Gadget Review

An irradiated cyborg lemon from the citrus-scented post-apocalypse, SlommunnyV3 is an adorable 4-inch tall Mini Mummy figurine created especially for Pink Ghost's Giant Skills — MINI Munny: Custom Group Air Show, to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida this weekend.

SlomunnyV3 is the cutest DIY Mini Munny Ever [Gizmowatch]

Sexing up power strips is a little industry all to itself: the sexiest being the Power Squid. The latest design rests on the waves, not beneath them: it's modeled on the container tankers that deliver to our shores the very gadgets it powers.

Designed to accommodate the many power adapters cluttering our living space, this ship powers our electronic devices with their cords in its wake. It also makes apparent the infrastructure behind all those power cords.

Most electronic devices in use everyday are manufactured in one province in China and are delivered to us by containership. What people often do not realize is the extreme scale of the infrastructure needed when a single geographic area becomes a primary manufacturing source; even for things that most people see as insignificant. The largest of these ships hold up to 9,000 40ft containers and are too massive for the Panama Canal. They frequently return to China empty. There is nothing to bring back.

The Containership Powersupply (Prototype shown) measures 20"x3.5"x5" and is made from a cast rubber body over a metal chassis. Prototyping by ModelSource, Avon, CT

Product Page (Click the "I" in the top row) [Giffintermeer VIA SlipperyBrick and Oh Gizmo!]

Bethesda's Adam Adamowicz has a great post up talking about some of the thought that went into the concept art for the upcoming videogame Fallout 3. He namechecks BBG's patron saint of design in this great little anecdote about Aliens:

Seeing Syd Mead lecture in SF was an incredibly profound lesson on design. During the Q&A I asked him how far he went on a design to make it technically believable. His advice was ‘to design with the story in mind and stay consistent with it’. Hence I learned that the Sulacco [sic] from Aliens is essentially a massive gun in space with a big nuclear reactor at one end which beautifully fits the theme of space marines exploring a planet infested with deadly hostile aliens. That answer freed me obsessing over minutiae that diverges story-wise, and focus on the broad strokes that propel the story. The addition of ensuing consistent minutiae would give it richness.

I want to see Syd lecture. I want to hold Syd in my arms while he traces invisible, tasteful whorls over my cheeks.

The concept art from Fallout 3 is pretty fantastic, too. These are some fantasy gadgets, all of which are attempts to create that strange alt-history aesthetic where technology was slightly more advanced than what we have now, but still using only '50s materials and design cues.

Conceptual Design [Fallout.Bethsoft.com via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Image: Michael Heilemann

Delicious, but unportable, the ice cream float is one of the few summer pleasures that food scientists have proven completely incapable of reproducing in bottle form. Every once and a while, the sages of Coca Cola or Pepsi or ABC will claim to have come up with the secret, only to slap a picture of a cartoon hugel of ice cream on the label and serve up a foul slime infused with so much chemical vanilla that a single sip causes the mucus membrane to melt away like a Fruit Roll-up dipped in toxic waste.

Over at the Mother Boing, our Cory spotted the Fizz Cup, an ingenious accessory to correct the shortcomings of the beverage industry through excellence of design. You simply scoop a mound of ice cream into the Fizz Cup and snap the top onto a bottle of Coke or Root Beer. Instant ice cream float satisfaction. Genius. And at £6.95, cheap enough for the impulse buy.

Fizz Cup [Firebox via Boing Boing]

ExtremeTech asks today if Comcast — rumored to be about to start metering bandwidth — is "preparing to screw its customers."

While it's true that Comcast screws its customers, metering bandwidth strikes me as a fairer modus buggerandi than what it does now: lying to us by offering "unlimited" plans with secret limits, with a Kafka-esque policy of not communicating with people who get close to it.

Here's the rumored plan:

"Comcast is considering a rate hike for broadband customers who consume more than 250 gigabytes of data each month, though there are no immediate plans for implementation. "Comcast is currently evaluating this service and pricing model to ensure we deliver a great online experience to our customers," the company said in a statement. "We have not made any changes to our current service offerings and have no new announcement to make at this time."

It all comes down to cost. If Comcast stopped offering unlimited bandwidth, would you still feel entitled to it? It would be beastly indeed if Comcast smacked 250GB transgressors for huge penalties, but at least then it wouldn't be defrauding its customers any more. Or is it all just part of a strategy to get you used to paying by the unit for a commodity — bandwidth — that is or will soon be effectively free of charge to it, the utility provider?

The digitally tremulous will never be true rubber band snipers. I know how to make a rubber band slingshot with my fingers, know how to hook a loop of plastic around the tips of my thumb and index finger, know how to seat a glinting paper clip in the barrel. But somehow — the slippery slope, the one thing leading to another — and the next thing I know, my optometrist fishes around with a pair of tweezers in my aqueous vitreous for misfired paper clip shards.

Shira Nahon's Ringshot aims to level the playing field. A hollowed sheath of stainless steel makes a rigid, immovable 'L' of your thumb and index finger, allowing the mounted rubber band to be drawn back without causing the loops of elastic to wildly snap off your fingers. All it requires is a knuckle-mounted sight to make me truly competitive in the BBG office wargames.

Ringshot [Flickr via Ubergizmo]