Each one is built from the finest electronic components, with an optical resolution of 1600 dpi, and with microswitches rated for over 1 million clicks. The mice also feature a stiff, but bendable cable that keeps the cord from getting in your way. There’s also a unique sound-wheel control which kicks in to adjust your system’s volume when you click the scroll wheel.

The handmade wooden mice are available in Bubinga, Makor, Sapele, and Ebony woods from exotic locations like Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Sri Lanka. Of course, being a luxury item, you can’t expect them to be cheap. Prices for the mice range from €668 to €859 (appx. $996 to $1281 USD). If you’ve got money to burn, you can get your hands on one of AlestRukov’s mice here.

[via Behance]

If you’ve seen the real ASUS Eee keyboard – which incidentally will be available this month – you know that it doesn’t look anything like this mod. But even though the mod is chubby and faceless, it’s every bit as useful as the real thing: just attach it to a monitor via VGA and you’re good to go. The keyboard also has USB ports, a headphone jack and a built-in mic.

FYI, an Eee PC 900 netbook is equipped with a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. Here’s a naked look at the mod:

Funny how there’s still quite a bit of space left on the keyboard. You know, space for something like a screen. But maybe that wasn’t in the modders’ plan, which you can view in detail – and in Russian – here. Don’t even attempt to run the page through Google Translate, as the resulting “translation” only adds random English words, not sense.

[via Engadget]

You won’t find any Donkey Kong, Pac-Man or Space Invaders in this arcade museum. Nope. Games had names like Магистраль (Magistral), Городки (Gorodki) and Морской бой (Morskoy-Boy).

The early machines featured at the museum mirror some of the earliest U.S. and Japanese games with simple racing games, shooting gallery, a sub hunt game, and mechanical tabletops like basketball and ice hockey.

The museum currently has 37 different types of retro arcade machines in its collection, with 20 of them now restored to full working order. But even if you don’t get a chance to get to Russia any time soon, you can see many of the details of these oddities thanks to the excellent, detailed photography and descriptive overlays over on the website.

Perhaps the coolest thing about the site is that the designers over at Art Lebedev Studios went the extra mile by building playable Flash versions of many of the games.

Be sure to check out the online versions of Magistral, Gorodki, Morskoy Boy, and Autorally. You can even see the old 15 Kopek coins used to play these machines.

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is located at the Moscow State Technical University, and you can find out more details about their amazing time capsule of retro games over on their English language page here.

The guys at Russian design shop Mystake have created these candles that look just like bombs and dynamite sticks. They’re called “notmy” candles, as in “Officer, those are NOT MY explosives sitting on the table.” But unlike the real deal, these ones are guaranteed NOT to explode. At least I hope so.

You can grab the notmy bomb candle for $4.90 (USD), the dynamite for $6.90, or the “ammunition pack” that includes both for $10.90 over at the Mystake Shop. Of course, if you happen to be friends with any ATF agents, you might want to skip putting them out when they swing by the house.

Designed by Daniil Dadiomov for Russia’s Art Lebedev Studio, these Digitus address numbers get their chunky, funky shapes from the classic bitmap computer fonts of days gone bye.

I’m pretty sure this was the same font that my old Atari 800 used when I was programming PEEKs and POKEs in Atari BASIC. Ok, now I’m really dating myself.

Digitus address numbers are available in 5 colors – white, terracotta, and metallic blue, green and magenta (although I’m not quite sure what colors are pictured on the doors above). You can find them over at the Art Lebedev store for just $5.77 (USD) each.

Here’s iunewind’s description of Night Watch: “Model of robot mosquito, killer of vampire – real mosquito.” Based on that statement, you’d think that Night Watch is going to hunt down real mosquitoes right?

Well then what do you make of this line from another image of Night Watch that he posted – and is available for purchase – at deviantart?: “NIGHT FLYING VAMPIRE BLOODPUMPED ROBOT!!!”

Oh dear. Let’s hope DARPA won’t take this concept seriously.

