A classic line from Star Trek is “Beam me up, Scotti.” Using only colored beads and thread, avid Star Trek fan Devorah Sperber recreated the beaming up look, starring the one and only Captain Kirk, with William Shatner goodness.

Sperber also uses her talent with beading to recreate the Star Trek Holodeck, a great entrance for your Star Trek Entertainment Center, as well as a full wall mosaic of the Enterprise deck to showcase next to Spock’s Spacesuit. To see more of her creations, hit the jump. (more…)

And we thought roadside advertising was already obtrusive into our lives! Cisco Systems plans to have a multi-billion dollar business running through digital billboards by 2010. Google and Coca-Cola, among others, have already shown their interest in extending their advertising wings to these massive animated billboards.

Interestingly, these billboards are already technologically advanced enough to actually interact with the people and environment they are in. Talk about distractions. These goliaths will play film clips and animations to distract your eyes from the road. We wonder how this will effect traffic accidents on their initial popularity.

LiveScience references an old SciFi story by J.G. Ballard called The Subliminal Man. The story talks about gigantic posters that proclaim you to BUY NOW. Do you think these digital billboards will be used for brainwashing? Seems far fetched, but who knows what these bastards will do for a cent. Good thing most of us are already brainwashed! — Andrew Dobrow

The Next Really Big Thing: Digital Billboards [LiveScience, via Coolest Gadgets]

This thing is ugly. And by ugly, we mean that we would never let our kids eat something that came out of something that looks like a bad prop from a Ed Wood movie. But then again, almost every creation spewed by Yanko is a huge, useless piece of ugly. The designs they com up with are so deeply nestled in niches that no more then 100 people can be truly impressed by each one of their products. I don’t know how this thing is supposed to make my fruit properly chilled and I don’t care to know, but what I am concerned about is the blurriness of the child in the picture. Has he been permanently blurred beyond recognition after standing in the shadow of this atrocity? Ok…we’re sorry…we’re overreacting. Ahh, nevermind. This thing makes Rosie O’Donnell look like Cleopatra.

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We don’t know how the idea of turning toasters into guitar amps happened to spring to life, and we’re not sure if we want to know, but the result is one unique design for a rockers gear collection. Built on a simple foundation of a input/output jack, a 9 volt battery, and a small speaker, the Toaster Amp is a razzle-dazzle mini-amplifier fit for fans of They Might Be Giants and any band looking for that “new-wave” type of thing. For $149, you can enjoy some “warm and toasty” guitar tone while enjoying your breakfast cereal. Warning: We don’t suggest trying to use the toaster amp to toast anything other then the souls of your audience. — Andrew Dobrow

Toaster amp makes music, brings sexy back [Scifi.com]