Roombots are autonomous, roving furniture segments that cruise around your house, looking for each other and spontaneously organizing themselves into furnishings that evolve based on how you use them. It's a project from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs. Modular robots are robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and detach (Wikipedia: Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics). Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Compared to "monolithic" robots, modular robots offer higher versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the possibility of self-reconfiguration. The type of scenario that we envision for the Rolex Learning Center is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and tables, depending on user requirements. This furniture will change shape over time (e.g. a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules can create a static structure such as a wall or a box.
Here's Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Houses taking you on a tour of his clever, 100-square-foot house, which reminds me of a wooden, super-luxury first-class plane-seat on the flagship airline of some oil-soaked, cash-infused land.
ConcreteWall is a Norwegian company that sells wallpaper silkscreened to look like unfinished concrete in a variety of textures. I guess it's more "street" than drywall over 2x4s?
John's Phones sell no-frills mobile phones that send and receive calls and pretty much nothing else (though there's a place to keep your pen). Warren Ellis likens it to a phone from minimalist Japanese housewares/clothing company Muji.
Finally a separate unit with no frills and conditions. A simlock free phone with large keys, an address book, a pen and over three weeks time standby... John's Phone is simple and easy for young, old, holiday, grandfathers, grandmothers, athletes, national and international business traffic.
All three bear improvements over earlier generations of this familiar fruit, but some of the new additions—and in some cases, what's missing—may surprise you. Following are snapshots of the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch, with taste-test notes.
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
The UP! personal 3D printer from China retails for $1500, with goop running at $50/kg. From this early adopter's review: It runs at 0.3mm resolution, and the finished models show striations from successive layers of goop, but light sanding produces a smooth finish. For objects with funny extrusions and sitcky-outie bits that aren't stable until they are fully printed, the printer calculates and adds support struts on the fly, and these have to be removed with a hobby knife after printing.
This 1936 Henderson motorcycle was given a superb Art Deco mod by Frank Westfall of Syracuse, NY and displayed at last summer's Rhinebeck Grand National Meet. The Knucklebuster blog got to see and photograph it in person there, and has a thrilling account of its performance: "The bike is a fantastic piece of history, the craftsmanship is absolutely stunning and it's surely more of a museum piece than a daily rider. Frank has obviously spent an incredible amount of time meticulously restoring and rebuilding the bike to its current gorgeous state."
Kamill1 sez, "My first attempt at an automata, I think it turned out pretty well! Super fun build. A little wink to Jake Von Slatt, sitting down to play the pipe organ. Huzzah!"
Want to smell like a Swiss Army Knife? Lucky for you, 
Finally a separate unit with no frills and conditions. A simlock free phone with large keys, an address book, a pen and over three weeks time standby... John's Phone is simple and easy for young, old, holiday, grandfathers, grandmothers, athletes, national and international business traffic.
As predicted last week in 
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
Check out 