Tablets, iPads and eReaders are so ubiquitous, nerdy owners are employing extreme acts of graphic personalization to imbue their devices with unique geek chic.

Faaaalkooorr!! Almost every child of the Eighties holds a special place in their heart for The NeverEnding Story. The 1984 film spawned a pair of sequels and a TV show, cementing its hold on once-youthful imaginations and imbuing all who watched with the urge to ride a giant flying dog – OK, “luckdragon”, whatever.

Fans of the endearingly clunky, West German-produced fantasy film have grown into jaded adults but as Falcor famously advised, “Never give up and good luck will find you.” Yeah, tell that to Artax. Anyway, you can look up that and more on your tablet, ideally if its encased by a NeverEnding Story iPad / Tablet / EReader / Kindle Cover. Note the faux Auryn medallion affixed to the cover. Hey, it’s better than Nothing.

Hit The Button, Frank

Designed ideally for an Apple product like a Macbook or iPad and size-customizable by the seller, this MST3K adhesive vinyl decal features the familiar – to those in the know – silhouettes of Tom Servo, Mike Nelson and Crow T Robot in full-on movie-riffing mode. Now that Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been revived for a new run on Netflix, your robot roll call is as timely as ever.

Ultimate Zelda

The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most successful gaming franchises though considering it debuted way back in 1986, it’s had plenty of time to accrue legions of devoted fans. This “Ultimate Zelda Fan Package” from Etsy seller SkinzNhydez includes a Zelda book cover, Zelda wallet, Zelda iPad case, even a Zelda belt buckle. All you need now is a girlfriend named Zelda… oh, wait.

Time McFly’s

Channel your inner Biff Tannen with this Back To The Future 2 iPad case, featuring the cover of Gray’s Sports Almanac 1950-2000: the book that brought our heroes from BTTF2 so much Griff, er, grief.

Seller Firebox kindly advises potential purchasers that while “this book tells the future,” it’s “not to be used to create a series of paradoxes that destroy time.” Besides, since November 8th of 2016 we’ve already been living in the darkest timeline, amiright?

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Most of us have wished, at some point, that we could control the weather – to keep it from raining on a special day, perhaps, or conjure up a snowstorm that results in a few days off work and school. Artist, designer and animator Karolina Sobecka has come about as close as one individual can with ‘Cloud Machine‘, an invention that travels up into the atmosphere with a weather balloon.

Cloud Machine may not be able to create or disperse storms, but what it can do is still pretty fun: once it reaches a specific altitude, it disperses Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) heat and water vapor. This causes moisture in the air to condense into cloud droplets around the CCN, creating small clouds.

“This method is inspired by a geo-engineering technique proposed to create brighter, more reflective clouds which shield earth from sun’s radiation, and thus partly counteract the climate change,” says Sobecka.

The Cloud Machine is part of Amateur Human and Nephologies, a project commissioned by V2_Institute for Unstable Media for a Blowup event exploring “the how and why of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and artistic practice.”

via PSFK

There are some inventions that will forever be remembered fondly even after they are made obsolete by other technology. And then there are the other ones…the failures that never quite took off, or were replaced so rapidly as to have completely disappeared from our collective memory. Whether due to market difficulties, poor engineering or simply terrible timing, these inventions and gadgets are the failures most of us forget to remember.

Flying Tanks

Before military planes were robust enough to carry tanks to their destinations, military bigwigs had a brilliant idea: put wings on the tanks. They could be towed directly to the battle zone and easily flown to exactly the right spot. Although initial tests were successful, the winged tanks never made it into popular use. Better planes were developed first and are still used today to air drop tanks at their destinations.

Portable Record Players

The demise of this strange-looking contraption was a combination of poor timing and a lack of foresight by its makers. Poor timing because it came out in the 1980s just before cassette players and Walkmen would corner the market…lack of foresight because, come on, a record player that you carry around with you? Anyone who has ever used a record player could tell you what a terrible idea that is.

