Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Archive for the ‘Fun Stuff’ Category

It seems like I have a lot of posts with cool stuff made from Lego. I guess that either says something about me, or something about Lego.

I’m personally not a sports fan, but the folks at Legofussball have been recreating great soccer (football) moments including games from the 2010 World Cup.

Check out the video below of the USA vs England tie game.

I came across this excellent video today. In the same category as the "Pixels" video we posted recently, it is a video game come to life in the real world featuring Mario.

I found the original site (I think) that this was posted and got a very poor translation from the Japanese description.

The best I could determine was that it was posted on June 8, 2010. The video was made with Post-It Notes (or generic versions) for some sort of festival. It took 2 weeks to make in an empty school and cost about 5,000 Yen (about $55.00 US).

Edible Crayons

Person Style Blogger, "Ji" has made some edible crayons and posted the whole process on her blog.

She has made a set of eight crayons, which, as you can see, actually work as crayons. But they are also healthy and edible. The yellow crayon, for example, is made from peanuts, dried veggies, dried bananas, bee pollen, dried pineapple, freeze dried corn, freeze dried apples, chocolate covered sunflower seeds, Fruity Pebbles (yellow ones), and Marshmallow (OK, maybe Fruity Pebbles isn’t that healthy.) One of the main ingredients in all the crayons is melted marshmallows. I’m not sure of some of the taste combinations either, such as peas and blueberries.

The dried ingredients seem to have been ground just like pigments would be, then combined with the carrier and binder ingredients.

	Some of the ingredients getting mixed

Clearly these crayons aren’t too practical as either crayons or as snacks, but they are amazing. If you want to try your hand at making your own, Ji has listed the ingredients on her website, Luxirare along with additional photos. I found this Crayon Candy Molds on Amazon, but I’m sure you could find them locally.

If this seems like too much work for you, I did also find these Chocolate Crayons on Amazon.

Ji’s identity is a bit of a mystery. She’s very careful to hide her face in any photos of her on the blog. She prefers to feature the products rather than herself. I must say her photography is absolutely stunning. Every image is a work of art. Even the photos of her ingredients are artfully composed.

Ji is way more organized than I am

Picture perfect crayons you can eat

I came across this unfortunate typo on a wading pool this morning on the web. It’s made even funnier by the body language of the girl in the pool. At least they got the pricing signage right.

	Poop Up Pool

	Another version

Then, I found this one as well. Although in this picture, it doesn’t look like a three-dimensional box.

	Another version

Hmmm. maybe some field research is needed.

Via failblog.org

We don’t like it either

Dave’s Cool Toys’ blog gets lots of comments. But you won’t see most of them on our posts. That’s because most of them are Comment Spam.

Comment Spam results from unscrupulous bloggers and webmasters attempting to get link-backs to their site to boost their search engine rankings artificially by posting as much as possible on other blogs by leaving comments. Sometimes they do it themselves, sometimes they use software bots to post for them.

It’s a pain. Fortunately, we use software that does a great job of filtering out this nonsense.

But, there are times when I read through the comment spam just to see what’s there before deleting it and it gives me a laugh. I really must say I don’t understand what they think they are doing at times.

So, I thought I’d share some of the odd comment spam we’ve received recently. This is the first installment. My comments are in italics. I have not edited the comments, so misspellings, punctuation, etc. are as they were written. I’ve deleted or changed links, phone numbers, etc.

Dave’s Cool Toys Blog Comment Spam

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Very cleverly inserting a link in the middle

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Brilliant and well deserved! Enjoy the moment and the prize!
What prize? Did I get a prize?

right now I will come in the picture and join you.

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At you a uneasy choice
I think, that you are not right. Let’s discuss. Write to me in PM.
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What charming message
I’ve received several variations of this one such as the next one.

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The word of honour.
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In my opinion it is very interesting theme. I suggest you it to discuss here or in PM.
I can believe to you :)

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They couldn’t even be bothered to write something, just posted Greek Type

Check this Out!
2 days ago I received a message from 000-000-0000 (number removed) and was convinced the caller was a scam.
I decided to file a complaint with the Gulf Coast Western and complain.
Anyway, I feel like such a fool Gulf Coast Western -an oil corporation- called me back We’re contacting me about employment. Apparently I got the job
Any idea how to uncomplain and fix this????
This has what to do with toys?

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What good question
You Exaggerate.
Not your business!
That was all one post

Im surprised to have found this blog, I though I was the only one writing about this…thanks.
This was on a post about my son making "Dave’s Cool Toys" out of K’nex. Who else would write about this?

Your babble makes me want to poop my pants…

In all, the theme was 121 comments and 120 of them spamskih – well is not that fox?

Many bukaf not mastered, but the author credit.
Hopefully "bukaf" is not slang for something I’m not aware of.

looking for information for propagation of sea sponge, does anyone know of any other articles besides the one i posted.

This is a good and organization site. I like this in internet and here it exist. Ok and good.

Drop the high class, everything need to be flashy and expensive idea. You need to entertain in your budget and your abilities. Make sure that you will enjoy yourself also. If you spend most of your time worrying that your gathering is as great as it should be, you will not be able to have a great time as you should.

If I must say something, then nothing will stop the chatter inside

On March 3 we posted about OK Go’s amazing "This Too Shall Pass" video with one of the most incredible Rube Goldberg devices we’ve ever seen. In that post I mentioned that it brought back memories of the game Mousetrap. I also mentioned that we never actually played the game, but just built the mousetrap.

Well, I’m not sure if someone read my blog post, but the comedy troupe, The Station has posted a video parody of OK Go’s video called "Mousetrap Never Works" on YouTube.

