Speaker Birdie
Have you missed your Gilded Mistress? It has been a while since she has made a post of merit. She’s had quite a bit on her mind and even more to stuff it with on her plate.
And with that, there is ever so much she could share, but why speak of stress when she can dote on this?
We do all remember Gilding’s love affair with birdcages. For these Gilding would not only willingly but adoringly allow Mr. Gilding to hook up an external set of speakers to that monstrosity of a television that lives in our living room.
The Music Cage is a wireless speaker system from Japanese company Nendo. Not only do you get great stereo sound, you get classy, elegant, and cleverly disguised speakers that won’t make you cringe when you look at them. Comes in your choice of black or white and can be suspended from the ceiling or placed on a shelf. Other features: they have the ability to stream music via a Wi-Fi network, computer, or Blutooth enabled mobile phone. [Via Home Tone and dezeen]
One Wild Shower
Just for the environmentally concious who are pulling out their hair and screeching “the end of water is near…
The “Phyto-Purification Bathroom,” designed by Jun Yasumoto, uses a natural filtering principle, called phyto-purification, for recycling waste water, and thereby reducing the amount of water used while showering. Serving as a mini eco-system, the shower filters and recycles the water used and purifies it via its neat little cleaning system in the wash-basin for re-use.
Surrounded by lemnas and water hyacinths ans reeds and rushes planted next to eachother, the plants offer privacy, are watered in as much as they aid in the filtration process by pulling larger particles and heavy metals from the water. The filtration system is completed by passing through a carbon filter that gathers the remaining micro-particles and returns to you clean, fresh water.
Sounds neat. Looks nice and green and lush. But Gildingcan’t seem to remove the image from her mind that one day soon you’ll have to use a machete to chop your way clear through the reeds and brush just to make an opening to get into your shower. Call the Florida in her, but this is just a little too close to trecking the everglades in her own bathroom for her comfort.
[Via The Design Blog]
Slippery When Limp and Occasionally Erect
This is just wrong on so many levels — and utterly hilarious, and if given the chance Gilding would own one for the sheer pleasure of seeing the look on her guests faces when they picked it up.
So, when not in use, this concept gel remote control by Panasonic becomes limp and placid and displays a colorfully pulsating light show. But with a touch, it becomes excited and rigid, and fulfills just about every childish metaphore that has been thrashing your frontal lobe into your skull while reading this. [Via cubeme]
By the way, you can thank Atomic Terrier for turning Gilding on to this .^_^.
Credit Cards and Piggy Banks
You know that SNL skit about “Don’t Buy Things You Can’t Afford”? Yeah, that was a good one. But in the age of credit cards, its so easy for people to make the excuse that they can’t nickle and dime it because they don’t carry cash. Well now all you bitches that keep buying shit you can’t afford and putting our economy further into debt rather than helping it, now you have no excuse to not be saving. Meet the Credit Card Piggy Bank.
Every time you slide a credit card through the card reader in the ceramic pig the software will automatically connect directly to your private bank account and the specified amount set onto your Credit Card Piggy Bank via software installed your computer will be deposited. The Piggy Bank is wireless and connects to the computer via bluetooth technology.
More on the Credit Card Piggy Bank can be found here and info on its creator, Denis Bostandzic, can be found here.
Color Picker Penmanship
Gilding is as obsessed about the consistency and color of her ink as she is about the quality, cut and color, and consistency of her paper. Obsessive it may be, compulsive it is, but as a writer, its as essential to the flow of her writing as is breathing…or her laptop. But this pen is just too trick.
The Color Picker is an innovative concept design pen that can scan colors from anything and instantly produce a color you can use. After placing the pen against an object, the user presses the scan button. The color being detected by the pen’s color sensor and the RGB cartridge inside the pen then mixes the required inks to create the target color. By being able to observe and change colors according to the nature around you, the ultimate goal of the pen is that artists will then be able to create a more sensorial and visual insight of their surrounding nature’s colors.
[Via tuvie]
“Harmony”
So, GIlding is digging the new Toyota Prius commercial “Harmony.” The concept is clever and organic and graphic.
