John built the robot from scratch using sheet styrene. He drew a reference sketch of the ‘bot that he used throughout the creation process. All of the joints were made so that they would allow the resulting ‘bot to be posed. I have to say that it looks pretty awesome.

The Q-14 Reconnaissance robot’s construction is fully detailed on the Neiner family blog.

Would you scratch-build your own ‘bot like this? It’s a pretty daunting project, but when you take it one step at a time, I suppose anything is possible.

[via Make:]

Actually, that’s Mr. Pac-Man to you, sir. This over-the-top red and yellow 1996 Chrevrolet Caprice is decked out with custom Pac-Man leather seats.

And check out those rims… Mr. Pac-Man is hiding behind the chrome wheels, showing his face over and over again as the wheels turn.

If Pac-Man drives an Caprice, what sort of car do you think that Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde drive? I was thinking maybe they each had an AMC Pacer in their respective color.

[flickr via GadgetHIM via walyou]

The Ora watch tells time on a series of three crisscrossed analog time strips. The top strip tells time in minutes, overlapping a smaller band with the hours, and a narrow third belt with the current day of the week.

The mechanism requires an intricate and complicated set of motorized gears pull each band into the correct postion as the time changes.

Designed by Alexandros Stasinopoulos, the Ora is merely in the conceptual stages at this point, so you won’t be able to stop by your local watch shop and buy one of these any time soon.

So it’s all really cool except for the fact that it doesn’t actually exist.

[via designboom via dustbowl]

While this giant My Document folder seems to be missing an “S”, this laptop sleeve is still kinda cool. Available from the DesignBoom Shop for $30 USD.

United Keys OLED keyboard keep their prices on planet Earth by including only monochrome displays, and letting you program just 9 of the keys.

Each keyboard comes with a 3×3 matrix of custom keys, each of which contains a tiny 0.7″ yellow OLED screen with a bright high-contrast 64×64 pixel display. The keyboards ship with a OLED Manager software (Windows XP/Vista only) which lets you create custom icons and save macro functions for each key. The coolest part of the software is that you can set the keys to load in a unique profile for each application (as well as a default key set), so you can set different macros and icons for Photoshop than you do for Excel, and so forth.

The only real downside to OLED screens are their relatively short life span. With just a 40,000 hour display life (at 50% brightness), you’ll end up throwing this keyboard in the trash after about 4-1/2 years of continuous use.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

United Keys keyboards are available in either a full 103-key keyboard ($249 USD) with the function keys on the left side, or in a standalone 9-key keypad ($199 USD), which you can set on either side of your current keyboard. While they’re definitely no Maximus, they’re definitely the cheapest OLED keyboards you can get at this point.

[via OLED-Info]

[Looking for something more colorful and don't care if it's OLED? Don't forget about the Luxeed RGB LED keyboard.]

Sporting a total of 768 individually addressable amber LEDs, each one of the numbers slides into and out of view as the hours, minutes and seconds tick away. With all of those LEDs wired up to a single power source, I’m just dying to see someone hack one of these to display other information (like maybe the Technabob RSS Feed?)

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

While the display only measures about 11.4″ (w) x 3.75″(h), you should be able to read the time from the other side of the room with no problem. If you’re always running late, you’ll have no excuse that you didn’t know what time it was. You can find the 768 LED Clock over at Hong Kong gadget importer Brando for $89 USD.

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]

The Yellow Drum Machine drives around the room looking for things that might make an interesting sound when tapped on. If he likes what he hears, he starts going to town with a little riff. Once he’s bored, he moves on, looking for something else to make noise with.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

As the ‘bot drives around, he avoids obstacles until it detects an object that looks like it might be a nice musical surface, takes some audio samples, and if he finds the sound to be pleasing, composes a little matching rhythm using the original sound sample and plays a little song.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Created by robot hacker fritsl, the little drummer dude is cobbled together from a variety of odd parts, including a PICAXE 28 microcontroller, this sound sampler, a couple of geared motors, an old wood cheese crate and plenty of hot glue.

[Let's Make Robots via MAKE]

Using a wireless RF transmitter, you can make the yellow aquatic bird tool around as you splish-splash in your bath. A pair of motorized propellers moves the little guy through the water, and let you steer duckie to the left, right, forwards or backwards. A quick 5-minute charge will give you about 15-minutes of bathtime fun. And yes, both the duck and controller are waterproof, so there’s no worries about electrocuting yourself.

The R/C Rubber Duck is available from I Want One of Those for £14.99 (appx. $26.98 USD). Quack.

Never mind the bizarre umbrella lighting fixture that’s been implanted into the canine’s brain. And if shoving a charger into the dogs nose holes isn’t bad enough, you can also juice up the battery by plugging his ass into a wall socket. If the ASPCA would start taking complaints about inanimate objects, now would be as good a time as ever.

It’s so awful, I’m tempted to not tell you where you can get one. But you know me. I’m sure there’s somebody on your holiday list who’s deserving of this big old lump of coal in their stocking. You can have the pick of the litter in white or yellow for just about $7 to $8 bucks each.

The stuffed bear cam attempts to make passers by smile. Instead, it’s much more likely to record the look of horror on the face of each subject.

Bringing back memories of the horrific pink bunny suit that Ralphie was forced to wear in A Christmas Story, the costume fits (badly) around your computer monitor, and conceals a webcam in its nose, snapping pictures of unsuspecting victims.

Under no circumstances should anyone be allowed to buy one of these unless they’re playing a practical joke on its recipient.

The Giordano Curve LED watch features a matrix of 82 individual LEDs to display the current time in a unique vertical orientation. The watches have a nice stainless steel band, and are water resistant to 30 meters.

The Giordano retails for $179 to $189 and is available in red, green, orange or yellow LED versions.

Available from Japan’s ZakkaShop, the Metro LED DOT clock series comes in red, green or amber varieties. Available in either horizontal desktop or vertical wall mount versions, the clocks retail for ¥7,800 (appx. $64 USD) each.