Gearfuse

Say you happen to be taking a tour of your nearest Pantone color matching facility, or say you really want to spy on what other paint colors people are choosing for their walls. How could you ever camouflage yourself with such a colorful background to disappear into?

The Paper Mask Prototype features a colorful design, perfect for hiding in paint color sample books and other flamboyantly colored areas. Also great for people who have a hard-on for bar graphs.

(more…)

Here’s a little known fact that most people have no clue about: Back in the day, when Apple was working on a new computer model, the prototypes before mass production would feature clear, translucent casing. Don’t believe me? Fire up that DVD player and go watch Hackers. Angelina Jolie uses a clear-plastic Powerbook in the movie. And this Mac SE/30? No exception. It’s a beautiful-looking pre-production model that any collector would love to own.

Link

Remember the very first time you watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day and your jaw dropped the minute you saw the T-1000? I remember that day very well and it cemented my love for all things liquid metal. Prototype is a new next-gen console game due out this summer. It lets you take the role of some guy who can morph into different people, objects and weapons. Run up buildings, smash tanks with humans and destroy every goddamned thing in site. If you haven’t heard of Prototype, watch the video above. I think you’ll be running to your local Gamestop or Best Buy to plunk down some reservation money soon thereafter.

Link

The Arduino continues to power innovation and creation well into 2009. This blender, created by Matti Niinimaki, is rigged to create beats. No smoothies here, folks, just pounding techno full of cheesy sound FX. The Beat Blender prototype reads fruit embedded with RFID tags that are dropped into it. Hitting different blending speeds (Puree, Liquify, Blend, Grind, etc.) will add different effects and filters to the music, allowing for a unique style of making new music.

Matti’s setup makes use of a combination of hardware and software, including Max/MSP, Ableton Live, an RFID reader and of course, the Arduino. What gives Matti? Max/MSP? You know Pure Data would work just as well and we’d all be able to play around with your code.

I guess when God gives you lemons, you make music.

Link [via]

Oh gosh. I thought he’d given up on this with the economy and all. Guess not.
He’s still working on that Internet tablet prototype that he came up with last summer. Now he has a new model called “Revision B” that is going to cost $299 or more. It’s ugly, it runs Ubuntu and weighs three fucking pounds.

At this point, why you wouldn’t just buy a regular netbook with Windows is beyond me. Mikey has lost it. This is a recession and there are better, more reliable options out there compared to some heavy-ass prototype that no one has seen or can purchase. Game over, bro.

Link

A MacRumors forum member purchased a used Macbook Air off eBay “as-is” and ended up getting a prototype model of the Macbook Air. The bottom is a black material and there’s no “Macbook Air” written on the screen’s bezel. It also features an interim build of Mac OS X 10.5. The buyer found out that the MBA was produced around May 2007, a whole six months before the Macbook Air’s debut. Wild stuff. I’m not sure if I’d want to own a prototype Mac, though. I have enough problems with my Macbook. Imagine the headache this laptop would give me!

Link

We haven’t covered much cloaking technology and that’s a shame because it’s starting to come into its own. Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France says that established cloaking principles, such as steering microwave light around an object, could be applied to ocean waves. Because cloaking technology is still in its infancy, scientists are still working on tackling 3-D objects, but we’ve got 2-D down. This works in our favor because waves are essentially 2-D.

To put this theory to the test, researchers built a prototype. The image above is the said prototype which is tested in a wave pool. Acting like a whirlpool, the device produces forces which pull the water along the concentric corridors as a result of the waves repelling off the pillars. This causes all the water to go everywhere except the center of the cloak. Think of the possibilities.

Link

The practical uses for unmanned aerial vehicles are proving limitless. Once used for espionage and photography, these airborne spy bots just fell victim to a role reversal: they’ve gone from spy to medic. Well, while they don’t exactly heal wounds out on the battlefield, they do provide air transport for supplies needed in dire situations. Think of them as carrier bots.

The South African National Health Laboratory Service has been testing prototype UAVs designed to transport testing materials and medical supplies to communities that are too much of a burden for ground delivery.  These robotic carrier pigeons are pre-programmed using GPS and microelectronic gyroscopes to guide them to their destination and can even handle themselves in windy conditions. After all, a little turbulence never hurt any blood mid-transit.

Link [via]

If you thought that the nail biting clock and calendar was weird, check out this different take on the calendar altogether. Oscar Diaz came up with this self-printing concept when he discovered he could control ink bleeding onto paper. You could have a wallpaper calendar to write on, schedule appointments and what not, but where is the fun in writing up your own “To do” list? Rather than that, try having the ink leak all over the paper, telling you what to do that day.

This self-printing technique is unfortunately merely a prototype, so no amount of ink in the world is going to plan your weekend for you. Wouldn’t that be convenient to have your whole week scheduled my a pre-embossed page with ink leaking over it? Mine is telling me to never leave the house, ever, so I won’t.

Link (via)

Check out this stove. It’s called the Arcus and it has the ability to change the temperature of a pot or pan simply with a twist of your wrist. With a concept design like this one, I had hoped the designer, Manuel Perez Prada, would’ve included the ability to literally raise the heat to a higher elevation. This way, when I buy a stove that looks like this I can promptly stand over it, turn it on to extreme temperatures and burn my face off.

(more…)