BubbleWrap
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The new Bubble Wrap is losing its pop
Bubble Wrap is one of mankind's greatest inventions. It protects our online orders from becoming rubble in a delivery van, but more importantly, it doubles as pure, joyous entertainment. Pop, pop, pop. There's nothing quite like it. That's why we were shocked to hear that Sealed Air, the creator of Bubble Wrap, has developed a new version that doesn't pop. But wait! Before you grab your digital pitchfork, understand that there's some method to the madness. Bubble wrap, due to all that trapped air, takes up a ton of space in company warehouses and delivery trucks. iBubble Wrap, its potential successor, is sold in super-thin sheets and inflated later on with a pump. It takes up roughly one-fiftieth of the space, meaning more can be shipped to and stored by e-commerce companies.
Awesome Steve Jobs portrait made by injecting bubble wrap with paint
An artist by the name of Bradley Hart has created an amazing Steve Jobs portrait by injecting paint into individual nodules of bubble wrap. As Benjamin Starr at VisualNews describes: Hart's newest works -- mostly portraits -- are exceptional in the way they use each bubble in the wrap as an individual pixel. Like using colored tiles, he painstakingly injects each with paint to create the final image. We see Steve Jobs, a street scene in Amsterdam and the LCD monitor test image all beautifully reproduced. Each image when complete, becomes shiny bubbles of color. It's just about the perfect additive process. The Jobs portrait is shown above, but check out VisualNews for other bubble wrap-injected artwork from Hart.
Amazon's frustration-free packaging is anything but for hard drives
It's all well and good to cut corners when you're ridding durable, miniature electronics of their brittle plastic clamshells -- but this time, Amazon's "Frustration-Free Packaging" initiative has gone too far. The company's shipping computer hard drives in the stuff. According to dozens of irate customers, Western Digital hard drives shipped by the e-tailer over the past several months have arrived in damaged cardboard containers, thin layers of bubble wrap, or even loose in a simple electrostatic discharge bag without an ounce of padding to keep them from harm. And while some buyers shipped them back immediately when they saw what had happened, many who tried them anyhow found their magnetic storage dead on arrival. While we're not certain whether Western Digital or Amazon was at fault for placing the drives on the "frustration-free" list in the first place (Seagate drive buyers haven't reported similar issues), Gadget Lab reports that Amazon is aware of the problem, and already working to ensure future (lack of) packaging avoids causing more frustration than it's worth. Read the horror stories with pics at our source links below.
Virtual bubblewrap: the best / worst gadget ever made
Bandai Asovision has taken possibly the most enjoyable side benefit of having a gadget obsessed life and made it 100% legitimate with the PuchiPuchi, a gadget that emulates the joy of popping bubble wrap. The PuchiPuchi simply features eight buttons that each make a popping sound when you press them: for extra enjoyment, the creators have sought to include bonus popping sounds like "door chime" and "sexy voice" every 100 pops, and there's also a one-in-a-thousand chance that your PuchiPuchi will be a super special "puchi lucky" toy with a heart shaped bubble. Frankly, the concept is so absurd -- and, well, Japanese -- that it might just work. Still, we've got to admit to hoping that each PuchiPuchi includes a healthy portion of real bubble wrap on the side.
