Posts tagged Object Culture

Danish industrial design firm KiBiSi and Danish bicycle manufacturer Biomega have teamed up with Puma to release the Mopion cargo bike, a sort of pickup-truck version of the Puma Boston bike:

[The Mopion] mixes city bike features and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.

The stretch two-wheeler will officially launch in mere hours at Eurobike and goes on sale in Spring of next year.

(more…)

I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all happened in a second and I didn’t even realize what had happened–I basically opened the bottle, heard a pop and then she fell down, holding her head and going “Fuuuuuuck!” (Afterwards she was fine, though our budding romance was not.)

The amount of pressure inside a champagne bottle, in addition to being calibrated to destroy my relationships, is much greater than what’s inside a bottle of beer. To prevent explosions, champagne bottles are made extra-thick and extra-heavy, nearly two pounds each. Multiply that by the 300 million bottles of Champagne that France ships every year and you’ve got a lot of carbon emissions. To combat this, the French are developing a new, slimmer-walled champagne bottle that weighs less.

(more…)

On physical objects becoming less and less physically weighty: Nowadays if you drop your phone, it may not survive. The other day I caught a snippet of GoodFellas, the part where Robert Deniro uses a 1970s-era telephone receiver to bludgeon a crony. Try to do that with your iPhone or Droid X and you’d have a confused, unbloodied crony and a cracked touchscreen.

Keyboards are less substantial now too, and typing on my laptop doesn’t make the racket an old metal-on-metal typewriter did. But just as we’ve seen old phone receivers nostalgically connected to cell phones, David Schultze’s Philco PC, Mac Classic iPad holders, and J. Stephenson’s wonderful retro computers, here comes Jack Zylkin’s Instructable for a typewriter USB keyboard.

(more…)

We’re excited to hear that Ponoko, the popular, laser-cutter based, online fabrication system, is teaming up with SparkFun to offer electronic hardware as part of its catalog of materials, allowing makers to create polished, custom electronic products. Touch-sensitive, gps-enabled, music-producing robots that feed your cat come to mind.

(more…)

ActiveIon’s Ionator HOM is a magic cleaning machine. Intended as a replacement for endless bottles of spray cleaner, the large, drill-gun-like device converts regular tap water into an ionized mist that lifts dirt off of surfaces and kills bacteria. There are no chemicals involved.

For two months we’ve been putting it through its paces in both a home and commercial environment to see how it stands up. Can regular tap water clean what normally requires bleach, ammonia and other chemicals?

The answer is yes, and the device is pretty darn impressive in action.

(more…)

Regular watchers of Entourage may remember the episode beginning with the birthday of Turtle, the Imelda Marcos of sneakers, which gave viewers a glimpse of his insane shoe closet and wall-length hat racks. Question is, how does a guy like that travel? The kicks I don’t know about, but a company called New Era makes these amusing Cap Carriers, which come in two-, six-, and 24-capacity sizes. A combination of nylon and neoprene formed into crush-proof shapes keeps your lids from getting flattened like Turtle’s ego.

(more…)

RISD-educated Jay Brett’s got a pretty kick-ass job: Industrial designer for Hollywood, building prototypes for superheroes.

Brett recently worked on the prototype build of a jet (in two versions, crashed and un-crashed) for the forthcoming Green Lantern movie, and it’s presumably the plane that the titular hero crashes during his Hal Jordan test-pilot days. While no shots of the Green Lantern plane are publicly releasable yet, for obvious reasons, one project you can see is Brett’s prototype of the Tron Light Cycle. While some of you may have spotted it at Comic-Con, Brett’s got shop shots of the thing posted here. And you can also check out Brett’s full book on Coroflot.

(more…)