Gas-Shooting Riot Car

In the 1930s, the world wasn’t quite so politically correct as it is today. If a group of people gathered together to protest, for example, the police could mow them down with a humongous fortified vehicle complete with poisonous gas streams. This hulking machine was patented in 1938 but (thank goodness) never built. Perhaps cooler heads prevailed once the powers that be thought long and hard about the implications.

Vacuum Beauty Helmet

Although the woman with the plastic bag over her head looks exceedingly worried, and the other woman looks a bit like a wicked witch, this isn’t actually a picture of a crime taking place. The plastic helmet and the attached hose are allegedly a beauty treatment from 1941 involving a vacuum. How the victim…er, customer…breathes while encased in an air-free plastic hood is anyone’s guess.

Robot Reading Helper

The Robot Readamatic, invented in 1963, was meant to help slow readers improve their pace by revealing one line of text at a time. The arm would move at a pace set by the user to help him or her stay focused on the reading. Oddly, the device looks like it should be the other way around so that the big supporting arm doesn’t get in the way. We have to wonder if that bizarrely obvious design flaw had anything to do with the fact that the Robot Readamatic was never widely adopted.

Flying Saucer Camera

Back in the 1950s, there were so many UFO sightings reported each year that the government finally decided enough was enough. The Air Force introduced the Flying Saucer Camera, a special camera with two lenses designed to identify the source of strange lights. One lens took a normal photo while the other separated light into colors so that the origins of the light would be obvious.

Monowheel Vehicles

Although most of us choose to travel on two or four wheels, some inventors have been pushing for us to adopt a single-wheel vehicle since as far back as 1869 when the first monowheel appeared. Of course, with other forms of transport being safer, quieter, and easier to pilot, it doesn’t appear that the monowheel will be breaking into the mainstream anytime soon.

Twentieth Anniversary Mac

Released in 1197, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was a sweet looking machine for its time, boasting a very thin (for the time) screen and a detachable trackpad instead of a mouse. No one but the wealthiest hardcore Apple enthusiasts could afford the landmark computer, though – it came out with an initial price point of $7,499. The price later went down to $1,995, below the cost of production, thanks to extremely slow sales.

Phone Answering Robot

Built in 1964, back when we as a society seemed to share a collective fascination with robots that would do our household chores, this phone-answering robot was not nearly as functional as it might look at first. Its abilities were limited to picking up the phone…and putting the phone back down. It couldn’t act as a message recorder or even a message player, but it sure did look cool.

Cigarette Umbrella

Smoking may be passé today, but in 1931 it was just a normal part of life. As such, it was fraught with dangers like cigarettes that got soggy in the rain. A circus clown came up with this crazy/brilliant solution: a tiny umbrella at the end of a cigarette holder that let smokers puff away without fear of the weather.

One of the marks of our modern culture is the proliferation of gadgets most of us carry around. From digital cameras to cell phones to tablet computers to laptops to MP3 players, we have our hands full just trying to keep track of all of them. This excellent concept could go a long way toward streamlining our technology while still keeping us as connected as always.

(all images via: YankoDesign)

One of the problems with having too many different pieces of technology is the fact that hardware and functions are often repeated between the devices. Your digital camera and cellular phone both take pictures; your tablet and MP3 player both play videos; your phone and laptop both store your data. The Lifebook concept could solve several of our modern first-world gadget problems.

According to designer Prashant Chandra, combining all of our gadgets would make life simpler and allow all of our technology to share resources. Rather than having the same bits of data stored on multiple devices, Lifebook would let each device form part of an overall super-gadget. It’s sort of like Voltron – but instead of being composed of vehicles, it’s made up of a tablet, a camera, a phone/music player and a laptop.

The laptop serves as the base for all of the devices. There is no physical keyboard; rather, a touch keypad appears whenever the tablet is plugged into the laptop base. The phone/music player is fully integrated into the laptop as well, and all of the devices share memory and data as soon as they are plugged in.

In addition to streamlining the process of storing and transferring data between devices, the Lifebook concept would allow users to charge all of their devices in one place without that huge, ugly tangle of cords we all hate. Although the Lifebook is still in the concept stage at the moment, it is not hard to imagine it becoming an indispensable piece of technology in the foreseeable future.