Looking to improve your burglary skills and you want to include your children in the process? Look no further than the Paper Locksmith Collection from Flying-Pig Paper Animation Kits. Inside the kit, you’ll find a working cylinder lock, a combination lock, a paper key, a warded lock and a 12-page instruction manual.

While it might not be as tasty as a papercraft steak, the Paper Locksmith Collection serves its purpose as a unique learning tool for all ages. At about $10, it’s a great project to tackle on a rainy weekend. Just don’t let the rain get near your paper locks or you’re S.O.L.

Link (via)

A Japanese surgeon demonstrates the precision of a DaVinci surgical robot with its ability to practice the art of origami. Dr. Norihiko Ishikawa of the Department of Telesurgery has the robot folding a crane no bigger than a penny using nothing but it’s robotic pincer-like hands.

I’d gladly let this robot slice me open to deprive me of a kidney if it’s precise enough to fold paper into a miniature crane. Who knows? Maybe it is capable of doing other Japanese recreational activities such as Bonsai. It may save lives and due neat arts and crafts but is it Johnny-Five?

Link (via)

This pixelated dog actually serves as an advertisement for Leica cameras. Since I can’t read a ton of Spanish, I’ll leave it up to your imagination to figure out how this dog came about. I love how in the one photo, the real dog is trying to see what’s up with the pixelated paper pooch.

Link

Montreal native Yee is crazy for origami. Offering DIY kits on his site, you too can create an origami V12 paper engine that pumps just like the real thing (with the help of electrical wires, a resistor, a motor and a battery holder).  Damn shame it can’t power a car with pencil shavings. Well, there’s always the next millennia.
Link (via)

When you and your friends fight over who’s going to be first player in Mario Kart,  Doom or whatever game you happen to be playing at the time, the most effective way to handle those sort of situations has always been a best out of three game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. What if we told you there was a way to choose paper every time and never lose?

If you can manage to create anything close to the Paper Wars reproductions of classic weapons, organized by PostlerFerguson, I’m pretty sure there would be little debate as to who the winner is, even if your opponent is clearly holding out two fingers in the scissor pose. You think you won? Well try cutting through my paper AK-47, motherfucker! Yeah! What now? (more…)

Xerox is looking to venture outside the office world you’ve associated it with. Seems now it’s aiming to make tree-hugging hippies smile with erasable paper. The paper automatically clears itself after a 24-hour waiting period and can then be used again and again, up to 100 times. It may not be a zero-watt monitor, but hey, it beats sitting there with an eraser for ten minutes.

How does it work? Glad you asked:

The paper contains specially coded molecules that create a print after being exposed to ultraviolet light emitted from a thin bar in a printer. The molecule readjusts itself within 24 hours to its original form to delete the print, or heat can readjust the molecule instantly. Xerox developed the molecule.

The ultraviolet bar itself is very small, so it can be used in mobile printers, Shrader said. The technology could also be useful for network printing.

Doesn’t sound easy. What do you think? Will companies and consumers give in to this new kind of paper when it becomes mainstream? Is it cost effective? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Link (via)

While this new Canon fax machine labeled the JX200 looks very nice, one can’t help to wonder why anyone needs a stand-alone fax machine anymore? Aren’t fax machines so 90’s business room tech? With the thriving of multi-function printers that can fax, scan, copy, and have built-in phones, what is the point of this? There are advantages to having a standalone: the main one being that it does its job well, not a ton of jobs OK. So for specs, the JX200 scans and copies at speeds of one page per six seconds. canon also has said that this fax machine is fairly quite, which is something that is pretty hard to find in printing type devices. There is no doubt that this is a high quality product despite its fair price of $80. Canon does not put out products that disappoint. High quality is all fine and good, but is there a demand for fax machines when you can buy multi-functions that can do so much more for just a bit more of an investment? — Nik Gomez

Canon’s New Ol’ Fashioned Fax Machine [SlashGear]

While scanners haven’t really been in the forefront of technology innovations and annoucenments as of late, this full page scanner sure does find a place in anyone’s heart who has had to carry around bags of press releases lately (CES and Macworld anyone?). This wand is very simple to use. All you do is run it over the page you wish for it to scan, and it stores the page in full color in about 4-5 seconds. The DocuPen RC800 can store up to 100 pages in its internal memory. So many people have been calling for the abolishment of paper for so many years, and this device sure isn’t going to make paper a thing of the past overnight. But it’s all baby-steps, each new device that allows for more market saturation makes more and more people realize the benefits of having digital copies that weigh next to nothing when compared to that 20 pound bag they have been carrying around all day. It is able to read nine different types of memory cards with a Universal Mobile Charger. The DocuPen is currently being sold for $300. — Nik Gomez

DocuPen RC800 [via CrunchGear]