Below are two versions of the commercial and lastly is the making of:
Clockwork Appeal
For all other intents and purposes, Gilding ha no use for watches or wall clocks. With cell phones an ever constant presence she has no need of wearing a watch, other than perhaps its aesthetic, and with a functioning microwave there’s no need for any other time piece in her apartment. But these clocks could very well change her mind.
The SEIKO’s Electrophoresis Display watch is a new design development of the company, infusing chic elegance with cutting edge technology. Utilizing “electric ink” technology along with an electrophoretic display, the new watch design is able to achieve super-high contrast, high image sharpness, low energy consumption, and a display which is able to feature different sizes and even flexibility.
The watch is also an expression of SEIKO’s emotional technology. The wearer is able to set the watch to display in a manner that is befitting of their place and/or mood, such as an ‘efficiency’ mode which the display is informative and easy to read, and a ‘mystery’ mode in which the display panel expresses the time in a more imaginative, evocative style. Oh, and this September girl can’t help but be partial to the 360-degree sapphire crystal.
A creation of artist Dale Mathis, Quater Till, and its companion clock kin, are more like pieces of art, both in creation and in display. Check out his gallery and you’ll understand what Gilding means. As Mathis writes, “his creations speak from the heart of the dissident life of the inner city.”
These two beauties are the creation of Clayton Boyer and come not as complete clocks, but as a set of plans for a DIY project. Built from wood, the clocks look like something from one of Leonardo DaVinci’s sketchbooks with a sort of steampunk appeal and some even with a swoopy graphic appeal.
And while Gilding would never build one of these, she is certainly not above bribery to get someone else to build it for her.
[Via Dark Roasted Blend]
Dotz Me Organizing Crazy
Gilding just may splurge on these. But they’re such a great price and such a handy dandy organizing treat that she hardly feels guilty about it.
The concept is simple enough and just by looking at them you can pretty well tell what they are for. But basically, if you are suffering a beef with cords that won’t bend to your organizing will, then these three different accessories are here to wage complete cordy submission war for you: Dotz Cordidentifiers, CordStraps, and CordWraps. And not only are they sensible, they come in bright colors and with cute organizing graphics. Yep, they’re hot. Available at Dotz
[Via Yanko Design]
The Bordello of Geekdom
Every gamer’s wet dream came true as Devil’s Playground presented Video Game Girls burlesque at Bordello on May 9th. The dancers arrived armed and outfitted for epic arcada battle, and included Princess Peach (Super Mario Bros.), Samus Aran (Metroid), Chun-Li (Street Fighter), Link and Princess Zelda (The Legend of Zelda), and Rayne (Blood Rayne).
Burlesque slideshow goodness of dancers available here, from LAWeekly,.
Pretty in Pink
This one is for glam junkie, a girl of epic pink proportions. Fiat 500 has created a Barbie show car in dedication to the most famous fashion doll ever. The vehicle was created by a partnership between Fiat Centro Stile and Mattel and was given to Barbie at her 50th birthday celebration in Milan.
The specs of the car, from paint finish to hubcaps, can be found here.
Digital Player in Cassette Tape Clothing
Retro design with modern technology. Not a new concept, but this is a new toy. The NVDRS Tape plays the wolf in sheeps clothing in its cassette tape construction but it is actually a digital player. Even housing new technology, the player continues to hold to the classic convention of 45/60/90 minutes, holding 10/15/20 select songs in digital format. Songs are uploaded via USB.
A few more classic conventions of the cassette-slash-digital player that brings back memories: if you want to forward or rewind a song, you have to manually do it by rotating the spools. And charging it depends on how good those fingers of yours are — you guessed it, rotating the spools charges the player. Those children of the cassette days will have this one down pat — just try beating us you children of ipod era. Rotating the second spool hole of the tape charges the kinetic battery, and an LED light indicates the power status.
So while this digital toy is a bit more like a novelty trinket, especially for those of us used to having no less than 4 GB of memory, it makes it on the green list for its kinetic energy power source and its construction. Both the 90 and 60 minute versions are housed in recycled aluminum enclosures, however, the 45 minute one is constructed from Polypropylene.
