They are the work of Carey Huffman, featured on her blog, Full Of Fluff. And if you like them, she’s also made the patterns available for download. With the weather showing no sign of improving, it might be worth giving them a go.
I should stop trawling the quirky Japanese websites, there’s too much temptation for buying odd novelties. Like this Mini Rubiks Cube for your mobile phone.
It’s designed to hang from your mobile phone, so instead of mindlessly sending out sms messages to people you hardly know when you’re bored, you can engage your brain a bit more creatively by trying to solve this small-size cube, which by rights should easier than the full-size one.
Available in Japan now, you can pick one up for the equivalent of a bargain £1.29.
Find out more at the Rakuten website (translated from Japanese)
It’s a retro gamer’s dream – but you’ll have to be a rich one to bid for Atari’s marketing archives, which are up for grabs at Sotheby’s in New York, with an estimate of around $150k – $200k. That between £75k and £100k.
For that huge outlay, you’ll get around 2,000 items of original material dating from 1981 – 1983 (when Atari was at its height, including manuscript memorandum, internal specification guidelines, original sketches, blue lines, mechanicals, proofs, colour separations (including acetates), and screen diagrams. The majority relates to games and consoles, but it does includes some early design and graphic work for game characters and components.
So in other words, everything you need to start your own vintage gaming empire. If you’re interested, you need to register with Sotheby’s. And perhaps have a lottery win before the auction date.
Find out more at the Sotheby’s website
Via Boing Boing
Nothing to do whilst waiting for that kettle to boil or that microwave to ‘ping’? You need the Tetrius Magnet Set – which is Tetris, with fridge magnets.
Yes, these are your everyday fridge magnets, idela for attaching things to your fridge or freezer door. But as a neat sideline, the blocks are all Tetris-shaped, so you can sharpen up your gaming skills – or just re-arrange them in whatever pattern you like.
Seven blocks per set, it retails for $9.95 (around £5).
There’s nothing wrong with an interest in nostalgia – but I’d be slightly worried if a friend of mine came round to the house wearing a PacMan Belt.
Obviously, there’s practical reasons for wearing it – like keeping your trousers up. But I’m not sure that a belt for an adult (which this is – it goes up to 42 inches) should really feature coloured ghosts and a PacMan on the buckle.
But if you think you can pull it off, it retails for a reasonable £9.99.
Obviously a normal Rubik’s Cube isn’t hard enough for the people of Japan, so they’ve created something more fiendish – a World Map Rubik’s Cube.
It’s been made to celebrate 25 years of the cube and replaces the plain coloured blocks with a sample map of the world. That makes things a lot harder – let’s be honest, one patch of land and sea on a map looks pretty much like any other.
As far as we know, this is only available from Japan, or via mail order from a Japanese online store (follow the link at the bottom for one such place). It retails for the equivalent of £10.
