Archive for June 2013

If you’ve been reading Technabob for any length of time, you probably know that we’re huge fans of LEGO and LEGO paraphernalia. Now, it turns out that Hollywood is jumping onto the LEGO bandwagon with the upcoming release of The LEGO Movie.

The crews of most TV shows use regular tables to have conferences and go over their work, which is fine because most shows are pretty crap. But that will never do for a quality program like Game of Thrones.

Tauntauns make great rugs – great sleeping bags too when you are in the freezing cold of Hoth and don’t care how it’s insides smell. This tauntaun skin rug was designed by Malaki Keller and is 100% awesome.

Professional photographers wouldn’t dare use an iPhone – or any smartphone for that matter – to take pictures for work. But they can use it to help them do their job. Take the Lumu for example.

Cats are techie creatures. From playing games to wearing headphones (okay, so this was just an April Fools’ Day joke, but hey, I can totally see it happening), cats can do it all. And now a developer has created an app intended for use by your frisky kitty so it can take its own selfies.

There’s something quite special about high-end speakers, in the way that they are often able to recreate acoustic performances very accurately, akin to what holography is to visual senses. I’m not sure that these Bowers & Wilkins speakers will do that, but they certainly look the part.

We’ve seen a handful of tiny arcade machines, but Tiny Arcade Machines is way better. It’s a shop owned by YouTuber dabarduba, an electronics engineer in the UK. He makes compact arcade machines that fit on your desktop or bar counter.

If you’re an active Foursquare user, then you probably have a pretty detailed log on the places you’ve been to and when you were there on your account. Foursquare has just unveiled a new tool that their users can utilize that makes taking a trip down memory lane easier and more pleasing to the eyes.

There are plenty of electric bikes these days, but from time to time, one comes along that sets itself apart, like this one from Germany’s Smart. Smart is best known for their ultra compact city cars, but I’m impressed with this e-bike too.

Hand puppets are fun for kids, but these knitted toys really don’t quite hold the appeal today that they had in say, the 1500’s. So, how do you jazz up hand puppets so that people actually want to play with them today?

I find it amusing how Sherlock Holmes is a true master of disguise and blends in so well with his surroundings that you won’t even know he was there (think Game of Shadows.) If you’ve ever wanted to pull the “I’m on the armchair but you can’t see me” trick but aren’t very good with makeup, then here’s your chance: the Human Chair by artist Jamie Isenstein.

Now you can take a trip to numerous destinations without having to leave the comforts of your home and without spending a single cent. How? With Google’s Street View, which has now been updated with 1,001 new destinations and places that were previously not available.

A while back, I wrote about the QuNeo, a reasonably priced, multitouch music controller, packed with triggers and modifiers. The folks at Keith McMillen Instruments were kind enough to set me up with a QuNeo so I could put it to the test.

It’s like beating Kong in a barrel… Wait, that’s not how the saying goes. But you can say it now. This custom-built Donkey Kong tabletop arcade machine has been put into a barrel. Why? So you can drink and game of course.

Forget layer cake, level cake is what it’s all about for gamers. This amazing Super Mario Bros. cake represents the water, land and sky levels from the game in amazing detail.

The last cosplay I featured was very faithful to its source material. It was also legitimately creepy. This Toothless quad suit on the other hand may not be the most polished costume out there, but it is one of the most adorable ones I’ve ever seen.