Tag: Tape

The brainchild of a group of presumably messy eaters at Johns Hopkins University, Tastee Tape is an edible adhesive tape designed for holding burritos closed so you don’t wind up with burrito guts all over your lap while you’re trying to eat one.

Tape is one of those really useful things that has always had a bit of a fateful flaw. Since it sticks to itself, it can be incredibly frustrating to find the end of it once you start using a roll.

What if I told you that it takes a full five minutes to get a single piece of tape out of this insane Rube Goldberg machine? Hey, it’s about the journey, not the tape. At least that’s what I would keep telling myself if I had to wait on this machine to get said tape.

Boy, it’s been a really long time since I saw or heard an 8-track tape. These technological antiquities were insanely popular back in the 1960s and 1970s, but gradually went the way of the dinosaurs as they were replaced by more compact and longer-playing cassette tapes.

We like cosplay around here, despite the fact that I am not much for dressing up (I even shun pants). People who like to go to conferences like ComicCon or WonderCon are a bit more enthusiastic about getting dressed up than I am. 

I can’t believe that no one has thought of this before. This new invention claims it will transform “virtually any surface into a base for LEGO components.” You can build around corners, on curved surfaces, or even onto the sides of other brick-built creations.

Give a geek some cardboard, wood, and a roll of tape and he will cook up a very slick little obstacle course for said roll of tape. I don’t know what it is about this course that I find so mesmerizing.

Last month we checked out a decorative tape with a circuit board design. It turns out that researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group have considered such a form factor for interconnected and programmable sensors, and are looking for potential customers for their product.

Upgrade your gift wrap master race-style with Aya Codama aka Bullet’s Out of Place Artifacts circuit board tape. The gold and gray metallic elements make it look realistic and expensive. Actually it really is expensive. Sadly, the product’s website is all in Japanese, but from my understanding Bullet is indeed selling the tape.

Handheld 3D printers like the 3Doodler are easy and fun to use, but they’re suited for small sketches. That’s why a group of Hasso Plattner Institut (HPI) students came up with the Protopiper (pdf), a unique tape dispenser.

The Force is great and all, but if you have duct tape, why do we even need it anymore? Duct tape can do anything. And these days you can purchase duct tape in kinds of colors and themes.

Boy, I haven’t seen a reel-to-reel tape deck in years. After 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, MiniDiscs and MP3s, we’re at least five generations past the everyday use of these things. And dekstop calculators? I haven’t used one in a very long time either.

Something as simple as a roll of Scotch tape can transform faces in a not-so-pretty way. In fact, the Scotch Tape series of photos shot by Wes Naman borders on horrifying. Who knew tape could turn regular peoples’ faces into such grotesque abominations?

Using cassettes to create mixtapes was a fun time to spend an afternoon when you were a kid. There’s something oddly pleasing about this analog media format. Thankfully, if you’ve got a MakerBot in your shed, you can make a modern version of the mixtape, by 3D printing an MP3 player in the shape of a cassette.

VHS tapes might have gone the way of the dinosaur, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fond memories of the dominant video format before the rise DVD, Blu-ray and streaming. Kick back, relax, and remember the days when you had to rewind your movies and keep them away from magnets with this awesome handmade VHS tape coffee table.

Halloween’s still a number of months away, but evil corporations and the undead can strike anytime anyway, so we might as well stock up on these unique crime scene tapes.