Gizmodo: vienna

Drink Cocktails Mixed By a Robot Based on Your Mario and Tetris Gameplay

Kat Hannaford — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:26:09 EST

To me, a festival is a field, a few musical acts, pair of rain boots, and heaps of mud. But then, I do live in England. Roboexotica, on the other hand, is robots and cocktails. Much more civilized.

Held in Austria, it's basically a bunch of boozehounds that show off their cocktail-mixing robots. The best of the creations appear in the two in the videos below, which force you to play Mario or Tetris, with the sort of cocktail the robot mixes you dependent on how you play the games. Slow and steady wins the race, in my books, but what would that earn me? [Roboexotica via Kotaku]

Image Credit: MattDork

Retro Illustrations Show 30 Ways To Die From Electrocution

Elaine Chow — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:00:00 EST

Sometimes, we so take for granted our shiny devices that we forget they could very well kill us. Need pictures to illustrate that macabre thought? Here are 30, brought to you by 1930s Vienna.

The 30 illustrations are from the book Elektroshutz, found in Vienna's Technisches Museum. These frightening fables are great reminders to not pee on, chew on or feed to babies electricity. Check out Bre Pettis' Flickr for the rest of the set. [Bre Pettis Blog via Flickr]

World's Highest Lego Tower Construction on Video

Jesus Diaz — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:30:10 EDT

We told you about the 460,000-brick, 96.73-feet Lego tower before, but here is the video showing how it was built by Lego experts with the help of 3,000 kids, who assembled 121 sections made with 2 x 4 Lego bricks to raise this titanic monolith—the highest ever in world. [460,000-Brick Lego Tower Breaks World Record]

Shot-Glass Printing Bot, Darko-Like Rabbit, Molten Beer Bong Turn Up at Roboexotica "Cocktail Robotics" Convention

Wilson Rothman — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:02:30 EST

Apparently the science of cocktail robotics was woefully neglected until some enterprising alkies created Roboexotica, a convention to celebrate cyber-assisted drunkenness. The action is taking place this weekend in Vienna, and from the looks of the opening night pictures, things are still as academic as they were when I was in college. (Just looking at this molten steel beer bong gives me a tear of nostalgia.) The homemade replicator—or "reprap"—you see above stamps shot glasses using a thermistor, stepper-controlling arduinos and, of course, an extruder. Man those nerds know how to party! [Roboexotica, Brex's Flickr Page and Sean Bonner's Metroblogging Vienna via Make]

Solar Tree to Light up Streets outside Viennese Museum

AddyDugdale — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:39:27 EDT

Ross Lovegrove, designer of beautiful, yet useful, things, has teamed up with Artemide and Sharp Solar to produce these solar-powered street lamps that are to light up the Ringstrasse outside Vienna's Museum for Angewandte Kunste (that's the Museum for Applied Arts and Contemporary Art.) They'll be going up on a tree-line boulevard, so expect the effect to be awesome. More pics and info below.

According to a statement from Lovegrove Studio, the Solar Trees "communicate more than light... they communicate the trust of placing beautifully made, complex natural forms outside for the benefit of all of society becoming a museum that if folded inside out, the museum as an incubator of change in society... and with this the promotion of environmental science and the joy of the new aesthetics made possible by the digital process.

And there's me thinking they were just street lights. Switching on day is October 8. [Dezeen]

Windows Vienna: Vista Successor, Out in Two Years

Mark Wilson — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 15:16:06 EST

With Vista just hitting shelves, Microsoft is already looking ahead to their next OS codenamed "Vienna", that is slated for a 2009 release. This from development VP Ben Fathi:

We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is...Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers...It's too early for me to talk about it...But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more.

Hmmm...lots of tech speak going on there. Let's give the prototype Gizmodo Translator a whack at it:

The end user is F&*#ed

Ahhh, now it makes sense. – Mark Wilson

Microsoft: Vista Follow-up Likely in 2009 [pcworld]

Microsoft Code Names Successor to Vista

Charlie White — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 13:05:10 EDT

According to insiders, Microsoft has code-named its next version of Windows, calling it Fiji. So that's right, Fiji is the next version after Vista, and we're also hearing that after Fiji will be Vienna.

Of course, by the time these products reach the real world marketplace, if ever, they will probably have some other vaguely aesthetic-sounding name. But until then, we'll call it Fiji. Our bets are on an operating system that's not even shrink-wrapped, but web-based, certainly by the time we get to Vienna.

Microsoft's got a codename for Vista successor [the Inquirer]