house
Design
Mirror/Ironing Board Concept
10:00PM Brian Lam | Aha! I hate pulling down ironing boards and then having to fold their screechy legs back up. Having one disguised as a mirror is a great idea that would save time and space. (Just figure out stability.) [Aissallogerot via Toxel] More »
Design
An Inside Peek at Microsoft’s Future Smart Home
7:00AM Andi Wang | BBC has a video tour of Microsoft’s new smart house—a future home that runs on technology to help with daily tasks, including an interactive mirror that gives laundry directions for specific clothing. More »
Design
$US5,000 Paper House is the World’s Swankiest Hobo Pad
10:15PM John Herrman | Swiss company The Wall AG has a perfect solution for third-world shanty towns, semi-permanent refugee camps and approximately 7.2% of adult Americans: paper houses! More »
Gadgets
Kickit is Most Fun You Can Have Tidying Away Shoes
8:08PM Kit Eaton | Shoes clutter up my apartment’s hallway because both me and the wife are waaaaay too lazy to put them in the cupboard just a few feet away…but I suspect if we installed this there’d be no problem. Because kicking off your shoe to get it “stored” between the bristles of Kickit looks like fun. The kind of fun that could turn into a dangerous flying-shoe competition. But, and it’s a big but, there’s a flaw: Kickit is a designer product going for about $US2500 (€2000). But I reckon you may be able to hack together your own from some planking and sawn-off floor brushes. [Crunchgear] More »
Online
11:33AM Nick Broughall | The current economic crisis in the US means that most people are tightening their purse-strings and trying to avoid the seemingly inevitable move towards bankruptcy. But really, that just means that there are some bargains out there for the rest of us!
Like this house in Michigan which sold for $US1.75. Sure, it has a whole heap of taxes on it, and the building is condemned, but that just adds to the allure of the bargain. From what I’ve read on the internet, the town it’s in sounds like it might be a bit of a hole, but that still doesn’t change the fact that this is a bargain.
Even with the taxes on the property, the whole thing cost the lucky buyer about $US1000. Take out a 30 year mortgage on that, and you’d be paying what? 20 cents a month? Not too shabby.
Now we just have to hope that someone in Australia will offer something similar. Preferably in QLD – I need a holiday house…
[ebay] More »
House Bought On eBay For $US1.75
11:33AM Nick Broughall | The current economic crisis in the US means that most people are tightening their purse-strings and trying to avoid the seemingly inevitable move towards bankruptcy. But really, that just means that there are some bargains out there for the rest of us!
Like this house in Michigan which sold for $US1.75. Sure, it has a whole heap of taxes on it, and the building is condemned, but that just adds to the allure of the bargain. From what I’ve read on the internet, the town it’s in sounds like it might be a bit of a hole, but that still doesn’t change the fact that this is a bargain.
Even with the taxes on the property, the whole thing cost the lucky buyer about $US1000. Take out a 30 year mortgage on that, and you’d be paying what? 20 cents a month? Not too shabby.
Now we just have to hope that someone in Australia will offer something similar. Preferably in QLD – I need a holiday house…
[ebay] More »
Design
Poufman Luxury Leather Seats Are Like Pac-Man Biting Your Bum
10:20PM Kit Eaton | Pac-Man-like padded seats, kitted out in leather and with accompanying power-pill-like stools…sounds like a fabulously retro way to pay furniture-y homage to the ’80s arcade game. The Poufman seating sets come in a bunch of colours, but retro gamers keen to dot them about their homes had better have made lots of dollars in the time since the ’80s: the price of these things is unknown, and not listed on the maker’s website. And we all know what that means. [Product via Technabob] More »
Gadgets
Motorlight Variable Spread Uplight: Moodlighting for Lighting Perfectionists
7:52PM Kit Eaton | The world’s first variable-angle uplight is apparently what Motorlight from designer Jake Dyson represents. Twist the wheel on the side, and you adjust the geometry inside the lamp so the beam it casts is a broad splash on your walls, or a neat spotlight. And it can cycle from one to the other automagically. Lighting fanatics, like me, will be thinking “neat! dynamic moodlighting,” and will admire the simplicity of the design. Since Motorlight is made in limited batches of 500, though, its high-quality design is matched by its high-quality price: US$980 each. It comes in five colours though, with special colouring on request. [JakeDyson via Dezeen] More »
Home
Rockport Paper House Is Most Ambitious Papercraft Ever
11:30PM Gizmodo US Edition | Back in 1922, a mechanical engineer began building his summer home in Rockport, Massachusetts out of paper. Originally used just as insulation, Elis Stenman soon began to make furniture and decorations out of paper as well. What resulted was Rockport’s Paper House, which is remarkably still standing after 80 years. Stenman’s grandniece is now in charge of the house, which was turned into a museum in the 1930s. More »
Home
Great Giz Ideas: Harass Your Neighbours With Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Name
7:00AM Jason Chen | We were setting up our wireless router in this our new house when we made a startling realisation. Our wireless hotspot doesn’t need to be limited to boring names like LinksysN or 2Wire1969, they can be messages to our neighbours that they see every time they connect to their router. Here are some that our crack team of jerks have come up with. More »
Design
