And perhaps in a bid to get more people to change their mindsets and get ride of these wasteful tendencies, the Swap-O-Matic came to be. It works like a vending machine, only instead of selling stuff that you might need on the go, it’s a trading station instead.

The designer behind the Swap-O-Matic is Brooklyn designer Lina Fenequito. Her vending machine has thirteen compartments where the items to be traded can be placed in. It issues credits as its currency instead of cash. Using the touchscreen interface, users can keep track of their credits, put their stuff up for swapping, and take stuff that they want as well.

Swap-o-Matic is a great idea, but until someone comes along to fund larger scale production and distribution, it will likely remain the only one of its kind.

[via Springwise via Gizmag]

This awesome piece of art was created by Joe Black using over 5,500 toy soldiers, carefully positioned to form a large image. The pointillist image is called Made in China and it’s a portrait depicting a Chinese soldier that was originally taken by photographer Robert Capa and appeared on the cover of LIFE Magazine in 1938.

Each of the toy soldiers was glued on, then hit with spray paint to complete the image. It’s quite an amazing piece of art, which uses toys to make a statement about war.

Made in China was most recently on display last October at the Moniker Art Fair in London. Hopefully, it’ll make the rounds again so we can see it up close and in person.

[via Colossal via Whudat]

He took some telephone wires and wired them up to a Radio Shack 2.5mm plug. Then, he fed it through a hole that he made through the rubber strain relief of the Nunchuk and soldered it where the shoulder button connected to the main board. C aut0-adjusts and Z fires the shutter. None of the other controls do anything at this point, though it would have been cool if the joystick could be used for  zooming and focusing remotely.

I always like the idea of reusing tech that you might throw away or no longer use. What spare gadget do you have lying around, and what would you like to rebuild it into if you could?

[via Ubergizmo]

Gwydion ap Dafydd of Konkreet Labs was able to hollow out a hardcover copy of Mary Hahn’s Praktisches Kochbuch (Practical Cookbook) to conceal a MeeBlip synthesizer.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Gwydion chose the page well, since the glowing LED power light has been placed perfectly into the eye of a pig on the page. That’s pretty cool.

For his next hack, Gwydion promises to use a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

[via Make:]

The average CD weighs about .15 grams, so the weight adds up nicely and you can make the dumbbell weigh whatever weight you want. Sadly, it’s just a concept right now, but hopefully these become a reality. It would be nice to use those CDs for something besides drink coasters.

[via Yanko Design via Geeky-Gadgets]

I get the whole thing with wanting to recycle water, but what I don’t understand is why a lot of scientists are going to great extremes in trying to turn urine into something that can be drinkable again. I mean, why not find better ways to desalinate sea water? Or better yet, develop something like the Raincatch raincoat that turns rainwater into drinking water on the go?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

That’s right folks. The Raincatch by Hyeona Yang and Joshua Noble isn’t just your normal old raincoat. It was actually made to collect rainwater and then purify it by passing the water through charcoal filters. The water will be stored in the shoulders of the coat and sipped via the straw near the collar.

Obviously the Raincatch is a concept for now, but it’s one invention I’d choose any day over the urine-recycling processes.

[Fashioning Tech via Dvice]

The scientists and researchers at Tulane’s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology are well aware of this fact, which is why they’ve been working on using a specific strain of bacteria that feeds on organic materials, such as old newspapers, in order to produce biofuel.

The team of researchers, comprised of associate professor David Mullin, postdoctoral fellow Harshad Velankar, and undergraduate student Hailee Rask, have discovered a strain of bacteria they dubbed as “TU-103″ that can feed on paper wastes to produce butanol. The bacteria was first found in animal droppings and was cultivated so that it could be used for butanol production.

Velankar explains, “Cellulose is found in all green plants, and is the most abundant organic material on earth, and converting it into butanol is the dream of many.” And achieve that dream is what these scientists have been able to do. He also adds: “In the United States alone, at least 323 million tons of cellulosic materials that could be used to produce butanol are thrown out each year.”

The team conducted their experiments using old editions of The Times Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper. The patent for the process that they have developed for biofuel production is currently pending.

[via Physorg via Dvice]

However, given that it’s a completely new design for the tube, it might take a while before toothpaste companies start applying it to their tubes. So if you can’t change the tube, you might as well do something about the brush.

That’s what Catherine Werdel was thinking when she came up with the tube squeezing toothbrush. Below the neck of the toothbrush is a thin slot where one of your toothpaste tube can go through to push the paste out.

I always find it interesting when people come up with ways and means to try and get the most out of something instead of letting it go to waste, even if it’s just a little thing. Because, really, if you put it all together, in the end, it will amount to a whole lot.

[via Fancy via Oh Gizmo!]

The manufacture of hundreds of millions (or even billions) of wooden pencils all over the world also results to the cutting down of a whole lot of trees.

For these two problems, there is but one very simple solution: the Eraser Pencil.

It’s the pencil that lets nothing go to waste. There’s no wood to shave off, no metal components to hold the eraser at the pencil’s other end. That’s because, instead of wood, this pencil is made up of (you guessed it!) eraser.

Sure, you might end up with eraser shavings instead of wood pencil shavings, but if you’re the conscientious recycler, then you can just melt it up over a flame and form another eraser with the shavings instead.

This is still a concept though, designed by Deuk Young Lee. The pencil has been around for ages, and it’s refreshing to see someone still come up with such a concept that’s not exactly new, but still novel at the same time.

[via Oh Gizmo!]

They laid them out on inflatable mounds to create a sort of sea of discs. They call it  Waste Landscape and it’s located in Paris through September 11, 2011.

