My Nabaztag is back. After a few frustrating weeks trying to get my WiFi rabbit to connect to its server back in France, and a few equally frustrating and vague suggestions from their support, I finally found out what the problem was. It turns out that the rabbit was timing out before it could resolve the server's IP address.

The solution is to use an hidden feature to change the address and port to use, so I set mine to use the IP address directly instead of the domain name: http://192.168.0.1/b.htm?a=82.98.0.3&b=80 which finally made all of the lights blink green.

While I was doing that, I also figured out why the reaction to the English-speaking version of the little rabbit has been lukewarm. When you setup Nabaztag to be French speaking, it takes on the voice (and the personality) of a typical French girl: smart, sassy, and a little bit of a motormouth. Sadly, the English voice sounds like Dobby the House-Elf from Harry Potter. Here's what Daniel from CNET had to say about his rabbit:

...Almost immediately after registering LapinLED and turning it on, it sprang to life. "Yippee," it shouted at me in a plaintive male British voice that could have belonged to a bit player in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "I've been given a name." The trouble is, I wasn't as impressed as I expected to be. Traffic alerts are fine. Spoken messages from fellow bunny owners are fun. Even watching LapinLED do "tai chi" at random times was kind of neat. And I loved the combinations of blue, red, orange, purple and green LEDs flashing at me all the time.

Given the choice between a plaintive Dobby the House Elf, and a Smart-Mouth Ex-Girlfriend from Paris, no wonder Daniel was underwhelmed. Nabazoux will tell me the time every hour on the hour but once skipped 7PM by telling me that she's been trying really trying to concentrate, but can't because oh-la-la her head feels like someone is driving a sledgehammer to her temples. This is the kind of unexpected little things that I find really funny about Nabaztag, much more than reading the news, or telling the weather. It's saying things like "So, I'm bored, and hmm, I've decided to go on vacation in Australia. so Goodbye!"

Hopefully Violet will come up with a better personality for the English rabbit. It would almost be better to play the French card, and have Nabaztag speak with a thick French accent instead.

Japanese art crew Rinpa recorded a stop-motion video for a week while painting the same mural over and over again.

Rinpa Eshidan means "Rin School Painters Group". "eshi" is an old-fashioned japanese word for "painter" and "dan" means group. rinpa was a style of japanese painting from the edo period (18th century). the style was to decorate everyday items to color life itself. i like that point of view so much. it’s cool that this new group of painters has named itself after the rinpa tradition, especially since they do such new work in decorating our modern urban lives.

This and other videos from Rinpa Eshidan have been making the rounds for the last few weeks, but I hadn't actually watched them until now. I love their graphic style which is very clean and fluid.

[via Drawn!] Watch the video after the break.

I've been fascinated by Green Fortune's PlantWall project, ever since I posted about it on notcot. I love the idea of creating a vertical garden, specially in a urban environment where horizontal space is hard to find, and even better if such a system can be installed indoors. Unfortunately, the PlantWall is just a concept right now, but Canadian company Elevated Landscape Technologies (ELT) makes systems for both green roof and living wall applications.

The ELT Easy Green™ Living Wall is a modular living wall panel that can be pre-grown or planted in place. Its rugged construction and ease of installation make it a perfect choice for clients looking to Expand their Gardens in new and exciting ways.

The basic living wall panel is modular, and measures 50 x 60 x 6.5cm. The angled separators means that you can use normal soil and even transplant nursery plants. Each panel costs $40 CAD, but ELT also sells pre-wired panels for indoor/outdoor use. You can even grow herbs and salads indoors, with the addition of UV lights.

[via Treehugger]

This week on notcot.org, a very happy puppy, the beach in barcelona is talking, designer shades, and skateboard with a built-in band-aid.

#1937. Puppy Love is a limited edition fiberglass sculpture by Colin Christian featuring one very happy puppy.

#1893. Great Public Service Announcement on the beach in Barcelona. The beach is talking to you! don't litter.

#1873. Designers love to take some concept literally. Ray is a lamp shade made from one of ray-bans most iconic pair of sunglasses.

