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So you’ve been invited to accom­pany a new group of Break­fast Run riders this week­end, and you want to impress them?

You’ve got your knee-sliders worn just right, your bike is scream­ing with the new car­bon pipe and your wheel­ies are the best your nieces and neph­ews have ever seen, but you’re still wor­ried that you might not impress that rad’ cherry on her gold-plated boney?

Fear not, for the solu­tion is here, cour­teousy of UD Rep­licas, nov­elty leathers!

Star Wars / Stormtrooper

Bat­man Begins

X-Men United / Wolverine

DISCLAIMER: You may look, feel and be inclined to act like a com­plete jack­ass when dressed like the unfor­tu­nate model above. Any mon­ies paid in order to look like the model above is highly will not be refun­ded as you will have learnt your les­son, we all hope.

DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER: For the anal-retentives among us, the above dis­claimer is a fic­tional com­pos­i­tion, designed to impart wit. It bears no rela­tion to any­thing real. Chill.

Toto, the Japan­ese toi­let man­u­fac­turer, has unveiled a new motor­cycle: a trike, to be more precise.

Fit­ted with styl­ish hub­caps and white­wall tyres, the bike is powered by human excre­ment. You can now travel the world in styl­ish and ecologically-friendly style, provided of course, that you are able to con­tinu­ously ‘sup­ply’ the drivetrain.

The altern­at­ive would be to source your ‘fuel’ elsewhere…

Con­sid­er­ing that your seat is that of the toi­let, on-road fuel­ling is the order of the day. How­ever, in the interests of safety and toi­let roll ease-of-use, the sug­ges­ted refuel­ing method is still to stop, as per convention.

The ‘engine’ works by con­vert­ing your…meals…into bio-gas. No men­tion has been made of what to do if you develop a leak on the exhaust man­i­fold though…

Stand­ard fea­tures include your toi­let talk­ing back to you (pre­sum­ably to help ease the refuel­ing ‘pro­cess’ if you are a shy one…), a music player func­tion and the abil­ity to “har­ness resid­ual light imagery to write mes­sages in the air as it passes by”. I have no idea what that last one means.

The bike is cur­rently on a 600-mile demo’ ride around Japan. This is not a runs of the mill for the rider.

If you can read Japan­ese, read more about it at the offi­cial web­site, tototalk.jp

The title to this post could just as eas­ily have have been ‘Awe­some Gad­gets You Never Knew You Needed’.

Steve Hoe­fer is the epi­tome of a gad­get freak. The dif­fer­ence though, is that he cre­ates his own gad­gets — and often comes up with unusual solu­tions to passed-over prob­lems in the process.

Based in San Fran­cisco, Steve describes him­self as an “inventor and cre­at­ive prob­lem solver “.

In real­ity, that means he spends his time tinker­ing with all man­ner of inter­est­ing tech­no­logy, from game pro­gram­ming to cir­cuit board wiz­ardry and gen­eral tech’ fabrication.

You can get the full story on Gra­thio and Steve here.

Here are some of Steve’s fant­astic cre­ations and solutions:

1. The Book Light

* Make your own! Instruc­tions here.

2. Secret Knock Detect­ing Lock

* Make your own! Instruc­tions here.

3. Touch Screen Glove Mod’

This 5 minute hack solves a prob­lem of mod­ern elec­tron­ics: capa­cit­ive touch screens (like in the iPhone, iPad, and oth­ers) don’t work well with gloves. By simply sew­ing through the fin­ger­tip a few times with con­duct­ive thread you give the screen enough capa­cit­ance to detect your touch without hav­ing to take off your gloves.  (Or without hav­ing to use your nose, like I was doing when I got the inspir­a­tion for this mod.)  The con­duct­ive thread is great because it’s not unpleas­ant to touch, it won’t scratch the screen, and it’s non destruct­ive to most gloves.

