Each coaster is made up of 110 individual 1cm square “pixels” which are perfed in a way that lets you selectively remove blocks from each square. Through what sort of amounts to “pixel sculpting”, you can create your own personalized designs.

They come in a stack of 50 coasters, which start out conjoined into a 500cm (almost 200″) long chain which can be broken apart into individual pieces. Each square has a random arrangement of color shades, so each coaster is just a little different from the next one.

They’re made from a resilient paper fiber that should hold up to the condensation you might get on the bottom of your cup, or the occasional spill. In addition to the blue palette (which I prefer), there’s also a hot pink version if you’re looking for something a bit more girly.

At this point Pixel Coasters are only available from Taiwanese design retailer 25togo, I’m hoping somebody eventually imports these to the States. A pack of 50 coasters sells for 260 Taiwan Dollars, or just about $8 bucks.

by Tamara Warren

Zaha Hadid, the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, designed a door handle a couple years back that was manufactured by Italian hardware company Valli & Valli and it is finally on sale now.

In a collaboration with Woody Yao, the handle, which is called ZH Duemilacinque, was originally created for the Puerta America Hotel in Madrid. The hotel is conceived from the perspective of a dozen architects whose creative concepts were invested in one of twelve floors. Hadid designed the entire first floor with a spaced age futuristic facade.

The handle is part of Valli & Valli’s Fusital Collection that features the work of renowned designers and architects including Frank Gehry, Richard Meier and Cini Beori. Made from nikrall zamak alloy, the attention to detail emphasizes the turning motion and the contours of the grip. It’s available in chrome or satin chrome starting at $440 at the Valli & Valli sales center. Contact them directly at sales [at] vallivalli-us [dot] com.

Valli & Valli Usa Inc.
150 East 58th Street 4th Floor
New York, NY 10155 map
tel. +1 212 326 8811

In the welfare halls where Korean gadget merchants with dot-matrix signs spend the IFA lazily snoring, Engadget en Espanol spotted about as official a confirmation of the iPod Nano 4G's new form-factor as you can get: major iPod accessory manufacturer Hama was showing off their official line of cases for the new Nano. As Wired's Gadget Lab notes: "This isn't just some fly-by-night Chinese knockoff merchant: Hama is a venerable and well respected company."

I think we can safely take it as read this is the real look of the new Nano. The real question for me is whether the Classic will follow suit with a change to the screen dimensions.

Hands-on with Hama's iPod Nano 4G case at IFA [Engadget Espanol via Gadget Lab]

While I’ve visited LEGOLAND in California, as a fan of the building blocks I still feel I must eventually make a pilgrimage to the real LEGOLAND in Denmark. And hopefully when I do, I’ll have a chance to see some of artist Kenn Munk’s LEGO graffiti before the park removes them. You see, while LEGOLAND represents a perfect copy of real cities, Kenn feels it’s actually too perfect, and has been ‘vandalizing’ the miniature metropolis over the past couple of years… but in a good way.

The thing is, the miniature city in Legoland form a perfect copy of our cities, with the exception of graffiti, it does not exist in the Lego universe, therefore I decided to tag the last untagged city in the world, but I wanted to do it Lego style and I wanted it be harmless and fun so I built impossible sculptural shapes out of Lego and visited the place with aforementioned journalist and tagged the place and a tradition was born. The objects are always just placed there or clicked on to existing parts, no glue is used, no alterations to existing buildings is made, no vandalism in other words.

In 2006 and 2007 he installed his ‘impossible shape’ LEGO sculptures, but for 2008 he wanted to add something that was inspired by pop-culture, and settled on the black sentinel monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

While I don’t necessarily endorse graffiti, particularly at a place like LEGOLAND which represents thousands and thousands of hours of hard work, I think Kenn’s pieces actually add to the park, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll create for 2009.

[ Kenn Munk dot Com ] VIA [ TOYSREVIL'S I LIKE TOYS ]

Well Tom Ward from Instructables has a great idea, and that is to use an electronic Dot Matrix Business Card. The card will scroll your information on a 5×15 matrix of red LEDs.

Ok there is a downside to this, the electronic business card is more expensive than the paper version, but you can guarantee that a client will not throw one of these away.

