April 2007
Monday, 23. April 2007, 22:57:49
nintendo, games, touma, tech
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In a bit of crossover news it looks like famous Japanese toy designer Touma has a DS game coming out shortly. Gabu Gabu Planet appears to be an adventure game that looks like it follows in line with games like crash bandicoot. 3D side scroller with lots of fruit to grab and stuff to jump over. But the real gem for me is that the characters in the game all hold a nice Touma styling, sharp chompers and all.
Go Nintendo has stated that this release will indeed be coming out in the US, it's just a question of when.
Monday, 23. April 2007, 15:35:56
painkiller, pusher, thomas han, toy
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So one of my current favorite Artists/Toy Designers is Thomas Han. He has a very unique style that deals with a lot of intriquite lines and bright colors. He is most recently well known for his 8" White Heat "Painkiller" Dunny that came out last year from Kid Robot(of course). It looks like Han's newest contribution to the world of designer toys will be his first original sculplt called a Pusher. Apparently these will be available in 4 different designs: Animal, Spirit, Monster and Pirate. According to
Vinyl Pulse there will also be an SDCC(San Diego Comic Con) exclusive design to look forward to. Overall I would say that Han has a winner of a design on his hands and it's definitely one to keep an eye out for.
Friday, 20. April 2007, 15:47:55
vinyl, kaiju.japan, joe ledbetter, toy
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Not exactly new news(a couple weeks old in fact), but I bring this up because today you can actually get your hands on these super limited vinyl works of Japanese art. The SFT exclusives are special limited versions of the already popular Kaiju For Grown Ups series of vinyl by Wonderwall. Each of these colorways were created for the Souvenir From Tokyo Museum Shop located within the National Art Center Museum in Japan. So if you aren't jumping in your seat already trying to find out where you can get them, then without further ado you can pick them up here:
http://shop.tokyocube.com/toys-listings-brand.htm?b=5&t=58 They will be on sale at 18:00 UK Time(an hour and fifteen minutes from the time this was posted) today April 20th. ALl I can say is that if these are your thing and you really want one, then good luck, but you may need more than luck to get your hands on these.
Wednesday, 18. April 2007, 18:44:12
mobile, cell, pantech, SD
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Pantech/Curitel have a new phone on the market under their high end name brand, SKY. This new phone, the IM-R200, has a standard feature set for phones these days but has a secret under it's slider hood that is surely going to turn some heads with it's clean look. The standard feature set that this mobile includes are 116mb of built in memory, micro SD slot, multimedia player and 2 megapixel camera with autofocus. What makes this handset stand out is the second LCD display, hidden beneath this sliders main display, that turns out to be a keypad. A very interesting use of a secondary display for sure. As with most good bits of technology, we won't see it outside of Korea, at least not for now.
Tuesday, 17. April 2007, 15:32:34
browser, opera, email, chat
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So Opera 9.2 popped up this morning and I just started using it. Right off the bat I want to say that I absolutely love the big new feature "Speed Dial". Your probably scratching your head wondering if Opera implemented VOIP or something, but no. Speed dial is the new quick way to get to your favorite/most used websites. Essentially, when you open a new tab you will be presented with Speed Dial, a page that has a bank of nine website previews each one that is assigned by you. So when you go to open a new tab you have all of your favorite pages staring you directly in the face and with a simple click you will be magically whisked away to where you want to be. Speed Dial is something that I have been looking for for a long time because I have always felt that Opera needed a way to get to your most common websites even faster and this does just that. Beyond Speed Dial I don't notice much else in the way of new and fantastic but if there is anything else it doesn't matter because Speed Dial steals the show.
I highly recommend that anyone that has not downloaded 9.2, please do. And anyone that has not tried Opera alltogether there is no better time than now to start using Opera.
Saturday, 14. April 2007, 08:08:37
jled, toy2r, designer, joe ledbetter
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If you are into toy collecting or are familiar with who is hot in the Los Angeles art scene these days then you know who
Joe Ledbetter(aka JLED) is. Currently Ledbetter is responsible for some of the hottest toys in the designer toy scene with items flying off shelves and limited pieces skyrocketing in price. One of his newest toys, and the newest addition to his line of 8" Toxic Swamp Qees, is the 8" Toxic Swamp Cat in Purple. This Qee is limited to a production of only 300 pieces and is exclusive to
Forbidden Planet. The past offerings in the line of toxic swamp qees have all been great and are great quality like most of the toys that Toy2r puts out. You can currently pre-order this Qee for 34.99(GBP) and it will be delivered July 30th, 2007.
Wednesday, 11. April 2007, 16:27:44
be@rbrick, dunny, toy, collect
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I have been thinking about this long and hard and I have decided that as my interests change and I gadget related news has become slightly stale that I will add a new aspect to my blog. From here on out I will cover Vinyl/Designer Toys in my blog in addition to the tech and gadget related news I have already been covering. To get this started off I will direct you to my Toy Gallery located in the photos tab above. Most of the pictures are items from my collection with a few random pictures as well.
Some of you that read this might be scratching your head thinking, "well these are just toys, what is so special?" Well Designer toys are toys that are generally created by an artist and/or painted by an artist. Many of the toys are "platform toys" which means that its one general toy design that many artists paint or use any variety of mediums to translate into their own work of art. You might be familiar with some of the more famous designer toys out there like Qees from Toy2r, Dunnys from KidRobot or Be@rbricks from Medicom. Beyond the more famous brands there are many small companies or independent people making toys that are completely amazing and deserve recognition(although their sales prove how sought after they are).
To make this transition easier to you the readers I will be adding special icons/tags to distinguish a toy post from a tech post, I will post what these look like very soon.
Update: I have added pictures for the tags to reduce any confusion and to easily identify what the post is about. You will notice in the upper right hand corner there are 2 icons. One icon for posts tagged with the word Toy and pretaining to anything related to designer toys. The other icon is for posts tagged with the word tech and pretaining to anything technology or gadget related.
Monday, 2. April 2007, 16:45:40
song, music, itunes, ipod
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This morning Apple and EMI announced a major breakthrough in Digital music distribution by announcing that next month Apple will start offering DRM free music from EMI through its iTunes music store. DRM songs will still be available for the standard price of $.99(upgradable to DRM free for $.30) and they will offer "Premium Songs", which are DRM free and twice the quality, for only $1.29. All of EMIs music videos will also be available DRM free. What does all this mean for the common user? It means that you will no longer have to have and iPod to listen to your music on the go. You will be able to put your DRM free music on to any portable music player that supports AAC format. Steve Jobs went on to say that they plan on offering 2.5 Million DRM free songs by the end of the year from a variety of record labels.
This is huge news for the music industry and especially for those of you who are gadget geeks and don't necessarily want to own an iPod.
WIDGETIZE