The Pencil Dice is the brainchild of designer Sebastian Bergne, who combined a dice with a pencil. Should make rolling a 1D6 so much easier on your next game of Dungeon & Dragons.

The simple addition of dice markings to a six sided pencil makes all the difference. Pencil dice is an essential addition to any brief case, pen cup or pencil case. A little something to help you pass the time, entertain the children or even make decisions.

The awesome people at Think Geek are selling another one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before?" products that will add much needed geekdom to any room: the Big Red Button. As they so eloquently explain:

In every sci-fi film or TV show, there is usually one easily recognizable trope - no, not the hypersexual female alien in the skin-tight cat-suit, though she does make a fairly regular appearance. The answer we're looking for is the panic-button. You know, the Red Button™! The big shiny candy-like button that erases history, ejects the warp core, blows the emergency seals, activates the self-destruct, sounds red-alert, engages the hyperdrive, activates the halide fire-retardants, or simply flushes the waste-disposal system is a regular character in most sci-fi.

Flickr user DeTomaso77 has put together this gallery of British birds made out of LEGOs. As he explained to me:

It's a long shot but I'm going to try and get LEGO to produce these as sets for Bird charities.

Go to Italy right now, shortly after dinner and visit one of the majestic squares of Rome and you'll see people walking, side by side or solo. They aren't going anywhere per se, though, because walking is a social status thing, an excuse to see and be seen. Best of all, this portico culture goes as far back as the Roman Empire.

Walking was also closely related to morals and social status. Slaves moved quickly; in fact, they did not so much walk as run (servus currens, "the running slave" being almost a tautology). One particular social climber, parodied in a comedy of "flat-footed" Plautus, was advised to slow down and to ape the exaggerated stately pace of the Roman gentleman (the only pace possible, I imagine, when you were formally dressed up in a toga). But it was important not to go too slowly; for that was the mark of a woman, or an effeminate. And it is precisely this idea that helps us restore some sense to one of the "jokes of Cicero", a sometimes pretty opaque collection

Looking through a microscope, Microscopia is azurenimbus first game for Ludum Dare 23. I'm not going to tell you how to play it, but don't be fooled by the easy start.

Although a bit processor intensive on my little old machine, this CSS 3D Tilt effect, which turns web pages into 3D, is quite impressive.

Using CSS 3d to make every website into 3d(kind of). It is a bit buggy but you can bookmark the script to your bookmark bar and have some 3D fun on any websites by one single click!/p>

If you feel your geekdom is not up to par for never having learnt VIM, Unix's daunting text editor, know that you're not alone (I, for one, never quite mastered it). For a meagre $5, you can now play VIM Adventures, a game that will teach you all the commands and functionality of VIM and turn you into a pro. Good luck in the maze.

If you're too busy to play World of Warcraft or any other time-consuming MMORPG, consider signing up for TWEENK: the role playing game for lazy people. You don't really have to do much else after that.

Tweenk is a game with minimal user's involvement. Everytime you tweet, your alter ego finds adventures, kills monsters or gets items. Every tweet you post can change his life. At the time you tweet "Good morning" your character finds a new sword.

Sign up the game with your Twitter account and just keep tweeting. Every tweet will be a source of adventure for your character.

It's time to be lazy.

I can't give MMMMMM enough credit for being a simple yet brilliantly designed game. And I'm guessing the game is called that way for the number of times you'll scratch your head or hold your chin to figure out how to get past the next challenge. I know it seems hard, but give it a shot.

musicForProgramming(); is a series of hour-long mix-tapes featuring music designed specifically to help you program. They're pretty intense and surprisingly soothing.

Through years of trial and error - skipping around internet radio stations, playing our entire music collections on shuffle, or just hammering single albums on repeat, we have found that the most effective music to aid prolonged periods of intense concentration tends to have a mixture of the following qualities:

Drones
Noise
Fuzz
Field recordings
Vague memories (Hypnagogia)
Textures without rhythm
Minor complex chords
Early music (Baroque, lute, harpsichord)
Very few drums or vocals
Synth arpeggios
Awesome
Walls of reverb

Music possessing these qualities can often provide just the right amount of interest to occupy the parts of your brain that would otherwise be left free to wander and lead to distraction during your work.

I can't figure out if this is a joke or not, but reportedly, Shiri is the first robotic humanoid buttocks designed to represent emotions with the "visual and tactual transformation" of butt muscles. At about 2:45 you can see the operator smack the robotic bum and the "muscles" tense up. Uhm.