Nikon D90

Not happy at showing off with its 12.1MP it shoots continuously at up 4.5 frames-per-second. With an impressive power up in just 0.15 seconds and a shooting lag of just 65ms this camera sits at the forefront of the camera world just now. The new HD video party trick, called D-Movie Mode, allows snappers to capture 720p video in Motion JPEG format at 24fps with sound. The camera has low noise ISO sensitivity from 200 to 3200 and there's a 3in 920,000-dot LCD display with 170-degree viewing angle.

Nikon D90 Back & Front View

Other key features include built-in image sensor cleaning, 11-point AF system with face priority and fast auto-focus, one-button Live View, 5 scene modes, in-camera image editing and GPS geo-tagging.

It's not as highly specified as the Canon EOS 50D but then it is cheaper, with a US price tag of around £500. There's also a new lens, the AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR, and the kit price is around £650.

Obviously, those prices will inflate the closer it gets to its UK "expected" release date of September 5th but, it also means that the existing D80 will be getting a serious price cut bargain hunters.-Martin Lynch

Over on Instructables, Tom Ward has a great tutorial on how to create a rather professional looking electronic business card that scrolls your contact info via a 5×15 matrix of red LEDs. Not surprisingly, the design is considerably more expensive than a traditional business card, but it’s definitely the type of thing a client won’t ever throw away.

This is the sort of card that would suit a high-tech business, or those who were involved in high-value contracts, where an innovative image is all important. I would never suggest that it would replace a conventional business card, but to impress that all-important prospective client, there would be more than a few companies who would be happy to spend just an extra few dollars. Like the flashlight card, the aim is to design a business card that people just can’t throw away!

The design is really quite simple for what it does - a matrix of 5×15 LEDs, connected to a single-chip “PIC”microcontroller. A handful of resistors and switches complete the design (Schematic available below). By keeping the microcontroller in sleep mode unless the buttons are pressed, the battery can last several years, and still allow a couple of thousand displays of your messages.

While the materials seem pretty easy to find online, the construction does require some know-how, including soldering skills and a way to program the card’s PIC microcontroller. And while Tom admits that making these by yourself by the hundreds is not easy or cheap, he is optimistic that they can be commercially produced which should drastically reduce the per-unit costs.

[ Dot Matrix Business Card ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]

This unnervingly large dot matrix panel is clearly the logical upgrade path for that emblem of the old ways, business cards. One imagines a scene from an early 1990s straight-to-video movie in which the hero, perhaps Rutger Hauer or Christopher Lambert, hands his futuristic dot matrix business card to the villain, doubtless played by Michael Ironside. Ironside raises his eyebrow, impressed. Then everyone waits three minutes while he reads it. Creepy henchman Brad Dourif glares from the shadows.

[via CrunchGear]

Make no mistake about it - the D90 is not meant to be a flagship model, although it does draw plenty of inspiration from the D300, a DX-format digital SLR camera. Of course, judging by the model number alone, you can tell that this is the successor to the D80 and will come with a 12.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor for you to capture crisp and clear shots. In addition, the D90 will ship with Nikon’s very own EXPEED image processing system to deliver outstanding images with fine details, smooth tones, brilliant colors and low noise across a broad ISO range.

Another feature would be the ability to compose great looking shots thanks to the Live View Mode on the generous 3″ 920,000-dot high-resolution LCD screen. You also have the benefit of an 11-point auto focus (AF) system that makes use of Nikon’s exclusive Scene Recognition System and Face Detection in order to help even the unlearned shutterbug (who happens to have a damn good camera to boot) shoot pictures that aren’t anything to be sneezed at. Other features include the versatile AF-S NIKKOR 18-105mm Vibration Reduction image stabilization lens, and a burst rate of up to 4.5 frames per second in order to capture sudden and fast moments - too bad Nikon did not release this before the recently concluded summer Olympics, or you could’ve gotten a shot of Usain Bolt creating history three times at the Bird’s Nest.

The Nikon D90 will be released in the US from September onwards, retailing for $999.95 just for the body alone, while you have to fork out $1,299.95 for the body and lens outfit, including the new AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens.

Press Release
[ Nikon releases D90 copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

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