This ‘pasta printing press’ lets you create and mass-produce your own custom pasta shapes!





Somewhere in Italy, a visibly distressed Nonna is wondering what’s wrong with the world!

The Parola Pasta machine is a unique combination of a pasta-maker and your old-fashioned printing press. Designed by Nikita Nietzke, a student at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design), Parola Pasta reinvents one of the world’s most famous food categories, bringing automation in a new form to it. Modeled on the kind of machine Johannes Gutenberg developed in the 15th century, the Parola Pasta lets you extrude pasta dough in any alphabetical design. The machine uses a set of extruder plates that can be placed together to create words, and then after that it’s all about creating the alphabet-soup-equivalent of pasta!

The machine is hand-cranked (although that can easily be automated) and requires you to manually cut the pasta shape out at intervals. The pasta is then laid out on a wooden tray which automatically moves to make space for the next pasta piece. The tray docks in the Parola Pasta machine’s base, letting you dry it out for future use. The machine could, in theory, work with any kind of dough, allowing you to used colored pasta (spinach or beetroot) or even make things interesting by popping in some cookie dough instead! An ‘AMORE’ shaped cookie would definitely hit the sweet spot, wouldn’t it?

Designer: Nikita Neitzke

Austrian city builds public library with nothing but QR codes, NFC and stickers

Austrian city builds public library with nothing but QR Codes, NFC and stickers

Strangely, the Austrian city of Klagenfurt doesn't have a public library, even though it hosts the Festival of German-Language Literature. However, an initiative dubbed Project Ingeborg is turning the municipality into a book repository of sorts with 70 QR code and NFC chip-equipped stickers. Plastered throughout town, they direct users to web pages where they can download public domain works, largely from Project Gutenberg. Oftentimes, e-books will be located in relevant locations -- so you'll be sure to find Arthur Schnitzler's The Killer near the police station, for example. Come August, the team behind the effort will partner with local talent to distribute books, music and other digital content too. In an effort to build a stronger bond to the location, the organizers have prevented search engines from indexing the links, so you'll have to visit Klagenfurt to access the curated goods. If you'd like to turn your city into a library, the group hopes to release instructions for replicating their system soon.

[Thanks, Michael]

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Austrian city builds public library with nothing but QR codes, NFC and stickers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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