#1844. Thinkmo decided to paint a trompe-l'oeil bandage on his skateboard, and call it the Band-Deck.

Check out my other contributions on notcot.org.

Natasha and I went to see Rodrigo y Gabriela in concert at the Temple Bar in Santa Monica last night. As I was expecting, the energy these two have in concert is pretty incredible.

After opening with Tamancun from their new album which finally released in the USA a few weeks ago, Rodrigo started talking about their background, and ranting about an article about them in a local newspaper that said they were classically trained nu-flamenco guitarist from Spain...

First of all, said Rodrigo, we are from Mexico City, and if you brought a friend here to hear some flamenco, I'm sorry. We used to be in a mexican trash metal band before this, so this is no f*cking flamenco music!!!

Rod y Gab pretty much played all the tracks from their albums, plus a few extras, as well as treating us to some amazing acoustic guitar solos, with Rodrigo torturing his axe to bend the highest  notes, and Gabriela banging on hers in a knuckle-rapping explosion of rythm guitar meets drum solo.

This is definitely a band that loves the stage, and they seemed as happy to be playing in Los Angeles (well it's practically Mexico) than we were to be listening to them. You can see the dates for the rest of their tour on www.rodgab.com.

Temple Bar
1026 Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica, CA

NS Design recently announced the WAV Double Bass series, an entry level model based on their fantastic CR series Electric Upright Bass (EUB). While the CR Double Basses were made in the Czech Republic, the WAV are from China, but also feature a much simpler design, with passive rather than active electronics, helping bring the price down to $1195 USD.

Designed and built to deliver great sound, excellent playability, and long, dependable service, the WAV series provides an affordable option for the serious professional and student player.

I've been playing a CR5M for the last year, a left handed 5 string model with both magnetic and piezo pickup. After changing the stock strings, which sounded a little bit too much like an electric fretless, for a set of Pirastro Flexocor strings, I've been getting a really great acoustic sound.

The new WAV series should let many more bass players switch from electric to upright, and is available in the usual amber finish, but also in a gorgeous black and cherry red lacquer.

I've just spent the entire evening watching TED Talks, which have finally been released to the general public. I remember watching Al Gore's speech this summer, but I hadn't really realized that TED would be releasing most of its backlog of talks and presentations over the course of the year. (Thanks to SwissMiss for reminding me)

Each year, TED hosts some of the world's most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now - with our sponsor BMW and production partner WNYC/New York Public Radio we're sharing some of the most remarkable TED talks with the world at large. Each week, we'll release a new talk, in audio and video, to download or watch online.

TED is a yearly conference, held in Monterey California, where about fifty highly intelligent, and intensely passionate people talk about Technology, Entertainment and Design for 4 days before about a thousand of their peers. Since the conference itself is by invitation only, is restricted to a thousand people, and cost $4400 dollars to attend, many of us will only experience it with these videos, so it's great that they are releasing them to everyone.

For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect...

Go listen to and see: Richard Baraniuk | Larry Brilliant | Majora Carter | RIchard Dawkins | Dan Dennett | David Deutsch | Eve Ensler | Helen Fisher | Ze Frank | Malcolm Gladwell | Al Gore | Sirena Huang | Jennifer Lin | Steven Levitt | Ross Lovegrove | Nicholas Negroponte | Jehane Noujaim | David Pogue | Joshua Prince-Ramus | Tony Robbins | Ken Robinson | Hans Rosling | Cameron Sinclair | Amy Smith | Julia Sweeney | Mena Trott | Jimmy Wales | Rick Warren either directly on the TED website, or as a podcast, with more coming every week.

[via SwissMiss]

Sas Christian's portraits all have these giant manga-inspired eyes, so big and detailed that you can usually see details of the room and environment in the painted reflections.

My original inspirations relied heavily on anime, Tamara De Lempicka and Mark Ryden. I loved the creative expression of the Harajuku kids in Tokyo. They filled me with such hope and excitement. Originally the intention of my paintings was just about creating a strong image, purely visual. I wanted to impart a modern tongue-in-cheek humor, incorporating my experiences. Contemporary, ballsy, flirty, weepy girls; punk, catholic, no-nonsense, damaged but not broken girls. Funny, intelligent, unusual, independent, odd ball, outsiders. Lovely.

