April 6, 2016

Watch and listen to a marble tsunami

Filed under: Gadgets by Orangemaster @ 9:26 pm

Marbles

Need a break from cat videos? Back in 2015 Jelle Bakker from Amersfoort built a Mouse Trap-like course at Monkey Town in Gouda for 11,000 marbles all rolling around at the same time.

Bakker, who is autistic and loves building things for marbles, built his contraption using wood planks and floor heating conduits. He says he likes the sound the marbles make as they go over different parts of the course.

I bet Jelle would like this wooden dinner table with a built-in marble track.

Watch all these marbles turn into a tsunami:

(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo of Marbles by Meghana Kulkarni, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , ,

February 1, 2016

Do you know your seven sins? Test yourself with Hieronymus Bosch

Filed under: Art,History by Branko Collin @ 11:32 pm

7-deadly-sins-screenshot

There was never a better time to get your Bosch on.

The Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, the town that one of the Netherlands most famous mediaeval painters was named after, has a major exhibit of most of Hieronymus Bosch’ works coming up in less than two weeks.

The Guardian calls it “the impossible”, an exhibition of 20 of Bosch’s 25 surviving panels in a small, local museum. The exhibit will run from 13 February to 8 May 2016.

If you are unable to make it to the museum, the Bosch fever sweeping the country ensures you can engage with the great painter in several other ways. The local newspaper, Brabants Dagblad, has an online quiz that will let you spin the wheel to find out how much you really know about the seven deadly sins. The questions are in Dutch and cover topics as varied as Doutzen Kroes, Roy Donders, frikandels, Mike Tyson, Snow White, civil servants, Louis van Gaal, FIFA, the biggest hamburger in the world, plastic surgery and David Beckham.

The paper has five other games for you, each one based on a different painting by Bosch, which can be reached through the quiz’s main menu.

If Dutch isn’t your forte, broadcaster NTR lets you explore the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. There are spoken versions of the interactive tour in Dutch, Dutch for children and English. If you just want to admire the painting, Wikimedia Commons has a huge photo of 30,000 × 17,000 pixels (223 megabytes). Should you print that file, you would need a wall of five metres wide and almost three metres high to display it.

(Illustration: screenshot of the Brabants Dagblad game, edited to convey the impression of spinning motion)

Tags: , , , , ,

April 30, 2014

Kickstarter kicks off in the Netherlands

Filed under: Film,Gaming,Photography,Sports,Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:55 pm

On Tuesday April 29 crowdfunding website Kickstarter now features a page for the Netherlands. Before then, Dutch residents with good ideas had to register their project through another country like the United States. Since then, about 30 new project ideas have popped up on the Dutch page, while the rest are projects that were around when they had to circumvent the country issue. And just like in other countries, Kickstarter takes 5% off the top when and if projects achieve their financial goal.

One of them was more fun than anything else: the ‘Fish on wheels’ (on Kickstarter). Other projects include lots of board games, music, tech, film and inventions.

Tip to the lightbulbs: please let someone check your English if you want to be taken seriously.

(Link: www.bright.nl, Photo of Lightbulb by Emil Kabanov, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

May 28, 2013

Retro handheld consoles to be featured in photo book

Filed under: Design,Photography by Orangemaster @ 9:21 am

From the guy who made a series of bright yellow video game consoles, a 21st century reworking of the very first arcade console, Martijn Koch plans to crowdfund a book entitled ‘2kB of Fun’ featuring his large collection of handheld electronic games.

Koch, an architect, started his collection by first using old eighties game consoles while redesigning an old bank building set to house 40 small gaming firms. “To give the floors their own identity, I bought a couple of bright coloured handhelds from the early eighties and photographed them. They ended up being too retro for the interior, but they asked for a nice treatment! I was missing a true celebration of these magnificent toys from 1976-1985.”

Feel free to like his Facebook page and of course, sign up to buy a book, which will hopefully be ready by December 2013, in time for the gift-giving season. Oh, and check out his personal pitch.

(Links and Photo: www.indiegogo.com, www.retrospace.nl)

Tags: , ,

September 22, 2008

Dinner table with built-in marble track

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:53 pm

Marbelous is the name of this table with a built-in marble track. Designer Tineke Beunders of the Ontwerpduo studio created it earlier this year. Beunders bases her works on vague childhood memories. I wonder if she mixed up the marble track — which was fun because you got to make it yourself — with the cutting board that had a gravy groove.

Photos: Ontwerpduo. Via Bookofjoe.

Tags: , , ,