Tag: Germany

Some walk lights have buttons you can press to let the system know that there are pedestrians waiting to cross, while some others have a Pong game unit instead. Too bad you can only find the latter in Germany.

We’re always talking about stuff made out of LEGO around here, and while I’ve even seen furniture and vehicles made from LEGO bricks, I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve seen a load-bearing bridge that uses LEGO.

I definitely like the fact that more and more appliances are becoming Wi-Fi-enabled, meaning that expensive home automation that was only available for the rich, or incredibly handy is trickling down to us ordinary folk. The air conditioning company Friedrich has just released a Wi-Fi dongle that will allow you to control their air conditioners from anywhere.

How does Germany celebrate the release of The Phantom Menace in 3D? With the world’s most awesome Star Wars diorama of course. Rene Hoffmeister and Lorenz Lnggrtnr built this super complex diorama featuring sets from Star Wars completely built out of LEGO.

Every time I upgrade my headphones, I rediscover parts of my large music collection. Since I can’t get any big speakers because of where I live, I’ve resigned myself to exploring the realm of audiophile headphones.

No, these aren’t aliens or anything like that, but this art installation by Luzinterruptus is pretty spooky. The anonymous artist group put together this haunting installation for the Hamburg Dockville Festival. It’s supposed to remind us of the dangers of nuclear power.

If you’re like me, you’d love some robot to prepare your breakfast, kind of like those crazy machines from Back to the Future. While today’s robots are certainly smarter than Doc Brown’s jury-rigged breakfast maker, you might wonder how good the robot breakfast will be.

A couple of students at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany are developing the video equivalent of the Content-Aware Fill feature in Photoshop CS5. In other words, their software can make objects invisible, and it does this in real-time.

It looks like another company is working on a cute humanoid robot. This time, the ‘bot comes from Germany, and he’s some kind of walking cyclops. The Myon robot is about 50 inches tall and weighs 33lbs.

This is one thing that you’ve definitely got to see. In Germany, in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, they can repurpose the building’s internal ventilation system to create an artificial tornado – indoors! This twister takes about 7 minutes to form and is powered by 144 jets and 28 tons of air.

I always wondered why they called it an airplane hangar. This clever wall hook system is definitely a clever play on the airplane hang(e)r concept. Created by Kolja Clemens of Germany’s MOM, these cool aluminum airplanes are just the right size and shape for hanging up your leather bomber jacket or flak jacket.

Normally, if I told you your robot was smoking, you’d have to send it in to a technician to have it looked at. I’m not quite sure why anyone came up with this idea, but they did.

We’ve yet to see a gadget really compete against the iPhone, to the extent that subscribers in the U.S. are willing to endure the sometimes horrible service of AT&T so that they can keep using Apple’s revolutionary product.

Man, these are smartphones indeed. The wise – and probably bored – folks at the University of Berlin made a one-of-a-kind iPhone app which they called iDriver, which allows them to control a Honda Civic via Wi-Fi.

File this under “weirdest use for a piano. ever.”. This amazing bit of programming and mechanical engineering has created what is probably the first and only classical piano that can speak in English.

Here’s a cool little PC program for creating ambient electronic music. And it sure looks purty while it’s doing it. The setting for Andreas Illiger’s Microsia is inside of a virtual “plant cell” of a leaf.