Igor Verniy creates amazing steampunk animal junkbots from watch parts, car parts and electronic junk (here's his Etsy store); in this Bored Panda interview, he explains his process.

Welcome to this year's Boing Boing Gift Guide, a piling-high of our most loved stuff from 2013 and beyond. There are books, gadgets, toys, music and much else besides: click the categories at the top to filter what you're most interested in—and offer your own suggestions and links!

Tom Hardwidge's Arthrobots are sculptural steampunk insectoid junkbots made from spent ammunition polished to a mirror shine. They're lovely, detailed and delicate.

Steampunk Insects Created from Bullets

(Thanks, Thussa, via Submitterator!)

Datacent, a data-recovery house, has a page of recordings of the sound of hard drives failing, segmented by vendor and cause of failure (e.g., "Western Digital 250GB desktop drive with stuck spindle can't spin up, chatters" and "Fujitsu laptop hard drive with bad heads making sweeping sound"). — Read the rest

Brian DeVitis, a UCLA mechanical engineering grad student, has spent the past three years modding a giant R2D2-shaped Pepsi dispenser into a home entertainment system with eleven integrated game consoles, a projector, and eight-way sound.

This appears to be an update of the eight-console R2D2 I wrote about last September — either DeVitis has been adding more stuff to his bot, or there's two of them out there. — Read the rest

Mat Mets of Make: Online says:

On my recent post about building an electromagnetically assisted pendulum, commenter Accomplished chimed in to share their excellent solar pendulum build. Accomplished used the BEAM Magbot Pendulum circuit from the book Junkbots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels.

Dominic Wilcox's aluminium toothbrush carrier turns an ordinary plastic toothbrush into a work of art: "Hewn out of a solid piece of aluminium, this case holds the solitary contents of one toothbrush." Imagine if everything in your toilet-bag had its own case like this. — Read the rest

Man, I am all over these $45 space-marine "Bertie" robots from Tenacious Toys — rusted and beat up and full of character, designed by Ashley Wood.

Bertie

(via Superpunch)

Over at the Make Blog, Gareth Branwyn has compiled a great list of robot gift ideas.

Maker Bundle #1

The Maker Shed has put together the first in a series of parts collections, called Maker Bundles. Maker Bundle #1 combines all of the electronic components to make four of the beginner-to-intermediate robot projects we've covered in MAKE magazine.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, a graffiti artist left a curious message for Brownlee on his front doorstep, and Joel did not pay six dollars to dink around on an iPhone Stylophone.

Beschizza was outraged that breaking a web site's terms of service has been made a crime. — Read the rest

Gord sez, "Brooklyn artist/musician/way-out thinker, Ranjit Bhatnagar, rigs up a home made tin can orchestra and Theremin to perform Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy.'" Man, that's one crazy junk drumbot — like the Fat Albert percussion section.

Link

(Thanks, Gord!)

Link

(Thanks, Gord! — Read the rest

Gareth Branwyn, blogger, author, and scribe of Wired Magazine's Jargon Watch column, has a new book out: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. It's part of the popular Absolute Beginner's Guide series by Que publishing, and leads newbies into the fascinating world of robots and do-it-yourself bot building. — Read the rest