools

[Via BotJunkie]

So I’ve been playing around with the idea of building something for The Make: Robot Build and decided that if I do, I want to go as minimalist as possible, using only prefabbed components and things I can make by hand.

As my first experiment with this, I put together the Hermit Bot from a couple of servo motors, popsicle sticks, and hot glue.

He’s only programmed to walk forward right now, and has no sensors, but I’d say as a first experiment in walking, he works pretty well.

MoMA has acquired @!

Is @ Design?

The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol.

Why @ Is in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design that not only forever changed the @ sign’s significance and function, but which also has become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others. His (unintended) role as a designer must be acknowledged and celebrated by the one collection—MoMA’s—that has always celebrated elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time, the essence of modern.

Another interesting quote from the acquisition post is this:

Being in the public realm, @ is free. It might be the only truly free—albeit not the only priceless—object in our collection.

While I don’t doubt the significance of it (I mean it is @!) I do wonder how anyone can “acquire” it.

What an awesome world we live in.

[via swissmiss]

For Christmas I decided I would be laser cutting my parents gifts this year. I really liked the idea of a calender desk toy, and thought there was something really nice about the idea of building with time, so this construction toy calender, cut from 1/8th inch thick birch plywood and left natural, came about.

The design is based off of 4volt’s Hex Connector Toy and inspired by the bonsai calender (which clearly I love conceptually… but I think isn’t so great aesthetically).

What I really like is that at the end of 2010, there’s no need to throw out this calender. Instead, a new calender for 2011 (and so forth) can be cut, and used with the previous year’s to build bigger and better creations.

I’ve posted the files for it, as well as assembly instructions, over on Thingiverse, so if you feel so inclined to make your own, be my guest.

This video from Hold Your Horses is just teeming with art history references, and they’re great!

Good job L’Ogre.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

[Via panic attack.]

Just came across the weBlimp, a crowd controlled telepresence device.

weBlimp! from BdotQ on Vimeo.

The concepts behind it are really cool.

Collaborative learning: “positive results of collaborative learning may be the notion that peer interaction stimulates elaboration of conceptual knowledge. In a collaborative learning situation, students must negotiate goals, represent problems and understand the meaning of concepts and procedures. Collaborative students have to make their thoughts explicit.”

Ludic interaction: “Ludic activities are motivated by values of curiosity, exploration, surprise, wonder and reflection rather than by externally defined tasks. These values stimulate the intrinsic motiviation to interact with a design or to say it short feed the desire to play.”

Their results (and basic interface) remind me a lot of my piece Tangolumen. One thing though, I think that their results are a bit generous. In their video the narrator says “…participants were eager to interact with, not just the control space, but also with the blimp itself…” But of course the participants in the prototyping phase were friends, classmates, and colleagues. These are people that are eager to play with everything you make, which while a real blessing, doesn’t make it the best gauge for interactivity. I’ll be eager to see how the blimp fares when it is at the Surrey 2010 Celebration site in Holland Park during 2010 Winter Olympic Games from Feb. 17-21.

Ok, I’m in love with this short film already. And I haven’t seen it yet. It premiered last night as part of the first-ever Opening Night’s Shorts Program at the Sundance Film Festival. But for those of us not at the festival, it’ll premier on www.imheremovie.com in March.

What I’m loving the most is the character design, where the robots look like bots that product designers in the 80s would have built, with beige plastic and think grey rubbery cords. Love it.

The site is also pretty beautifully designed, keeping with the films visual feel, and getting the nice sounds of clicking relays as it generates bits of on screen text.

From the film’s site:

I’m Here is a 30-minute love story about the relationship between two robots living in L.A. The film is written and directed by Spike Jonze. Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory are in the lead roles, and the soundtrack includes original music by Sam Spiegel and original songs by L.A.-based art musician Aska Matsumiya and other emerging musicians. I’m Here is released on this website in March.

—-

The film is a collaboration with ABSOLUT VODKA, and the partnership acknowledges the brand’s position as a pioneering and culture-shaping brand. Come back soon for more information about the film.

I know plenty of people who would be bothered by this sort of brand based patronage, but I love it because really, were it not for the brand support, no way would this film be seeing a world wide web distribution, and the vast majority of us would never see it. (Let alone that the film likely wouldn’t have been made. Someone has to pay for the arts.)

Watch the trailer and fall in love along with me:

[Via shape+colour]

Gentleman, Scholar, and friend to all (and comic artist / world adventurer) Ryan Estrada is making a movie.

Specifically he’s making a 90 minute (aka feature length!) animated film based on his comic “The Kind You Don’t Take Home To Mother.”

The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mother is an upcoming independent animated feature directed by Ryan Estrada. It’s a movie about a werewolf, but with one small difference. It takes place between full moons.

With four weeks of freedom until her next transformation, Julia Hobson faces a whole new set of horrors. First dates, disapproving parents, awkward social situations, and the looming lunar deadline that makes her wonder if her new relationship will last the full moon.

It’s only a matter of time before David Duncan finds out if Julia really is the girl of his dreams, or if life with a lycanthrope turns out to be too much to handle.

And you know what the coolest part is?

YOU can be in it. (Or your dog can be in it.) How freaking cool is that? All you have to do is help with the funding and in exchange you (or your dog) will be animated into it.

Check out the movie’s site and if (I mean when) you decide you’re into it, help make it happen. Because it’s going to be awesome, and you can be part of it.