If you're looking forward to the singularity, that moment in time where we'll be able to upload our conscious mind to a computer and live forever, Tom Scott created this video on what the digital afterlife may be like, courtesy of lawyers and copyright.

If you liked this, you may also enjoy two novels that provided inspiration for it: Jim Monroe's Everyone in Silico, where I first found the idea of a corporate-sponsored afterlife; Rudy Rucker's trippy Postsingular, which introduced me to the horrifying idea of consciousness slums.

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle explains how economics can save you if you find yourself kidnapped by pirates. The number one suggestion: keep your mouth shut.

According to a hostage negotiator quoted by This American Life, giving away this information is apparently typical of hostages and is counter-productive to their release as it narrows the bid-ask spread. Economists would describe hostage negotiation as a bilateral monopoly price negotiation that is structurally just a special case of chicken. That is, unlike a barrel of oil or a freight car full of soybeans which can trade on an extremely liquid market with innumerable buyers and sellers, a hostage has exactly one seller (the kidnappers) and exactly one buyer (the employer and/or family of the hostage). When there is only one buyer, the opportunity cost for ransoming the hostage is zero. Likewise, the employer and/or family has no realistic alternative means to recover the hostage. In order for everybody to walk away happy, we

I love the minimalist modular approach behind Rolands Landsbergs' Boxetti collection. When open, the furniture provides a tremendous amount of storage and functionality which can all be tucked away out of view when closed.

Boxetti collection is driven by three basic design principles -- functionality, advanced technologies and contemporary aesthetics of minimalism. Each of Boxetti modules is designed to achieve maximum efficiency of particular demands for functionality and suitability. The capability of the modules to be transformed into compactly solid blocks is essential for the design concept in order to obtain an unobstructed and comfortable space -- free of uselessness. Boxetti collection is a handmade product -- the quality of materials as well as structural and technological solutions endues the collection to the extent of exclusiveness.

Before you click play, be aware that this video is NSFW, all right? Okay then. This short was created by Le Tag Parfait, a French zine about everything porn culture. Think Vice magazine's NSFW section, entirely done in French.

As friendly Peeping Toms, we share with you what happens through the keyhole. We open this series with Eva and her passion for duck hunting.

Website Slackstory has put together some of the most disturbing stories that people wrote on a "What's your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?" thread on Reddit. Yes, it's horrible to read about people who have killed (accidentally and purposely), stolen or engaged in generally fucked up, immoral behaviour (just search for "cum box" in that article to see what I mean). And yet, I can assure you, you will keep reading, totally fascinated by the human condition all around us.

I basically killed my father. or at least intentionally allowed him to die.

He was an abusive father all my life, and when I was 19, he had a heart attack. I calmly took the phone away from him before he could dial 911, put the recliner he was sitting in up so he would be laying back and his weight would make it harder to breathe, took one last look right at him, then left the room.

About an hour or so later I found him sitting there staring forward with foam in his mouth, not

Before you click play, this video is very NSFW.

Okay, with that out of the way, Antonio Vicentini shares his love for "boobies" with this video, where he puts a set of breasts through rigorous testing exercises to determine just how awesome they are.

When I was a kid I always dreamed of seeing this test on Beakman's World.

Just in case you -- or someone you love -- touched their genitals before giving you that handshake, be sure to get the Maybe You Touched Your Genitals hand sanitiser. Even has Aloe Vera as one of the ingredients.

The Number One After-Genital-Contact Hand Sanitizer. Now kills 99.99% of germs on contact! 2 oz./ 59 ml.

Antonio Vicentini a "Brazilian Homo Sapiens focused on animation, boobies, skateboarding and beer," has created this clever pixelated animation titled the camera collection, illustrated by Billy Brown and set to the music by Ben Hantoot.

Having a cellphone means that I hardly ever use watches anymore. I get all my information from my mobile device, including the time. The Pebble tries to bring back the love of watches with a highly-customizable wrist-device that not only can you give the time with customizable clock faces, but also provide complete interactivity with your phone.

Apps bring Pebble to life. We're building some amazing apps for Pebble. Cyclists can use Pebble as a bike computer, accessing the GPS on your smartphone to display speed, distance and pace data. Runners get a similar set of data displayed on their wrist. Use the music control app to play, pause or skip tracks on your phone with the touch of a button. If you're a golfer, feel free to bring Pebble onto the course. We're working with Freecaddie to create a great golf rangefinder app for Pebble that works on over 25,000 courses world-wide. Instead of using your phone, view your current distance to the green right on your wrist.

