dolo54 blows minds: These blade runner renderings on are my laptops. Huge versions can be had here: [www.pcgameshardware.com]
drummerboymdb: Yummy.
Mauricio Sanchez: Art from Ryohei Hase. Found in GSociety.org
lonan: Can't remember where this came from. It's a image that came from a program a guy wrote to randomly generate cityscapes.
yreka: There's a bit of problem in that I change my wallpaper usually every couple of days. This is the one I've had up the longest total though.
GermiSmith: I normally change my wallpaper fairly regularly, but this has been up since March.
gussde: Found it somewhere online. I get a lot of compliments on it and tell people that I have it at home and I need someone to splice it for me...
electrolemon
soccer1105: water flame
prophet178: The cover to the best album of the year. It's an optical illusion too. Looks pretty trippy.

D-Roll, which stands for "digital roll," is a concept from designer Hao Hua. It features one long cylindrical base from which the screen unfurls in one direction and the keyboard in another. When rolled, you can use the attached straps to carry around the D-Roll in classic purse or man-purse fashion. Sure, our future laptops aren't necessarily going to look like this, but to quote Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock, "Technology is cyclical!" [DVICE]

But recycling is precisely the point, according to designer Michael Trudgeon. In the Australian outback, where this restroom might have a home someday, water is scarce.

So is space, apparently, given the collapsible design, but we have a hard time believing the outback suddenly became a bustling overpopulated metropolis overnight. If there's anything the outback is not short on, it's vast expanses of dusty nothingness. Nevertheless, this sure beats a wooden outhouse or worse, a simple hole in the ground.

Trudgeon received a Bathroom Innovation Award in '08 for his design, which would be equally at home in Corbin Dallas' futuristic apartment as it would in an Outback Restaurant. [Bathroom Innovation Award
via DVICE]

The “Self-Energy Converting Sunglasses” concept uses a dye solar cell combined with unspecified nanotech to generate electricity while, presumably, still allowing you to see. The electricity passes through the frames to a port in the back of the glasses. Then a cord runs down your neck to your gadget of choice.

Hopefully by the time someone creates a working production model, we'll be beyond such desperate attempts to charge our portable technology. Or maybe the glasses will at least hide a halfway decent HUD inside. [Yanko]

Despite its obvious name, we're not certain whether the I-Cool makes you shiver, sweat or both to increase sedentary calorie burning rates, but we do know that office warfare already leads to many a rogue thermostat lacking proper regulation. In other words, it's tough to imagine that this chair, however cool it may look, will make you any more able to down McMuffins all day without packing on the poundage. But a man can dream, can't he? [Padwa Designs via Core77]

The crew would live in the top sphere of the craft, which would have five floors for cockpit, research labs, and observation decks. von Braun created this sketch (along with 35 others) for a group of articles he was working on for Collier's Magazine titled “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” He was famous that year for predicting that man would soon visit the Moon. [TierneyLab via Super Punch via Neatorama]