[via LikeCool]

Told you. That picture is a deep reserve of jokes just waiting to be mined. But even without a photo we can’t just dismiss the testimonies of thousands of people. They also said that the UFO emitted no sound or light, and that it was shaped like a “triangle with smoothed edges.”

I say Chuck Norris is hurling mountains at Russia, but that’s just me.

This concept for a set of speakers the designer calls “Audiomatryoshka” is definitely bold, if not a little over-the-top for most decorating styles. From where I’m sitting, the magenta-colored “dolls” could also pass for psychedelic pink penguins or maybe some electric purple bowling pins – perfect for a trippy dream sequence out of The Big Lebowski.

Russian designer Alex Mamontoff created these speakers as his way of modernizing the classic art form and making it more relevant to today’s audience. But the fact that you can’t open them up and put one inside the other sort of defeats the purpose, IMHO.

The artist has no plans at this point to manufacture these speakers at this point, but Mamontoff has actually made a working model of the speakers using a rapid prototyping system. In the mean time, if you want some penguin-shaped speakers, you might have to settle for these.

[via Behance]

Upon closer inspection, the robo-historians will snap with their metallic fingers, and the archaelogist ninjas will say, “A-ha!” in Ninja speak, slightly muffled by their ninja masks, because they now know:

Surely that is a bottle beside those stones! They’ll be scrambling all over the place, and the headlines in all Robot news channels and Ninja newspapers will read, “Bottle found beside some stones: archeologists not useless after all!!!”. But as for the stones they will be wondering still. These inscriptions will surely baffle them even more, even as it causes not a few archeologist ninjas to throw Shuriken at each other because of their excitement:

A commenter at Gizmodo said, “According to the plaque this is a monument to “KLAVA” (a name of a girl) by Anatoly Viatkin. It was built to be displayed during the “Festival of Modern Art in the City Environment.” Then there is a long list of thanks…” So if we want the robots and ninjas of the future to enjoy their exotic find, we must delete that stupid comment. Why not delete remove the plaque itself? Because it’s another puzzle for the robots and ninjas! One that will never be solved, because we humans know that the Russian language is made-up. It doesn’t make any sense, except to one Gizmodo commenter.

But ninja & robot bewilderment will quickly turn into ninja & robot disappointment when they find that piece of stone, which will lead them to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an Apple advertisement. Then they’ll report to their leader, Chief Ninja Robot Steve Jobs, that more evidence of their findings can be found at Jason Eppink’s Flickr site.

[via English Russia & Inventor Spot]

What we actually have here is a very rare Russian relic from the early 1980s. The Elektronika-7 (Электроника-7) clock was built using vacuum tubes, not LEDs to drive its unique bluish-green display.

The old industrial clock uses 16 segmented tubular vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) to form its digits.

This extreme rarity can be yours if you manage to score the winning bid in the next few hours (currently at $150 plus shipping). Check out the auction over on eBay for more details.

While it may seem like a simple idea, Russian modder Strannik put a tremendous amount of effort into the construction of these tower speakers, which required precision cutting, drilling and welding to pull off such a seamless look.

Check out the complete build log over on TopMods.

The Russian-built contraption got its start as a basic black Genius Mouse. But thanks to intricate brass and leather(?) embellishment, the mouse is pretty much unrecognizable from its original state.

Another nice detail is the braided, cloth covered USB cable.

The top of the mouse pops open to reveal some sort of screened contraption, and I’m not really sure what purpose that serves.

For some reason, this thing doesn’t look very ergonomically friendly, what with all lumpy bumpy surfaces protruding from the top. But then again, I never saw the word “comfortable” anywhere in the definition of Steampunk.

[Modding.RU via Steampunk Workshop via MAKE]

Given the heritage of Tetris, it’s only appropriate that these Icetris ice cube trays would come from Dima Komissarov of Russian design shop Mystake. With enough frozen blocks, you should be able to play a complete game in the confines of your hi-ball glass. The only downside I can see to playing Tetris with ice cubes, of course, is the fact that they might melt before you can even complete a row.

