Finally some build-it-yourself furniture that you can relate to. You legitimately won’t be needing the instructions either - just grab yourself a spanner!
From France’s Meccano Home, there’s a range of familiar-looking modular furniture. Sold in kits and ready to assemble, I see no reason why you can’t mix and match to give a whole load more possibilities.
via :: werd
These caught my eye as a fun-looking, colourful stool. Based around the idea of an exercise ball, they require a little core stability.
“Ballo is a multipurpose stool for short-term, active sitting. Ideal for a variety of uses, settings and spaces, the Ballo stool is suited to home and office environments and everywhere in between. Perfect for pulling up a quick seat, surrounding a conference table or for use in a reception area, Ballo inspires activity. Available in seven colors, Ballo’s playful aesthetic complements any space while promoting healthy movement.”
Nearly as colourful and playful as our Rubik’s Cube stool!
via :: Design Milk
Today during my daily crawl through blogs using Pulse, I stumbled across this video of a guy solving the Over-The-Top puzzle from creator Oskar Van Deventer. If you’ve not seen it before, it’s basically a huge version of the Rubik’s Cube designed to mess with your mind even more. I struggle with the 2×2 but this guy, Kenneth Brandon reckons if you’ve got the 4×4 cube licked, then you can do this mammoth 17×17 beast.
“The 17 x 17 isn’t that hard, but it is very, very tedious.”
It took Kenneth 7.5 hours in total to solve over the space of 5 days. I imagine if you went at it in one hit, your eyes would start to hate you after not long. Anyway, below is the time-lapse with some interesting explanations at the start. But you can also see the full 7.5 hours on his YouTube channel if you’re interested…
via :: The Verge
Play Pong with the person on the other side of the road whilst you’re waiting to cross. Fully functional concept becomes a reality in Germany!
Traffic Pong :: Colossal
We’ve reduced the shipping rates on our Rubik’s Cube storage seat, which includes many countries with free delivery. England, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and more…
See our Rubik’s page for more details or get in contact with us!
We are now offering our arcade coat hooks at £29.99 for UK orders and £34.99 for the rest of the world! Available to purchase from our website, ebay and Amazon.
Same as before, as much as possible is still made in the UK.
We recently received our new stock of the red and black balltops, so we have plenty of stock of all colours.
…which gave us an excuse to fool around with them before packing them up ready to ship out.
We’ve been without our 30mm balltops for a few months, but they are now back in stock. The 35mm LB35 is plentiful, but it’s just that bit too big for the loop on your jacket, so we just weren’t going to sell our hangUP arcade coat hooks with those!
Available in walnut, black and white back panel with a choice of red, black, yellow, green, white, blue and pink balltops.
It’s been a week since we got back from Revival and what a great show it was too! Craig, Chris and the Revival team did an amazing job again. Plenty of consoles, computers, arcade cabinets, light gun machines, driving games, pinball machines, traders, talks, costumes, chip-tunes, special guests, competitions…
surface tension was there with our stand again this year in the chill-out zone. With us we had our Dual, Arcane and forthcoming upright, Retrograde. Plenty of couches to crash out on too. We had our Rubik’s Cube seat on one side of the Dual, but also built some quirky seating for the other side. A 555 timer seat modeled on the 8-pin through-hole IC, which got plenty of attention! If you’re interested, you can see how it was made here.
Super Hexagon worked a treat on the upright. Though the surface tension team were battling it out between us for the highest score, only to be beaten by a 12 year old (not pictured). Meh.
There weren’t quite as many stand-ups as last year, but more than enough to keep you occupied. Plus with all of the pins, you weren’t left twiddling your thumbs.
That’s about it. We look forward to next year but aren’t quite ready to go at it again just yet! It was a long and tiring weekend, plus a busy run up to it.
What made me do this? It’s an idea I had a couple of years ago and had to have a go at it! I had the legs made 18 months ago, so I definitely couldn’t let them go to waste!
We wanted to make some interesting seating for our stand at Revival this year, to go with our Dual arcade table. Which would also have one of our Rubik’s Cubes on the other side.
The arachnid IC was made from 18mm MDF, some timber sections to mount the legs to and the legs themselves being 12mm aluminium. I’ve documented my build below in case anyone else wants to have a go.
One part complete after some filling and plenty of sanding. The pocket holes were also filled on the inside.
Timber sections on the inside were fixed again using the pocket hole jig and plenty of glue. These sections were used to mount the legs to on the base.
After fixing the legs, this was the first time I could see if it really worked as a shape. Slots were cut into the base section for the legs to come through.
The notch was added before I could start to finish it. The 555 was first prepared with 2 coats of sanding sealer, then 2 coats of primer. The final paint was then applied. The photo doesn’t really do it justice, but it was a dark metallic grey which gave it that graphite look of an IC.
The over-sized 555 looked great at Revival this year. It really hit the right age bracket with all of the retro-gaming enthusiasts, many of which asked where they could buy one!
With Revival 2014 just around the corner, we’re just chilling out counting down the days. Yeah right! We’re busy getting everything ready so we don’t arrive at midnight again, have to set up then back to the hotel for an hour of sleep! That’s the plan anyway.
If you’re wondering what we’re talking about, Revival is a retro games expo which premiered last year. Taking place on the 9th and 10th August this year, it’s everything from Magnavox Odyssey to Megadrive, pinball to Playstation.
There’s plenty on at Revival again this year. Once you’re in, there’s 60+ arcade machines, 20+ pinball tables 150+ retro gaming systems, plus 2 VR systems linked up this year! John Romero will be there for you to challenge to a game of multiplayer Doom, plus a Q&A session. There will be other Q&A sessions from Andrew Hewson (Hewson Consultants), Andrew Oliver (Dizzy series), Ocean and US Gold employees.
Turnarcades will also be unveiling their own Revival Survival arcade cabinet which succeeded on Kickstarter which surface tension backed, so we look forward to our inclusion there!
surface tension will be there again in the same location, so come and say hello. We’ll have our Dual, Arcane and Retrograde systems with us. As well as arcade games, we’ll have our Retrograde upright showing off plenty of games on the Steam platform which play, look and sound great on our home arcade systems!
We will also be offering discounts on all of our products purchased at the show.
Take a look at our photos from last years show.