There’s two reasons you’d want to buy this Baseball King Ball Set from the Japan Trend Shop. 1) You’re a fan of Japanese baseball, particularly players from teams like the Giants, Dragons and Eagles who have endorsed these balls. 2) You’ve always wanted to hurl pitches like they do in the major leagues (without the years of training) because each ball features a specially designed band running through the center allowing a pitcher to control the air resistance flowing over the ball in relation to the holes in the band. As a result it’s easy to throw pitches like a sinker, curveball, knuckleball, riser or screwball, though it goes without saying that these balls are in no way regulation. $24 plus an extra $25 for shipping.
There are two places where bomb-proof wallpaper would come in really, really handy: war zones, and college. I guess college is less deadly most of the time, but you also don’t have the US Government offering to step in and pay for replacement drywall after your roommate decides that it would be fun to try and kick his way through to the adjoining room by swinging from your bunk bed. Thanks, Logan.
X-Flex wallpaper is made from a “Kevlar-like material” (Kevlar itself being a trademark of DuPont, in case you were wondering) sandwiched between an elastic polymer wrap. It’s lightweight, portable, and a cinch to install relative to the protection it offers: you just peel off the back, stick it to the wall, and bolt it to the ceiling and floor and you’re done. You can even wallpaper or paint over it if you don’t like the color. Popular Science put X-Flex to the test with a wrecking ball as you’ll see in the video below, but to forestall any objections, you can also see X-Flex withstanding an actual bomb blast on their website.
For those of you who are especially paranoid, it’s certainly worth mentioning that X-Flex is not actually intended to protect against ballistics, like bullets or shrapnel, just blasts and blunt impacts like bombs and drunken roommates. A commercial version of the military grade wallpaper is due out next year.
Designed by Jiae Kwon, Map-Holes are replacement man-hole covers that serve as a sort of static compass for tourists and pedestrians, showing them what direction to head to find a particular landmark in the city they’re visiting, and letting them know how long it takes to walk there. The idea definitely has merit, but I don’t think replacing man-hole covers is the ideal solution. Not only because they usually exist in the middle of a street, but they’d also have to be perfectly oriented in order for them to be effective. If one gets even slightly misaligned, there’s going to be a lot of misguided tourists.
How many of you have accidentally busted a pair of your favorite sunglasses? Provided I don’t lose them first, it usually only takes a good two or three months before some accident befalls them. It would be nice to have a pair that could really stand up to a beating. These Japan Self-Defense Force Sunglasses might just do the trick.
These glasses are officially endorsed by the Japanese military due to their keen ability to withstand gratuitous amounts force. The lenses will not shatter if struck with a .3” object traveling at 106mph. Granted, that’s not quite enough to stop a bullet as depicted in their ad, but it’s impressive nonetheless. The frames themselves are made from TPR/TR90, which should be strong enough to take a bit of a beating themselves. At $317 a pair, I’d highly suggest not misplacing these.
I usually consider myself to be a bit of a tech head, but now and again something comes along which makes me realise how low I really rate on the universal scale of geekery.
The latest blow to my sense of nerdy self worth is SurfaceScapes, a project dreamt up by students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Centre, which aims to create a proof-of-concept for playing tabletop role-playing games on Microsoft’s Surface Table.
Basically, this provides players with a digital environment, which they can interact with using real objects (such as painstakingly detailed miniatures), and also provides automated calculations and visual and audio feedback for actions performed by characters in the game. If that takes your fancy, then watch the video and allow the nasal voiceover to explain things far better than I ever could.
So far, only Dungeons and Dragons is up and running on the prototype system, but fortunately for those whose proverbial boat is not floated by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s magnum opus, the team say it could be expanded to other games in the future.
[ The following article is sponsored by Eye-Fi. The device was provided free of charge, and I am being compensated for the time I took to review the product. The opinions expressed are entirely my own. -Ed. ]
By David Ponce
No one really likes cables. And the more electronic devices we own, the worse it gets. Anything anyone does to do away with all the spaghetti-like clutter is a good thing by my book. So that’s why I’ve always been a fan of Eye-Fi, makers of an SD card with an embedded Wi-Fi chip. Not only because it allows me to do away with the always-hard-to-find USB transfer cable, it actually makes my camera more useful (well, not quite my camera, no fault of Eye-Fi, but more on that in a minute). How so? By making it a snap to actually offload pictures from it and sharing them with whomever I like. This happens to be the entire point of cameras, but being the lazy person I am I’ve been known to leave pictures in there forever.
So does it work? Absolutely. Keep reading for a short review of the product.
Say what you will about George Lucas and his merchandising empire, but I have to give them credit for realizing how important their fans are and not always having a knee-jerk lawsuit reaction to every single Star Wars homage. Like this custom ‘Han Solo frozen in carbonite’ desk created by Tom Spina Designs. While there’s not a terrible amount of information on their site about it, I’m pretty sure it’s not an officially licensed Star Wars product since it was actually created as a custom one-off design for one of their clients.
Oh and FYI, while it’s a nice design and all, I’m not a fan of glass top desks because there’s always the chance of this happening.
Whether you’re looking for some calming white noise to help you drift off to sleep at night, or you just moved to the desert and desperately miss the sound of falling rain, this unique piece of vinyl should fill that void in your life. On one side of the endless rain record you’ll find a long track of, you guessed it, falling rain, while the other side features looped grooves that play a continuous stream of more distinct rain drops. $39 from the designboom shop, or free if you just move to a rainforest.
Besides the themed packaging that just screams Disney, the only thing that brands these USB to USB-mini cables as coming from the ‘house of mouse’ is their non-beige/black/grey colors, and a plastic molded Cars/Princess/Mickey/Toy Story/Stich design on one end of the cable. But surprisingly even though they are tied to Disney, they’re each still a rather reasonable $7 from online stores like Brando. So I guess the only branding that leads to unreasonable overpricing is the term ‘Monster.’
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[ The following article is sponsored by Eye-Fi. The device was provided free of charge, and I am being compensated for the time I took to review the product. The opinions expressed are entirely my own. -Ed. ]