This idea was so pop­u­lar that sev­eral mer­chants con­tac­ted me to let me know it was respons­ible for a spike in con­duct­ive thread sales and at least one opened up a new product line of con­duct­ive thread samplers for pro­jects just like this.

* Make your own! Instruc­tions here.

Is your boss giv­ing hass­ling you about your Face­book time?

Con­stantly get­ting caught check­ing your friend’s latest Status about her sor­did evening?

Feel like you can’t wait until lunch to check what that noti­fic­a­tion is for?

Your pray­ers have been answered.

Some ingeni­ous cubicle occu­pant some­where, no doubt in the same pos­i­tion as you, has spent a seem­ingly insane amount of time mak­ing Face­book look like a fully func­tional Excel document.

Log in to Face­book via the appro­pri­ately named HardlyWork.In and load up your social saviour.

If your boss strolls past, hit the “Boss Key” (‘space’), and you’ll be instantly trans­por­ted to a screen pop­u­lated by ran­dom but corporate-looking figures.

See the full guide here.

* the3rdrock.com is not affil­i­ated with this ser­vice nor does it endorse or sup­port it.

Most pet­rol­heads grin some­what when they get behind the wheel of a vehicle equipped with a turbo.

The whooooosh­ing surge of power that belts you up to speed is addict­ive, even at low boost.

Whether you call it a snail, a hairdryer or a turbo — it’s a desir­able bit of kit on any speedfreak’s shop­ping list.

In an exer­cise lib­er­ally adorned with the tag overkill, Steve Sand­lin built him­self a ’57 Chevy with a dif­fer­ence — eight times dif­fer­ent to be pre­cise. Yep, Steve’s ’57 has EIGHT Borg-Warner turbos.

Con­sid­er­ing the same would be pos­sible with one to two, I can only assume this is for show — and a grand one it is.

So, what are the specs?

Engine, Driv­etrain, & Under­hood Elec­trical Systems

Frame: Custom-built & engin­eered chrome moly tube frame

Sus­pen­sion:

• Front: C4 Cor­vette with pol­ished alu­minum upper & lower A-arms
• Rear: C4 Cor­vette independent

Steer­ing: Cor­vette power rack & pinion

Brakes: C4 Cor­vette four-wheel disc with ven­ted & cross-drilled discs

Wheels:

• Front –18x8 Amer­ican Racing Torque Thrust
• Rear –18x10 Amer­ican Racing Torque Thrust

Tires: Front — Mich­elin Pilot Sport 235/40ZR18

Rear — Mich­elin Pilot Sport 285/40ZR18

Engine: GM LS1 all alu­minum V8 pro­du­cing 730hp @ 5800 rpm, 710 ft/lbs torque @ 5000 rpm with 13.5 psi of boost

Internal: Lunati forged rotat­ing assembly, 8.5:1 com­pres­sion, Comp Cams valve train, ARP fasteners,

bal­anced & assembled at Ima­gine Motorsports

Intake: F.A.S.T. LSX poly­mer three piece man­i­fold & 90mm bil­let throttle body

Fuel Sys­tem: F.A.S.T. 600 lb/hr pump feeds 65 lb/hr inject­ors moun­ted in bil­let fuel rails that are

con­trolled by an adjustable fuel regulator

Heads: GM LS1 alu­minum with Man­ley stain­less 2.02 intake & 1.57 exhaust valves sealed with Cometic

four-piece head gaskets

Power Adder: eight Borg Warner/3K Turbos

Engine Man­age­ment: F.A.S.T. elec­tronic engine con­trol sys­tem with C-Com software

Wir­ing: Nep­tunes Audio cus­tom built system

Exhaust: Cus­tom built stain­less 1–3/4” into 2–1/2” turbo log sys­tem exit­ing thru 2” stain­less “wild tube” head­ers into 2–1/2” duals all the way out the bumper

Trans­mis­sion: 4L60E 4-Speed auto­matic con­trolled by FAST/TCI trans­mis­sion controller

