Mar 09
I don’t care for tea. Think it’s awful stuff. I like coffee. I don’t like people who like coffee. Half the time, they’re drinking big bowls of milk like they’re some sort of human-shaped, baby-man-cat. The other half, they’re talking all this fancy bullshit about roasts and beans and people working in fields. It’s just …
Jul 07
With death comes the peculiar experience of seeing a person’s possessions detached from their owner. They’re like orphans. This sewing machine belonged to Nan and has now been passed down to me. She used it to mend and alter our clothes. Although it’s around a hundred years old, it’s still in working order. A video …
Jun 21
Based on Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, this melting clock rests on your shelf and costs $13.49. But, if you’re looking to give your home or office a surrealist look, you might be better off stuffing a peacock into a birdcage and feeding it methamphetamine. It’s interesting to see objects that were once dreams become …
Feb 26
This little device combined three weapons: Knife, knuckleduster and pepperbox pistol. Easily concealed in a pocket, this weapon was for close combat. Pepperbox pistols are only effective at point blank range. Though pepperbox pistols were mainly meant for civilian self-defense, this one was more likely for civilian offence. It was popular with French muggers. It’s …
Oct 12
Being written in 1998, David Brin’s The Transparent Society might be a bit dated or maybe it’s more relevant than ever. The basic idea of the book was that people had to accept the death of privacy, which probably never really existed anyway, and decide between a world where everyone and everything was under surveillance or one in which the powers …
Oct 03
Japanese artist Mio I-zawa has created a fleshy umbilical charger for the iPhone. It makes sucking noises, twitches and looks alive. This recalls her other work, like the mechanical tumor (video below) that pulsates with CPU usage. Some people consider this stuff “gross.” But a lot of tech blogging is the expression of infantile feelings about some …
Aug 25
In 2006 I posted about an interesting new tech that printed bacon using a simple inkjet printer. It’s now 2010 and printable food is well on its way to becoming a product. Allow me to introduce the Digital Fabricator by MIT. The Digital Fabricator is a personal, three-dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, …
Jul 03
the art of alex varanese – alt/1977: we are not time travelers. Alex Varanese looks at modern products through a 1977 lens.
Jul 02
I have some pretty clever comrades. One of these, an incomparable chap who probably doesn’t want his name used, has long collected my empty pipe tobacco tins in order to repurpose them into various electronic devices – most of which have something to do with music. A while ago, he hosted a little workshop where he taught …
Aug 25
I had high hopes for steampunk. By combining the technological with the hand-crafted, it might have carved a path into a pleasant future. It circled back into the Victorian era but even that was forgiveable. Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward. Steampunk, I thought, just needs to mature. But, like …
