Giant Robot Love, Japan

Hasn't Japan learned anything from all those Godzilla movies?  You don't build tall buildings or giant frikken robots to piss Godzilla off!  Now he's going to have to come out of nowhere and rip the city apart because people made him angry.  He could be anywhere just waiting to destroy Tokyo. Well this time it's not Tokyo's fault, it's Kobe's.  They built a Giant Tetsujin.

Check it out, it's pretty cool.

Video on the jump

Book vending machine

I honestly never thought I'd see the day when there would be vending machines that spit out books.  Come on, people go to these machines for chips and a soda, not books. Now, when the Germans made the worlds largest vending machine, that was  an awesome idea.  Or when the Japanese made cellphones that could buy crap from vending machines, also brilliant idea.  This whole book thing, I don't really know...

A vending machine which can print "library quality" books within minutes, has now been linked to Google giving readers over 3,500,000 books to choose from.
The Espresso Book Machine prints books at a rate of over 100 pages per minute before gluing and cutting them to produce a perfect book, it can even churn out a fresh copy of Crime and Punishment in just nine minutes.

training-grenade MP3 player

What ever happened to MP4 players? I remember like 2 years ago I saw something on the discovery channel about some guys saying MP4 songs were going to be all the rage?  Where is the guy now, I'm going to beat over the head with this grenade.

Sorry about that, I get like that sometimes.  Okay, now this is an interesting story.  Apparently anyone who orders non-functional munitions (in NYC) will get a call from da' law, even though it's not illegal.  Anyone else think that's a little f'd up?  Anyways, a cool toy was made in the end.

There was much fear and freak out. But cooler heads prevailed and a phone call was made. "Hey Matt, did you order metal objects of a dubious nature?" "Yes, yes I did." There was a great deal of internal strife over this particular event as ordering munitions to the space is strictly forbidden. Upon review and discussion it was decided that while purchasing decommissioned training grenades was not in fact illegal in NYC (as far as we know), it was not something we would ever do again. That being said. I immediately set forth on a childhood dream project. I put an 1/8th inch jack into the pin hole for the gr3nade. It looked GOOD. Totally flush... very pretty. So I decided to run with it. I ran the cabling into the gr3nade... hacksawed it open. Inserted a Sansa 2 GB mp3 player. And then tried to SMD rework it. This ended poorly as the first sansa basically got burned by the rework station and died. The second I avoided using the rework station and instead recruited bre and his arms for a session of intense soldering onto very tiny solder points.

From boingboing via nycresistor

"Ahhh, it's a Zaku!"

This thing is hawt! It was created sometime ago by Taras Lesko (Aka idk his real name...) on Vimeo.com.  It's a 4-foot paper "Freedom Gundam".  To be honest, I don't know which series the freedom gundam was on, but it reminds me of Zero from Gundam Wing. Now if he could only make it out of gundanium instead of paper.  By the way, what they hell is gundanium anyways...

And yeah, I know it's not a Zaku..

Shown on Vimeo.com

Beer Bike!

 This is quite possibly the greatest idea ever.  Well maybe not, but it's still pretty cool!  It's a mobile brewery.  The bike provides the power to help make the bear and you peddle around all that extra weight.  You know, on second thought, that seems like a lot of work...

"The bike developed by Hopworks Urban Brewing, has been built on the frame of a cargo bike that carries two kegs of beer and a pizza storage compartment. The bike will be shown off at the upcoming Oregon Manifest handmade bike show."

Shown on Ecofriend.org