Engine Cool­ing: 40in cus­tom alu­minum radi­ator cooled by three SPAL 10” slim­line fans

Air Con­di­tion­ing: Vin­tage Air 134A system

Hoses: Aer­oQuip AQP stain­less braided hose sys­tems used throughout

Front Wir­ing Har­ness: F.A.S.T. engine con­trol harness

Instru­mental Har­ness: Nep­tunes Audio cus­tom harness

Instru­ment Gauges: Stew­art Warner Per­form­ance Series speedo, tacho­meter, oil pres­sure, oil tem­per­at­ure, fuel level, water tem­per­at­ure, turbo boost, two pyro­met­ers, turbo oil pres­sure & turbo oil tem­per­at­ure, all gauges are red back­lit (Provided by Fuel Sys­tems Inc.)

Radio: Pion­eer CD/DVD player with flip screen dis­play and rear view camera

Hood: Lin­ear actu­at­ors con­trol open­ing and clos­ing with a 12 inch Spal fan, aids cool­ing through the cowl induc­tion hood

Seats: All leather 2+2 Con­fig­ur­a­tion, 6-way power reclin­ing front

Interior Trim: Cus­tom matched red leather with steel con­struc­tion parade boot

Steer­ing Column & Wheel: Col­or­ado Cus­tom 14” Lazear bil­let aluminum

Mir­rors: Chrome rear view mirror

Body Pan­els: Cus­tom built all steel cowl induc­tion hood, Cor­vette door handles

Paint: GM Torch Red, PPG basecoat/clearcoat system

Trim & Mold­ings: Pol­ished stain­less trim with car­bon fiber sail pan­els on quarter panels

Bump­ers: Front & rear bump­ers smoothed & flush fit to body, air-intake enters through front bumper and exhaust exits through rear bum­ber, both units are wel­ded into one piece and painted body color

Lamps/Lenses: Cus­tom alu­minum third brake light moun­ted flush with sur­face of trunk lid

Wind­shield Wipers: N/A

Check out the build here and the fin­ished product here.

Before, you had to hunt and gather, guard­ing your brood and self against long-toothed pred­at­ors and club-wielding savages.

Then, you had to travel to a store, fend off attacks from other shop­pers for that last item on the shelf and pay, either with cash obtained in a pre-process or via a card, which far too often didn’t work due to ‘sys­tem errors’.

At some stage clever people ban­died about the idea of net­worked fridges that prom­ised to auto­mat­ic­ally shop for us when the sup­plies were detec­ted as being low. They said there’d be robots to fetch the shop­ping and a deluge of home-grown organic veget­ables to keep us green. They gave us web­sites, which were handy, but never took off because let’s fact it, a bottle of tomato paste rendered on your mon­itor just doesn’t war­rant the clicks needed to actu­ally pur­chase it when the thought of a com­pli­ment­ary herb is pages away.

Then the stag­nancy was stirred — by super­mar­ket giant Tesco.

They faced a dilemma in their South Korean mar­ket — how to move from second spot to first spot without the expense of match­ing the num­ber of stores of the pole contender.

South Korea has a fant­astic trans­port infra­struc­ture, and cur­rently hold the title of second most pro­duct­ive nation on the planet. It doesn’t help being able to move around effi­ciently if you don’t have the time to do it, so Tesco decided to bring the store to the people.

The rail net­work was flooded with high-quality light­boards run­ning the length of their plat­forms, turn­ing them into vir­tual Tescos.

Wait­ing pas­sen­gers could then per­use the goods on offer, scan­ning the smart phone-friendly QR codes of each item they desired. These scans are then auto­mat­ic­ally col­lec­ted in a bas­ket on the store’s shop­ping portal. A swipe to con­firm your pur­chase and it’s deb­ited to your phone’s bill.

By the time you arrive home later that day, your food’s await­ing unpacking.

Now that’s clever.

Source: insideretailing.com.au