Now the bad news — there’s no word on when and where you’ll be able to get your hands on these, but I definitely am clearing some space in my freezer in anticipation.

Because of the cramped quarters inside the box, the Russian-built Fallout Terminal [UPDATE: Turns out that it's actually the brainchild of a guy going by the name Widefault -- see comment #2 below] Civil Defense computer isn’t very powerful — running an anemic 300 MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and a 4GB Compact Flash card for storage. Heck, it probably isn’t even powerful enough to play the original Fallout or Half-Life. But with the proper Atari 800 emulator installed, it might be able to play a game of SCRAM (Remember gaming genius Chris Crawford? Ah, memories.)

[Read Full Worklog]

So the big mama is a Petabyte, inside her is a Terabyte, followed by daughter Gigabyte – and so forth – all the way down to a teensy little baby Bit.

The set of 7 dolls is handcrafted by artisans from Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod and comes inside an intricate Birch wood container, and can be found over on Charles & Marie for $220.

Alas, it’ll never get out of the starting gate. This heavily modded, liquid-cooled PC is strictly for use while parked (unless you want to strap a monitor to your lap while riding, and connect a really long extension cord). While it may not have serious racing horsepower, I’m sure it’s got plenty of processing speed.

Perhaps inspired by last year’s SLI-Machine wheel PC, The computer cycle was built by Russian casemodder Dennis Ilyin (a.k.a. “Xooler”) in a recent NVIDIA-sponsored case building contest. If you can believe it, Dennis only won the second place prize. I personally think he was robbed, but you be the judge.

Engineer Lars Pontoppidan created Scopetris using an AtMega32 micro-controller to drive the beam of an oscilloscope to mimic the game play of the classic Soviet puzzle game.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Lars had to create custom circuitry and programmed the beam to produce a similar visual result to that of those old vector graphic games. The game is controlled using a traditional Atari 9-pin digital joystick.

Unlike some lesser oscilloscope beam hacks which use simple video games like Pong, Lars really went all out to create a game with the relative complexity of Tetris. Using his significant programming prowess, Pontoppidan programmed the circuit to manage each individual as an independent object, allowing it to behave very similarly to the original arcade classic.

Kudos to Lars for an outstanding scope hack.

[via Hacked Gadgets via MAKE]

The stop-motion video by Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond of NotSoNoisy creative agency is the latest in his series of video game inspired clips, which first gained popularity with Human Space Invaders and Human Pong, and more recently, Human Pole Position.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Human Tetris was recorded during the Urbaines Festival at the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne, Switzerland. The video shoot took 88 people wearing bright Tetris colored T-shirts, and 880 carefully choreographed still images in order to complete the effect. Add one goofy human-generated audio track, and there you have it.

Too bad I just ran out of quarters.

The Pultius TV remote control has 99 individual channel buttons along with 3 buttons for adding 100, 200 or 300 to the number. This design provides direct access to 399 unique channels with just two button presses. While the idea sounds useful on paper, the 20-inch long remote “baton” is just plain goofy. With services like DirecTV having channel numbers that go well into the 800s, the remote would need even more buttons. On the other hand, you’ll never lose this remote under the couch cushion.

This is just the sort of whimsy you’d expect from the guy who brought us the $1600 semi-vaporware light up keyboard.

[via Engadget]

Apparently, the Russian bank which owns this ATM either didn’t bother to activate the copy of Windows installed on its internal computer, or is running a bootleg copy of the operating system. Either way, its done nothing to instill confidence in my use of ATMs.

It’s bad enough that so many our our financial transactions run through such an insecure and unstable operating system as Windows, but this has gotta take the cake.

Now I don’t know much about the liquidity of the banks in Russia, but I’d say to steer clear of this one for sure.

[via EnglishRussia via The Raw Feed]