Sas Christian has a solo show and book release at The Shooting Gallery in San Francisco, but will also be in Los Angeles at CoproNason in February. Her book, titled Looking In: The Art of Sas Christian is published by 9mm. More pictures after the break.

RUGenius found this Russian design studio and posted SAM, a re-invention of the traditional samovar on notcot.org but I've been fascinated by their clever take on the portable mp3 player.

Created by Moscow-based Man Works Design studio, Saint B mp3 is a prototype mp3 player shaped like a cross, and I love the questions that they raise in their description, as well as their beautiful 3D rendering.

Concept: The form of the player is inspired by the original Christian symbol, the cross. Indeed, we wear it in the same manner as a player - around the neck. We are playing not only with the form, but with religious symbolics. This player immediately brings many questions - whether it is possible to listen to any kind of music on it? Whether it can keep on playing a role of the religious symbol? Does everybody have a moral right to wear this thing?

Sadly, there are a few details on their current design that need to be revised, such as the fact that they are using a female USB port instead of a male, and the earphone plug seems to be in a strange place. But I love how they are using the cross to place the controls as well as the OLED display.

Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Time Capsule a few weeks ago, with the goal of creating a digital time capsule capturing 30 days worth of our current life and preserving it for future generation. People can submit text, photos, videos and illustrations expressing life along 10 themes which are Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You. The result will then be preserved by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings based in Washington D.C.

Time capsules have a storied past, stretching back to the first known literary work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which opens with a hunt for a manuscript hidden in the walls of Uruk. The great pyramids of Egypt and Mexico are also time capsules of a sort, containing relics of ancient eras. The ruins at Pompeii, buried in ash for more than 1,600 years, formed an unintentional but impeccable time capsule depicting city life at the height of the Roman Empire. The modern time capsule was born amid preparations for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, when Westinghouse constructed an 800-pound metal ball, which it then filled with everyday items and buried underground.

The Yahoo! Time Capsule project was created by Jonathan Harris, which has been using the internet as an art tool for many years, data mining the human consciousness with projects such as We Feel Fine, Lovelines, Phylotaxis, 10x10 and WordCount. Jonathan has a very good grasp of interface design and user interaction, and manages to build web applications that are both poetic and instantly understandable.

More about the other projects of Jonathan Harris after the break.

Robotic floor cleaners like the Roomba now have a low-cost competitor in the form of Robomop. Priced at about 1/10th of the cost of these complex vacuuming robots, Robomop is a dry mop that catches dust on hard floors using an electrostatically charged pad. Inventor Torbjørn Aasen was inspired by those crazy ferret balls toys, where you can see a ferret stuck to an erratically rolling yellow ball.

The first idea for Robomop came when he saw a rolling toy in a gadget shop. The rolling ball moved around in a fascinating way. He took it home and started to play with it. (He had to fight his children who tried to seize upon the funny ball.) A couple of days later he remembered a game he played when he was a child: the “Orange-turtle game”. If you put a paper over an orange and push it, it looks like a turtle stumbling over the floor. He took a scissors and cut an ordinary plastic bag, added a Velcro to the lower border and placed the bag over the ball. He could then attach a dry microfiber cloth to the Velcro, and - voila! - he had his first version of Robomop ready for testing.

Instead of building a costly and complex robot with sensors capable of navigating a room to clean it, Robomop favors a low-tech approach, using chaos theory and random motion to achieve the same thing, and wipes dust from the floors  instead of vacuuming. Charge the ball, stick a new cleaning pad to the cage, set the timer, and let Robomop wander around.

A rolling stone gathers no moss, but might pickup a lot of dust from your floors.

Created by Jonas Damon for Areaware, the Open Edition LED Clock gives each of the digits of a digital clock its own little display, allowing you to re-arrange them in any order (chronological or not) you want.

You can buy the LED Clock online from Moss or Generate.

[via TrendsNow]