Link: Yanko Design
Hitler’s Porsche
It is on this day in history in 1936 that Adolf HItler opened the first Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Having taken an interest in cars, even though he himself did not like to drive, Hitler, shortly after taking over as leader of Germany (1933), appraoched Ferdinand Porsche about making changes to his original 1931 design to make it more suited for the working man. Hans Ledwinka, an Austrian automobile designer known for his innovation regarding both technology and aesthetics, worked in collaboration with Porsche, who used many Tatra design features, in the 1938 “KdF-Wagen, later known as the VW Käfer — or Volkswagen Beetle.
Link: Wikipedia
Gilded Mobile Machine
The Gilded Duo spent a good portion of last Saturday watching CES (Consumer Electronic Show) on G4. One of this years spotlight technologies was the Lenovo Dual-Screen thinkPad W700ds. A pretty badass design, IBM is touting the machine as the PC using artist’s answer to being Mac-less.
The workstation features the Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core 2 Extreme processors, its own dedicated NVIDIA Quadro Express Graphics card, integrated color calibration, RAID HDD high-speed storage, onboard palm rest digitizer and pen (more widely known by its namebrand father WACOM), and, the totally basass part, the integrated second display screen.
But here’s where IMB fucked up an otherwise kikass piece of technology for us artists. The system only comes with 64GB solid state drive and 4 – 8 GB memory (RAM). And at the heafty price tag of four grand, artists will well recognize that these two numbers just don’t work. Hell, any idiot should really recognize that this just isn’t feasible at the current going rate of technology. Rack it in with a terabyte and now we’re talking. Sure the memory can be upgraded but with the price tag being as high as it is, the intelligent consumer will wait till the price tag drops considerably.
With that said, all you dumb-dumbs out there that will rush to buy this mobile monster machine the moment it comes out — DON’T! You’ll fuck it up for the rest of us who plan on strongholding the company into upgrading its stats — or at the very least, dropping the price for memory ommission.
Link: IBM ThinkPad W700 series
Pucca Precious
A Pucca precious cell phone. Yep, cell phone — tri-band cell phone at that. And an Mp3/Mp4 player with Bluetooth stereo output, FM stereo, 3GP support video playing, data transfer via data wire/Bluetooth, and 1GB storage. Other features include multimedia messaging, alarm clock with up to 5 group settings allowing you to set up from Monday to Sunday at random times, and group and individual ring tones. The phone is a flip phone and operated on GSM frequency for 900/1800/1900 MHz networks.
Price: $159.99.
Link: Light in the Box | Official Pucca site
Paraphernalic Technofetishism
Remember Gilding’s obsession with paper, books, and gorgeous pieces of both in one? Well as much as she loves her old, Gilding is a sucker for her laptop and all the toys she has that goes with it. Keep in mind, along with writing, Gilding’s other passion is photography and digital manipulation…Oh, and Mr. Gilding, but you already knew that.
So imagine how all a-flutter Gilding’s little heart went at Datamancer’s Opti-Transcription. (The first appearance of Datamancer’s work on Gilding the Lily was on his Steampunk Laptop.)
This custom fabricated leather-bound tome [above] actually houses a flatbed scanner. The scanner sits inside a sheetmetal framework with the book built around it. Datamancer gives details as to the materials used to make the ‘book binding’ that is the covering to this scanner. But let it be known, this was a first attempt and future batches of the Opti-Transcription are in the works so they can only get better from there.
Now for the best part. This peripheral was designed to accent Datamancer’s Computational Engine project.
Now, how badass is this~
Ok, so the full title to this constraption is The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine. The purpose for this display of paraphernalic technofetishism: to ‘retrocentrically’ create a false historical heritage for the modern computer.
Unlike the era to which ‘Steampunk’ honors, the modern computer was not given to adornment as its comparable brethren: The steamengine, with its gilding of the finest woods, ivory, gold, intricate inlays, and decadent tapestries. The automobiles of the 20’s to 60’s which were designed and adorned to capture the work of art that such technology was. And the television and radio which were given over to intricately carved wooden cabinetry through which its culture changing power of picture and sound blared through homes across the world, forever altering the dynamic of communication. The computer…well, it was given over to plastic. Datamancer seeks to give the modern computer an alternate history of “Golden Days” so to speak.
The Computational Engine project is still a work in process. Once complete, the plan is the eventual release of a line of fully themed, matching office suites to include keyboard, mouse, monitor, PC case, scanner, printer, and custom office furniture to house them.
Link: Datamancer
