But unlike those limestone speakers, this sturdy dock is made from cast concrete. The concrete dock was conceived by “guest designer” Aidan Conway-Stuart of obelisk. It’s cast in a deep grey color, and coated with satin sealer to protect its finish too.

The thing cradles your iPhone or iPod nicely on a cut-out section, which has an integrated channel for running your USB to 30-pin cable neatly underneath. The dock connector sticks out of the base, holding your iDevice securely in place. It doesn’t look like it would be easy to tip this thing over.

And if you happen to find yourself face-to-face with an intruder, you can always grab this concrete chunk and use it as a weapon. It looks like it could definitely do some damage.

So if you’re looking for a unique dock for your iPhone or iPod, head on over to Etsy, and you can grab one for $39 (USD). I’d actually like to see an iPad version – I think that’d look really nice too.

This new Lavazza concept espresso machine has surfaced with a body made out of two pieces of molded concrete. The thing looks very industrial and would probably fit right in at Steve Jobs’ house.

The parts that actually make the espresso appear to be stainless steel. The water goes into a drawer for brewing. The only particularly unpleasant sounding part is that the coffee beans appear to go into a hopper that puts them right next to the concrete. Mmmm. Coffee and concrete.

[via Yanko Design]

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]

Captain Ødegård’s giant-sized wood media player measures in at 8.25″ x 5.5″ x 2″, giving it about 90-times the volume of a regular Zen Stone player. He even got out the old woodburner to provide all the logo and control icons.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The larger-than-life player is fully functional, packing in 4GB of memory on an SD card, and wooden control buttons that actually operate the player.

[via Anythingbutipod]

The new model takes all of the features of the original ZEN Stone and adds a bright blue round OLED display for song title and other pertinent information. In addition, the Plus bumps the memory up to 2GB vs. the 1GB that’s in the first model. The Plus also adds a voice recorder, clock, stopwatch and FM tuner which weren’t in the original Stone. Battery life is just a tiny bit shorter at 9.5 hours vs. the 10 hours of the original, but that’s to be expected whenever you add a display.

Now all these features do bump up the cost a little bit. While the 1GB ZEN Stone costs just $39, the 2GB ZEN Stone Plus is expected to run about $65 when it’s released later this Summer.

[via epiZENter via Gizmodo]