Check it out.

Parental advisory: there is some violence toward the end of the video.

Kenny "K-Strass" Strasser

A very strange man has been appearing on morning TV shows throughout the midwest. He is booked as a yo-yo champion and hosts expect to be dazzled by his yo-yo tricks. He claims to be a representative of the Zim Zam Yo-Yo Corp., "the only non-profit, environmentally conscious yo-yo manufacturer in the world". Although some videos say "Zip Zap".

But when he gets on-air it turns out he is painfully inept at the yo-yo, strangely dressed, and awkward in general.

His name is K-Strass, or Kenny Strasser, or Karl Strassburg, or probably something else, and he has duped at least six different TV stations into booking him on their morning shows.

K-Strass sometimes claims to be divorced (twice), a recovering addict, and has family issues, sometimes taking calls from his father in the middle of his segment. His yo-yo "tricks" are often little more than swinging yo-yos around, dropping them, and sometimes hitting himself in the face or crotch. In one video he gets 7 yo-yos hopelessly tangled. He raps (badly), be-bops (badly), and falls down. He also seems to talk much more than play with the yo-yo.

Kenny also talks about going green, and Zim Zam is supposed to be environmentally friendly, however He seems to use plastic yo-yos, so I’m not sure how they are green.

So who is K-Strass? Nobody seems to know for sure. But there is a Zim Zam Yo-Yo website with nothing more than a yellow cap with the date "May 31". Hmmm. But there’s also another Zim Zam website as well. There is also a Zim Zam Facebook page. And, of course, there’s a Twitter feed, which clams that the www.zimzamyoyos.com page is a fake. Whew!

How bad is K-Strass? Check the videos below. Warning: some of K-Strass’s videos have been removed by their TV stations, so I can’t be sure how long these will be available.

The amazing video below is of the 2010 Illusion of the year as named by the 6th Annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest held by the Vision Sciences Society.

The illusion was created by Koukichi Sugihara at the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan.

The coolest thing about this illusion is that it is a 3-dimensional model. Everything that’s happening is actually happening while it’s being recorded. No, it’s not magnets or anything tricky like that. Watch the video and at about 25 seconds in it will show you how it works.

The illusion clearly only works from one very specific angle. Any other angle shows how it works.

Check out the Illusion of the Year site for the other winners and other great illusions.

Want to build your own? The creators have plans you can download here.

via Gizmodo

Check out this video of 12-year-old Greyson Chance signing the Lady Gaga song "Paparazzi". It was recorded at his school talent show in Edmond, OK. No word on whether or not he won the talent show (I certainly hope he did), but his video has had over 8 million views as of today.

Due to the popularity of his video, he is appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and spoke by phone with Lady Gaga herself!

Watch for this kid in the future.

Watch Greyson on the Ellen show here.

Useless Lego Machine

In January I wrote a blog post about the world’s most useless machine (I want that).

Today we have a follow-up with a very similar toy made of Lego. I stumbled on a YouTube video of the World’s Most Useless Lego Machine. It’s basically the same machine I posted about before, but this time made of Lego.

The creator made about 10 prototypes before completing the final version shown here. He used a clockwork motor for the action rather than electric, so it has a small hole to wind it.

When I see videos like this I wonder what kind of Lego collection these folks have. A search on Amazon for “Lego” came up with 4,868 items! That’s quite a variety of Lego to build things with.

This type of machine is sometimes called “Shannon’s ultimate machine”. It is named for Claude Shannon, an American mathematician and engineer who had many interests and kept a machine like this on his desk that switched itself off. Interestingly, he also build a machine that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, which we just posted about a Lego version the other day.

We love cannons. Which is why we sell the entire line of Big Bang Cannons (shameless plug). But this little cannon is a power-packed little weapon. It shoots holes in soda cans, breaks glass, pops a balloon from across the room. It’s quite amazing. Although this guy wasn’t too smart to shoot a lightbulb right by his keyboard. Video below.

Now that I watch this again, I hope I wasn’t taken in by a YouTube hoax.

The Lego Rubic’s Cube robot

How fast can you solve a Rubik’s Cube
? My answer? "Not very".

This robot can solve it in under 25 seconds.

The robot is made from Lego Mindstorm, Lego Technic pieces, and a Droid cell phone running a custom-made application. The cell phone takes pictures of each side of the Rubik’s Cube from above, the uses solves the puzzle and sends instructions to the Mindstorm robot with Bluetooth.

The robot was built by ARM to show off their processor in the Droid phone (which explains the skateboarding Droid robot in the upper right corner). Even though it’s a promotional video, it’s still one of the coolest uses of Lego I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some cool ones.

(via Gizmodo)

I love Flash Mobs (a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place and perform a brief act, then disperse). You’ll find several videos on Dave’s Cool Toys Blog of great public performances. This one is of Ohio State students and staff breaking into dance in the great hall of the new Ohio Union on Monday, May 3, 2010 at 12:35 p.m. There’s also an appearance by Brutus Buckeye and Ohio State U. President E. Gordon Gee. For an added bonus, I believe they used music from Glee. Crank the volume, watch in HD if you’re system can handle it, and enjoy.

I missed Star Wars Day, which was yesterday ("May the force" be with you). But I’m making it up with this little movie. It’s the original Star Wars Trilogy told in 2 minutes with animated Lego and narrated by a child. What could be better? The little nuggests of humor go by very fast, so watch it twice (or 3 times). My favorite… "What up, son". I wish I knew who made this, but I haven’t been able to locate that info. Enjoy!