Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Archive for the ‘General Coolness’ Category

Toys exposed by x-ray

Have you ever wondered what mysterious mechanisms might inhabit the depths of your favorite toy? If you recall my earlier post about the book Bears with simple images of teddy bears turned inside out to reveal their inner workings you’ll know that I have.

Modern toys often have lots of electronics, batteries, gears, and motors to discover. But even older toys had hidden mechanical workings such as dolls who’s eyes close when they lie down. I must admit I’ve always wondered how those actually work.

Scan Toys is an exhibition of x-rays taken of toys at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. But it’s far more than just a collection of x-rays. It transforms common toys and their inner workings into art.

I don’t recognize some of the toys and I haven’t been able to find much explanation of each individual image. Some of the images also have non-toy items in them as well. But each one is beautiful and fascinating.

Don’t think you’ll be getting to Buenos Aires anytime soon? No problem. There is a wonderful Flickr set of at least some of the images.

Via Gizmodo

Jame’s May’s Lego House

What would you build if you had an unlimited supply of Lego? How about a house?

James May, one of the hosts of Top Gear, has done just that.

It’s part of his show, James May’s Toy Stories, which examines some iconic toys and "embarks on some ludicrously ambition adventures and feats of engineering" with them.

One of the goals of the show is to motivate children to put down their Wii remotes and get out and play again (an idea that Dave’s Cool Toys can get behind).

James May’s Toy Stories is a British series, so some of the terms used were unfamiliar to me, but the toy guide on the BBC America website made it more clear. For example, Airfix was a term I wasn’t familiar with, but they are plastic model kits.

A Lego house is quite ambition, but so is creating a real bridge out of Erector Sets, recreating an actual train route with model trains, or building the world’s largest model plane (life size!).

	Plasticine Tree

For one episode, they have created an entire garden out of 2.5 tons of plasticine in 24 colors at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea show. The garden drew attention, both good and bad. Many critics felt the garden shouldn’t be at the show because it had no actual living plants. But people from all over England contributed to the garden and it eventually won a "gold" medal. The medal was made of plasticine. The judges were in a spot because his garden broke the rules of the show by not including any real plants, but they liked it enough to reward it anyway.

And that’s not the only accolade the show has earned. They created a "Scalextric" slot car track at the original circuit at Brooklands, the birthplace of British motorsport, using 20,000 sections of track, stretching 2.75 miles. Guinness World Record
!

Unfortunately, their attempt at a world record scale train track failed because vandals placed pennies on the track, shorting it out and stopping the trains.

James May’s Toy Stories premiers on BBC America on June 28 at 10:00 p.m. Don’t miss it!

The show aired last year in Britain.

There is also a book, James May’s Toy Stories, available. The only DVD I could find was coded for Britain.

Since Toy Story 3 opens today, here’s a video I stumbled on this morning that takes vocals and chords recorded from Toy Story
and remixes it into clips from the movies. Great video! For more of these, check out the Pogo YouTube channel.

I love OK Go. I like their music. But I love their videos.

One might have thought that their very popular treadmill video would be a one-hit-wonder, never to be outdone. (Not me, of course. I never doubted them for a second.) But they followed that up with their amazing Rube Goldberg Machine video.

Well, they’ve done it again with another amazing video for their song "End Love", which is about the end of a relationship.

The video uses widely varying speeds to compress and expand time throughout. And it’s one single camera shot! Yikes! At one point they compress 24 hours into only 1/2 second and at another point they stretch 1/2 second into 16 seconds.

The video, which runs 4 minutes and 30 seconds, includes a total of 18 hours of the band members performing and 192 hours of the LA skyline at the very end.

The amount of planning that went into this video boggles the mind. This means that the band members had to performs parts of their song very slowly and parts of it very fast so that when the video is compressed/expanded it will fit into the final real-time version of the song. Plus, it has a goose.

One last thing before you watch the video. OK Go is running a contest on Facebook for this video. Download the video for free, then upload it to your Facebook page and get your friends to comment on it. The Facebook user with the most comments in two weeks wins.

I came across this amazing animation with fire this morning. It’s an animation of classic computer games recreated with fire. Actually 320 tealights. It took the creator 2 weeks and a lot of patience to create. It was worth it.

via Gizmodo

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

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.

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.