bubble wrap
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Inhabitat's Week in Green: electric Corvettes and volcano sharks
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. Tesla is the hottest electric automaker around, but a mysterious new company called Faraday Future is nipping at its heels -- and poaching its employees. Rumor has it Faraday is working on a next-gen electric car, and it has assembled a crack team of automotive execs and designers from Tesla, GM, Ford, and Fiat. In other transportation news, Tesla gave the Model S a major upgrade with a new "Ludicrous Mode" that goes from 0-60 in just 2.8 seconds. An all-electric Corvette will soon be hitting the streets -- and it could reach a record-breaking top speed of over 200MPH. The Solar Impulse airplane has traveled halfway around the globe on sunlight alone, but it looks like it'll have to wait until next year to complete its voyage -- the plane's batteries sustained heavy damage while crossing the Pacific Ocean en route to Hawaii. And if you're still waiting for a working hoverboard, the RevoBot may be the next best thing. The futuristic body gravity board lets you glide along at 7MPH.
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.
Mugen Puchi Puchi trailer is wraptastic
We may be the only people thrilled about Namco Bandai's Ouchi de Mugen Puchi Puchi Wii, but we think we make up for everyone else's lack of enthusiasm. Seriously, after watching this trailer, we are going to die if Namco Bandai doesn't release this in the U.S. We will just pop. We just like WiiWare games about popping bubbles, apparently.If this trailer doesn't get you completely stoked about popping bubble wrap to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," creating a path for a little character out of popped bubbles, and twisting up a sheet of virtual bubble wrap to pop it, then you simply have no bubble-popping spirit. You probably even think the theme song is annoying.
Confessions of A Homebrew Virgin
Write us something about homebrew, my overlords command me, and my heart skips a beat. You see, I have a dark secret that, until now, has remained private: you could write what I know about Nintendo DS homebrew on the back of a postage stamp. And not even one of those bigger special edition stamps they introduce at Christmas, but a regular tiny stamp.A lot of you, I suspect, will be in the same boat as me, and this article is addressed to all of my fellow homebrew neophytes. Rather than simply pretend to know what I'm jabbering about, I thought I would be open about my newbie status, and write something about my first tentative steps into the world of homebrew.For this exercise, I deliberately set aside three hours (spread over a few days) to learn about and download as much homebrew as possible. I had several questions I wanted to answer: Was getting into homebrew as difficult as I always imagined? What would I gain from it? How useful are current online resources to somebody who knows nothing on the subject? Is it worth the expense? Find out by heading past the break for a view of Nintendo DS homebrew through the eyes of a rookie!
Namco Bandai pops in with more Mugen Puchi Puchi screens
Namco Bandai has unwrapped a release date for Mugen Puchi Puchi Wii, the WiiWare rhythm game based on the toy based on popping bubble wrap: June 24th. No word on a U.S. date yet, though we are crossing our fingers (with bubble wrap between them).Not only will you have the ability to pop bubbles by pointing at them and pressing 1 or 2, you'll be able to smash them en masse with a Wiimote on its side, as if rolling over them with a rolling pin. You'll even be able to use the remote to slash through the bubbles.The game's 40 stages help provide even more variation, from a snowman level to an ikura donburi level in which you pop salmon roe (ewwww), and even the excellently named "Namco Old Games Stage."
Bubble Wrap Keychain: The Game for Wii Ware
Bandai's "Mugen Puchi Puchi" keychain was a huge success in Japan, fulfilling the near-universal love of popping bubble wrap. The draw is that it simulates bubble wrap but never runs out (the name translates to "infinite pop pop"), and playing wacky noises on every hundredth pop. It's as bizarrely compelling as it sounds.And now it's going to be a bizarrely compelling video game! Ouchi de Mugen Puchi Puchi Wii is a game based on the premise of "oh, hey, bubble wrap!" You'll be able to squeeze bubbles with the Wiimote, scoring combos based on popping in time with the game's music. Each of around 40 stages will have a different background, music, and bubble popping sound! The game will also randomly test your stress level, which is almost guaranteed to be chill. We're calling it right now: this is our most-wanted Wii Ware game. Bandai Namco has to do the right thing here and localize it.
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.
