Gearfuse

One of the many things I hate about driving at night is the other drivers. Notably the ones who leave on their high-beams as they pass by. It’s not like it takes a lot of effort to switch them off. You must really be lazy or totally devoid of compassion to not click off your brights when you see a car coming your direction.

Thankfully, Valeo SA has developed a system called Beamatic Premium that would allow drivers to keep their high-beams on at all times without blinding other drivers. Beamatic uses on-board cameras to track the location of other vehicles on the road and uses automated dousers to block the glare from other drivers’ eyes. This way, people would have to go out of their way to be assholes, making them much easier to actually point out.

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Inspired by a craft swap project which encouraged the use of dual mediums, New York artist Sarita Maria decided to take the classic Mr. Potato Head toy and recreate him in the image of Sir Spudnik, Potato Head’s Victorian counterpart. But Maria didn’t just design a steampunk variation, she literally covered an actual Mr. Potato Head toy in metallic or brass-like materials.

Sarita provides a step-by-step look of the process over at her Instructables page. She also created a few goodies to go along with the project such as a wild west-style wanted poster and even a DaVinvi-esque design manual.

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How would you like to be able to travel through such classic literature as Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation, Palahniuk’s Fight Club and… wait a second… The Gay Science? How’d that get in there? I swear that’s not mine. That sort of thing ain’t my bag, baby.

These Portal Bookends were result of one man with access to a CNC machine, some metal and a healthy helping of free time. They might not be able to create the illusion of incoming cake (which also happens to be a lie), but they sure as hell liven up your bookshelf.

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Rubber is an acquired taste. Sugar, everyone loves. So it makes sense that pencil chewers ditch their pencil erasers for something a bit more appetizing. Lollipop Pencils replace the standard eraser with a flavored lolly candy. If you’re a wood nibbler, I’m still short on solutions. But hopefully the sweet taste of the candy eraser will deter you from chewing on the wood.

Designer Lowcy Dizajnu designed the Lollipop Pencil in the hopes that erasers will be spared and used the way they’re supposed to be.

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I don’t know what it is about Microsoft and making terrible commercials. Their Seinfeld ads were a disaster. With Bing, they just sort of used the power of information overload, mass tedium and constant brand plugging to get their point across. I sort of liked the “Windows 7 was my idea” commercials, and by Microsoft standards they were works of art. But it seems they just can never get the promotional stuff down.

Since they’ve figured out that, for the most part, they are incapable of creating their own sticky ad campaigns, they’ve now started borrowing ideas from memes and the results are just… I don’t know any other way of putting it than cringe-worthy. This ad for Windows Live Photo gallery uses the Double Rainbow Guy, doing his whole double rainbow shtick. But instead of coming off as trendy and fresh, it just sort of makes you want to shoot yourself in the face.

For those of you who don’t want to or mentally can’t do the math, 17,239 MPH is about 4.7 miles per second. So it takes about two seconds for the Earth to circle around yo momma’s ass. NASA astronaut Don Petit captured this time lapse video from the International Space Station.

At one point you can actually see the northern lights extending into the far out reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. I bet it’s moments like this that makes up for the decades of hard work and training.

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Yeah, that’s right. History is still here guys. Preserved through time on stone tablets and cave paintings. Archaeologists recently uncovered an ancient hard drive from the sands of Egypt. And held on that hard drive was an archive of the Facebook statuses that changed history.

In part II of Facebook history, Cool Material explores The Crusades, Pearl Harbor, the parting of the Red Sea and much more. Hit the jump to see part II in its entirety.

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Apple hosted a special music event today at the YBCA Theater in San Francisco. Steve Jobs took the stage at around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET, dressed in the traditional Apple CEO regalia. So what did Dear Leader unveil today at the “special event?” Let’s recap, shall we?:

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With Ron the Don, it’s always personal. Screw business. Did Wendy launch an ad campaign against the family? Well, business is going to have to suffer.

Meet the true kingpins behind the New Jersey of the food industry, the Fast Food Mafia. You thought Ronald was dead? Think again. Just stay clear of the drive-by deep fryings and believing their propaganda and you should be okay.

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All but confirming the super accurate tabulation provided by our patented Gearfuse percentage of likliness in the “Special Event” post earlier today, Hard Candy Cases seems to have dropped the ball on Apple’s big new iPod Touch announcement with the early release of Street Skin for iPod Touch 4G cases, which will be available to order on Wednesday, September 15, 2010.

Whether this date is a clue of when the iPod Touch 4G’s will be actually released for sale is yet to be seen. But it seems as though the announcement is pretty much a certainty at this point.

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