Their purpose was to “reveal the precious aspect of a small daily object” and to transform daily mundane objects into scultpures. For now, they look like a metallic sea dune, but once Wastelandscape travels through different exhibitions, it will be changed and adapted into new shapes. Ultimately, the discs will be recycled.

It’s also a sort of commentary on removable media, and what becomes of it when it hits the dumpster. Remember all those AOL CDs you kept getting in the mail?

[via Dezeen]

One thing that annoys me a lot when I’m out, however, is when I see plastic bags and beer cans and all sorts of other trash just wash up on the shore.

Maybe these guys saw the same thing and decided that they should do something about it. And do something they did with this surf board that’s made out of 72 beer cans, some polyurethane, and a whole lot of epoxy.

The board is a collaboration between artist Rich Morrison and surfboard maker Gary Seagraves in Morrison’s Enviro Surf Art series. The 6’2″ surfboard features a rocket fish design with twin fins and a swallow tail. Morrison says that the beer cans were collected from a local bar in his neighborhood.

I wish I can give it a go or two on that surfboard. Even though I’ll probably still fall off or flip over, at least I can say that I once surfed on a board of beer cans–and that it was good.

[via Treehugger via Dvice]

With all the stuff I have around here, I might be about to build myself a new house with all the parts I have. Some of the stuff I see doesn’t look that much like computer parts and I suspect that there are way more computers in this room than most of us would have from three years of upgrading. I also see some parts like that wheel that didn’t come off any computer I am familiar with.

It would make an awesome basement game room though or a geeky office. The room is 5m x 4m x 4.5m and the parts are placed inside of wall made from wooden studs. The walls have a lot of space between the computer parts so unless you’re comfortable with your body you won’t want to go walking naked through this room.

[via Bit Rebels via Geekosystem]

The University of Maine has found a way to put those lobster shells to use – and the use for them is an obvious choice. OK, it’s not really obvious, it’s actually rather odd. The researchers found a way to use those lobster shells to make golf balls; more specifically,  golf balls that are biodegradable. The shells are held together with a biodegradable binder and coating. Presumably they will just melt away to lobster dust over time in the environment.

The balls sell for a bit under $1 each and cost 19 cents to make. The catch is that the balls don’t fly as far as a normal ball, and if don’t wrap them with rubber bands they might pinch your finger off.

[via BoingBoing]

Mike had a bunch of parts he was going to put in the trash, and decided to give them new life as a robotic sculpture. He gathered up discarded circuit boards and parts from friends and family too, and managed to build a robot with quite a personality.

He’s got body parts from Dell, AMD, IBM, Maxtor, Toshiba, Sharp, Gateway among others. Nice touch there with the CPUs and flash drives for his brains.

I especially like the eyes – which came from some old Canon and HP digital cameras. You know that thing they say about the eyes being the window to one’s soul, right?

All in all, it’s a loving tribute to technology that at one point was an integral part of someone’s livelihood, education or entertainment. I think we need to build an entire shrine to old technology filled with these guys.

[via Total Geekdom]

Each bag is handmade from recycled rubber that comes from old innertubes and seatbelts, and I have to say that they are quite distinctive. Rubber will definitely help protect your laptop, and I like the fact that this is recycled rubber, so it’s keeping at least a little of that old rubber out of junkyards and landfills.

The smaller bag is a sleeve that sells for $80 (USD) while the larger one is actually a bag that sells for $90.

[via Geeksugar]

Artist Faith Pearson took a bunch of empty cartridges and turned them into fun miniature versions of movie scenes and models.

I think the Starship Enterprise is the best one, because the entire thing is made up out of cartridges. For all the others, the carts really just serve as scenes for the toy figures to hang out in. Still, one with the theater and all the action heroes is pretty cool, and certainly a much better use for leftover ink cartridges than throwing them in the trash.

[via BuzzFeed via TechEBlog]

What you are looking at is a block of four cardboard disposable flash drives that have different amounts of storage on them. You just rip one off when you need to store data or share data with someone and they can slip them into a USB port to read the data. You could also write directly on the cardboard drive to label their contents.

The only downside I see is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use a 16GB flash drive only once. I would assume the design would be robust enough to allow for multiple uses, but who knows.

The other rub is that the outer shell of most flash drives isn’t where much of the cost comes in, it’s the actual NAND inside, which would cost the same in the Flashkus. These would have to be much cheaper than a normal flash drive to make sense.

The main body is made out of power supply boxes. The head comes from floppy drive housings, and the legs and feet come from various pieces of scrap metal. A lot of love went into this sculpture. The whole thing was randomly “attacked” with the welding arc to simulate battle scars.

This model is currently on sale on Etsy for $450, and there’s only one of these – so if you want it, you need to hurry to get it. It’s over a foot high and weighs about 15 pounds! Keep in mind this is no kid’s toy, as it’s loaded with sharp metal edges.

[Igeektrooper via Leetlady]

My favorite item is the record player made from the brake parts. The platter for the record is a disc brake rotor, and you can see what appears to be the caliper cover on the side of the record player. The bowl made from the spokes and center hub of the wheel is really cool too.

Wine drinkers with a penchant for Triumph will like the corkscrew that is made from the grip and handle bar of the bike. This one is cool in that you pull the brake lever on the handle to make the corkscrew spin. There are a few other cool items like cutlery made from brake and clutch levers, and a floor standing mirror made from motorcycle mirrors. See more of the collection over at Designboom.

The light that comes from the lamp creates an interesting and ethereal effect. Does it make you want to create your own keyboard lamp? Probably not, but it’s definitely an good idea to do something with your old keyboards.

I’d like to see the effect if colorful LED lighting were used inside this lamp instead of a regular lightbulb. I’m sure that would be pretty funky.

[via Design Yearbook and Walyou]