The insanely talented Jasmin Lai has created this wonderful little video titled When I Grow Up, which follows a little girl who doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up.

I never would've guessed, but according to Scientific American's Krystal D'Costa, with the advent of the binding machine in the early 19th-century -- a device that "mechanically bound grain stalks as they were cut and deposited them in neat bundles" -- the price of twine sky-rocketed due to a shortage.

The binder twine industry grew in response to the widespread adoption of the mechanical binder, linking international entities to the U.S. and Canadian harvests. Manila fiber from the Philippines, and Sisal and henequen from the Yucatan yielded twine that tied the tightest and were naturally insect repellent. Managing these materials and tools became an exercise in political identity: U.S. manufacturers produced a bevy of binder machines, but the Canadians levied heavy taxes on the imports to protect Canada' agricultural implement industry. Additionally, because the U.S. harvest occurred occurred earlier than the Canadian harvest, manufacturers sold surplus twine to Canadians but

For religious cultists who want out of the cult and into the secular, the biggest challenge once they abandon their white button-down shirt and black pants is meeting girls. If that's you, you need to meet Israel Irenstein, the Tommy-Hilfiger-wearing 29-year-old ex-Orthodox Jew who, in this interview on Slate by Diana Spechler, explains how he coaches former ultra-Orthodox Jews into meeting girls and dating them.

According to Irenstein, lack of self-confidence pervades the recently ex-Orthodox, who refer to themselves as OTD, or "Off the Derech" (derech is Hebrew for path). Once they've gone off the path, for a variety of reasons including loss of faith, distaste for the lifestyle, and longing to educate themselves beyond the Jewish texts, OTD'ers are like immigrants in the secular world, unsure of the language and customs of dating, battling the voices of their parents and rabbis, who warned them that touching the opposite sex before marriage would incur God's wrath.

"There

According to Abhijnan Rej of Open The Magazine, Osama Bin Laden was not the cunning fighter, commander and theologian he appeared to be. Instead, he argues, his fame was blown out of proportion because Bin Laden was "mode-locked to success by a series of random events, each reinforcing the next."

Early in the days and months after 9/11, a senior Norwegian diplomat Espen Eide, following his peacekeeping experiences in the Balkans, called Osama bin Laden a "conflict entrepreneur". The New York Times ran long pieces on the organisational structure of Al-Qaida, depicting it as a well-managed modern multinational company with bin Laden as its CEO. President Bush evoked the Wild West with a 'Wanted Dead or Alive' slogan, unwittingly equating bin Laden with Jesse James. French philosophers being French philosophers spoke of Al-Qaida's (and ergo bin Laden's) actions as spectacular works of theatre whose aim was to 'radicalise the world by sacrifice'. In the Indian state of West Bengal, a

Reportedly, there is a bug where if you run PHP as a CGI script you can simply add ?-s at the end of a website and see their source code. Need an example? Check out Sony. Not good from a security standpoint.

I like what Facebook did. If you were to run http://www.facebook.com/?-s on their site, you'll get a little snippet of fake PHP with a URL. Follow that URL and you're brought on their career page, for software engineers. Quite clever. (Facebook is actually so big, that they've converted their PHP to C++ anyway).

I love the idea behind PhotoJojo's ioShutter: turn your iPhone or iPad into a super fancy remote camera trigger or add some much needed functionality to your camera without breaking the bank.

The ioShutter Camera Remote is your camera's lifeline to awesome, joining two of your favoritest things. It's a cord/app combo that lets you control your camera's shutter with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch's smarty-pants iOS brains. That means it can do so much more than any camera remote with 6 modes: standard trigger, motion trigger, sound trigger, time-lapse, timer, and bulb.

For reasons I can't comprehend -- probably because I am an Internet addict -- The Verge's Paul Miller will be documenting a year without access to the Internet. He's already on day one and deleting all his Internet-based apps while engaging in some very analogue activities.

[...] I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I'm so "adept" at the internet that I've found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I'm pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn't belong.

I'm also interested in a sans-internet reality as a technology writer. There was a time when technological innovation didn't seem intimately linked to the internet. Most pre-80s sci-fi, for instance, explored those futures. Now I'd like to examine what modern technology looks like in a TCP/IP

S’up bitches!?!?! I’ve watched a whole 3 movies in the last two weeks. That be weak. I’d like to blame it on my broken DVD player, but it just broke a few days ago (fucker!). I just haven’t been in the mood, so I have very little to talk about here. I’ll try to pad it out with a bunch of stupid shit you won’t want to read.