• After nearly going bankrupt in 1927, Buckminster Fuller moved his family to a Chicago slum so he could spend his days in the library reading works from the likes of Gandhi and Da Vinci. By 1928, he had compiled 2,000 pages of notes into a 50 page manuscript entitled "4D Time Lock." It was basically described as incomprehensible nonsense. From here, Fuller began work on his Dymaxion line of inventions focused around utopian living.
• The Dymaxion Car, built in 1933, was blimp shaped, sat on three wheels and had a periscope instead of a rear window. Fuller had a vision that the evolution of housing would lead to pre-fabricated homes that could be put anywhere, so people would be living in places like Antarctica or the Sahara, and would need an all-terrain vehicle to get around. The car could turn 180 degrees on a dime, and would often cause traffic jams from slack-jawed onlookers. Future designs for the car called for it to fly using a VTOL mechanism, but a fluke accident at the Chicago World's Fair killed production of the vehicle in 1934.
• Fuller viewed the (still popular) individual homebuilding process as inefficient and antiquated, which gave way to his Dymaxion Home project. He thought homes should be built like cars; constructed in a day, exactly the same as the rest. The Dymaxion Home would have all the necessary amenities and would be installed in lightweight towers. The towers themselves would be constructed in a central location and transported to the building site via Zeppelin, where a bomb would be used to excavate the land. When a family was ready to move, the home could be packed up, removed from the tower and taken to the next site. Unfortunately, Fuller was unconcerned with the availability of the technology he called for, which made building these homes nearly impossible.
• The Dymaxion Bathroom was intended to be built like a refrigerator, with a sink, toilet and bath condensed into a modular unit that could be placed anywhere in the home. Thirteen models were produced before production was nixed in 1936.
• Bucky's most bizarre concept was his Cloud Nine project, which consisted of communities built inside ginormous, super light spheres covered in polyethelyne. Apparently, when the sun hit the spheres and created enough hot air, they would rise up into the sky, essentially creating cloud cities (sans Billy Dee Williams). I don't think further explanation is needed to show why this never happened.
• But Fuller's most realized innovation were his Geodesic domes. Utilizing aluminum struts and fiberglass panels, Fuller made a dome which covered 93 feet and only weighed 8.5 tons, catapulting him to design fame. His services as a speaker and thinker became popular from universities and the Pentagon alike. Obsessed with the shape for their volume optimizing qualities, Fuller wanted to house entire cities under domes and shield residents from the elements, where energy would be conserved and money saved. His envisioned Manhattan covered in a two-mile dome, and more domes in the Arctic, Antarctic and Tokyo Bay.

Buckminster Fuller's failed inventions aren't the only things worth reading about. There are plenty of great anecdotes about his eccentric life — like how he was expelled from Harvard using his tuition money to entertain a group of chorus girls and spent a significant chunk of time only eating prunes, steak, tea,and...umm...Jell-O (unmentioned is that he also served as the second president of MENSA). Basically, he was awesome. [The New Yorker]

A bunch of designers hacked away at the plywood using an Epilog Legend 36EXT laser and went to work on over 80 different boards. When we first heard about the idea we thought the designs would be pretty rudimentary, but they can actually produce pretty intricate images at 1200dpi.

However, having the sweetest deck on the block will set you back, $500 to be exact. And that doesn't even include the wheels.– Ben Longo

Designers Use Laser to Grind 3-D Art Into Skateboard Decks [Wired via OhGizmo!]

For more on this innovative notebook, built with no expense spared, see our previous post.

And for a high-def version of the video above, download it from AeroXP's page.

Exclusive: The Intel Mobile Metro [AeroXP]

This one has it all. The slim, champagne-colored magnesium notebook—which is only a quarter of an inch thicker than a Motorola RAZR cellphone—will include a magnetically attached folder that will be available in different fashion colors. That folder will also be able to charge up the laptop wirelessly, and ladies (at whom this design is clearly aimed) can attach a strap to it and make it look just like a purse. Jeez, what else did they include in this beauty?

It'll have always-on connectivity, using all Intel chips, of course, to connect via Wi-Fi, EV-DO and WiMax. It'll also have a flash memory hard drive, with an expected battery life of 14 hours. Check out the glow-in-the-dark, the screen on the outside of that folder, the beautiful gold accents, and the overall thinness of this thing. It's just astonishing.

If Intel is able to deliver this notebook anytime soon, it's going to give Apple a run for its money. The big question now? How much will this cost? According to Business Week, the main reason so many other laptops look so lame is because of cost considerations, and the designers of this notebook admit that price was no object. Even if it's expensive, this design is so thin and beautiful, it's sure to bring some fat changes to the laptop world. – Charlie White

The World's Thinnest Notebook [Business Week]

Speaking of smoking, we're little worried about heat dissipation with this wooden enclosure, echoing Travis's comments about those leather-clad hard drives he introduced to you yesterday. In fact, the product page mentions that passive cooling may not be enough to keep that drive from overheating.

Anyway, that looks like some highly-polished, silky smooth hardwood, and we want one anyway, but now we see that orders are suspended for some reason. So perhaps a line will begin to circle around the building for this, too. – Charlie White

Product Page [Peter Kinne Design, via ubergizmo]