Fortunately, there’s a nice cafe near my house. For those of you interested in these Buffalo wooden speakers, however, you should know that they work without batteries. That’s convenient, although you shouldn’t expect boombox thump. [Buffalo via Akihabar]

According to Ron van der Ende:

I collect old doors and stuff. Old painted wood that I find in the street. I take it apart and skin it to obtain a 3mm thick veneer with the old paint layers still intact. I construct bas-reliefs that I cover with these veneers much like a constructed mosaic. I do not paint them!

I want some of these so badly. [Ron van der Ende via Diskursdisko via Neatorama]

When you get your Presence in Absence kit, the two pendants are actually one single birch wood-encased gadget. You and your dear one are supposed to use the included carving knife to separate the two flash drives and bond while cleaning up the wood shavings. This process and future data-sharing represents how the two of you are parts of a whole and belong together. You’ll share pictures, videos, music; the events in each other’s lives that you miss out on during times apart.

Quite sweet. Call me crazy though, but I think I’ll stick to less symbolic bonding experiences when reuniting with my long-distance lover. [Dezeen]

Just like in cars, the next evolution is to eliminate the crank and have an automatic version. Preferably one that you can push down on once and it’ll crank all the way, but that can also turn slowly when you hold it down, for a more dramatic rotation. [Freewebs]

Just like a real steam boat, this six-inch version moves because of expanding steam pushing away from water. Mimicking the real thing further, there’s a compact boiler and motor made of copper pipes and even a heat shield. You get things started by lighting a small “lamp” filled with olive oil and watching the steam come out before the boat zips across the bathtub.

The instructions provide the in depth details on the physics and go step-by-step from cutting and building the hull to putting together the boiler. All that’s missing is a guide on how to whistle like Mickey Mouse. [Duckworks via Make]

The kidney-shaped, iPhone-like handset is constructed from a Cypress wood base that’s been compression moulded for extended durability. Despite this manufacturing process, each phone retains a unique grain pattern, colour palate and woody aroma. And, just so you don’t have to feel bad about it, the wood is considered “surplus” from “forest-thinning operations”.

Docomo will be showing off prototypes in Japan later this week. And while we’ll probably never see the phones reach Australia, we can’t get over the fact that wood seems a lot more classy than plastic. [Docomo via Electronista via TFTS]

JFK had it right, “Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.” [Core77]

With the advent of foam and fiberglass and now carbon fibre, surfboard design and technology has come a long way in the last 30 years. Some of the sports that benefited from that technology were obviously wind surfing and tow surfing.

For tow surfing, we changed the design of the boards. Normally in conventional prone surfing, to ride a giant wave you need a huge board. What we did was because we already had power, and were already at speed, we just figured out how to make a little board act big. So we changed the shape of the board and made it act big by making it able to turn at speed better. That design fed into kiting as well.

Surfboards originally influenced wakeboarding, before they had double under-wake boards and bindings and the whole set up. We used to free board when we were kids, and now they call it wake boarding, but it was free boarding. You towed a surfboard behind a boat. A lot of that board design has fed into the industry.

I describe it a little like snowboarding and skiing, where skiing already had skis and ski technology and ski materials, and so when snowboarding came along, it made huge leaps and bounds. You’ve got all that infrastructure already in existence—besides ski resorts and chair lifts, you had all the R&D and ski design that had been going on for years and years. Snowboarding could just benefit immediately from it. If you look at it now, actually, the snowboard gave back to skiing, with the side cut. It’s weird how one will take from it and grow because it’s already at a certain point, and then the other takes back and grows. It’s interesting to watch how design and materials affect each discipline.

As far as the comeback of wood, in surfing, I’ll just say right now all of my best boards for big wave riding are wood and they’ve always been wood. When you’re out there risking your life and the surf is 25 or 30 or however big, however many metres you want to call it, once I rode wood I couldn’t ride anything else.

The thing is that wood has a dampening and an absorption ability that really no other man-made material does. That’s the reason why they make wood violins and wood baseball bats, because wood itself has a structure that man has yet to duplicate in its dampening of vibration and a couple other key elements. That really makes it play into these activities that we do, whether it’s baseball or surfing or even skiing: Skis have wood cores, snowboards have wood cores. Anybody that really demands at the highest level, that’s where you go.

I think that certain new materials help us. Obviously carbon fibre is an enormous improvement on aluminium and wood when it comes to paddles and stuff like that. It can be extremely light. Bicycle and windsurfers can get away with being really rigid. But when you look the art of wood and making stuff with wood, a lot is lost. A lot of knowledge of how to treat wood and what to do with wood to make it be stronger and lighter and all that stuff. For as much as we know, there’s probably as much we don’t know.

Technology and modern materials allow us something more immediate to grasp hold of. It’s maybe a little more available in the sense that we can mass produce it—people can put it together. If you get a handmade violin by someone who has been doing it their whole life, it’s a piece of art. But it’s a problem if you can’t produce thousands of them, and not everybody can get one.

Laird Hamilton has been a surfing hero since the 1980s, solidifying his reputation as the king of big wave surfing when he conquered Tahiti’s Teahupo’o Reef at its most perilous in August 2000. As an innovator, he pioneered many new activities including kitesurfing, tow-in surfing and hydrofoil boarding. He’s on the board of directors at H2O Audio, makers of pro-level waterproof iPhone and iPod cases, and has his own signature line of Surge waterproof earphones, proceeds of which are donated to the Beautiful Son foundation for autism education.

Italian scientists have developed a new “wood-derived bone substitute” that promises to be better than ceramic or metal implants. They start with a block of wood like red oak, burn it until the block is essentially charcoal and then coat the substance with calcium.

The “bone” takes about a week to grow at a cost of around $US850. And while it’s not quite as cool as titanium, the spongier structure handles natural impact better, and other bones prefer the calcium carbon mix to space shuttle alloys.

So much for my awesome robot legs. [Discovery]