Cool gadgets
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Flat Light: Ceci N’est Pas Une Lampe | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Finn Magee’s Flat Light is a visual gag in the spirit if not the style of René Magritte. The printed poster is both a lamp and not a lamp: the $195 wall hanging actually lights up when you flick the switch thanks to a bank of LEDs within. Magee made it after wondering whether a picture of a lamp would be as effective in lending “an atmosphere of productivity and efficiency to [a] room” as a real lamp.Four-Slot SD Card-Reader Looks Like Miniature Toaster | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
This little SD card reader is like a tiny plastic toaster for your camera’s memory cards. The little cube has four slots, each of which can take its own SDHC card, and the box comes with a detachable USB cable – essential for traveling light where you don’t want every single gadget to come with its own tail. The blurb says that Elecom’ reader is compatible with all things SD: SD, microSD, and miniSD, but it really looks like the tiny pinky-sized microSD cards would need an adapter or get lost in the slot, just like the last runty slice of bread gets lost in the toaster and burns on the hot elements. Why use this? Pros in the field will appreciate being able to drop a whole shoot’s worth of cars into one reader and then go grab a coffee.
Ntera Prints a Display on Almost Any Surface | Gadget Lab | Wire
Displays don’t always have to live encased in glass houses. Instead, a color screen can now be printed on almost any material — plastic, ceramic, paper or textiles — through a process similar to how ink is printed on paper, says Irish startup Ntera. The new displays, called NanoChromics, use specially synthesized molecules that can produce images with a resolution equivalent to that of a conventional inkjet printer. The difference is that NanoChromics displays are screens that can be changed electronically, like an LCD, instead of being static images.
Forget the iPad, the HP Slate or pretty much any tablet. For true portable big-screen computing we want the roll-up screen that sci-fi has promised us since forever. That dream edges ever closer, and Sony is now helping it along with a flexible display that can be wrapped around a pencil. The 4.1-inch OLED screen is thin.
Video: Flexible Sony Screen Can Be Wrapped Around a Pencil | Gad
If you've ever played with an old fashioned wall phone with a windup handle ring generator, you'll recognize the same concept in this modern device. Unlike a spare battery, the Sidewinder Portable Cell Phone Charger never runs out of power and never needs to be replaced. While turning the handle is not much fun, the Sidewinder is an ideal emergency standby power source, especially for survivalists wanting to have the lowest tech solution to powering their (ummm...) high tech cell phone! What you Get The moderately priced Sidewinder comes complete with a full kit of goodies.
Sidewinder Portable Cell Phone Charger
What’s the first application you think of when I say the phrase “vibration-powered self-generating battery”? Me too, but let’s keep this clean. The faux-batteries are from Brother Industries, and inside the AA and AAA-sized shells you’ll find a capacitor and an electromagnetic induction generator. Shaking them will charge the capacitor enough to juice low-power gadgets. The example given is remote control, which needs around 40 to 100mW of power.
Vibration-Powered Batteries Charge Themselves | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
YoGen - Mobile Charger for Life
Order now and begin supplementing your power supply. Full Connector Tips/Devices (PDF coming soon!) Apple Tip (1-3G & older Firewire versions)** iPhone - Original iPod - Classic, Mini, Nano (1st & 2nd) (** - 3Gs compatible soon.
The Joos Orange is a solar panel that promises to make sun-power useful, rather than just a hippy’s dream. By using top-end components and some clever circuitry, the panel wrings around 20x the juice from the falling sun-rays than other chargers. Sound impressive? It is, and it manages to do it for just $100. With just an hour in the sun, the Joos Orange will generate (and store in its li-ion battery) enough power to keep you talking on the phone for two and a half hours. This compares to 5-20 minutes for other chargers (according to the company’s figures).
Personal Solar Panel Twenty Time More Powerful Than Rivals | Gad
Microsoft Instaload: Insert Batteries Any Way You Like | Gadget
Microsoft has come up with an amazingly obvious tweak to battery tech that should save us some headaches, as well as several trillion hours of head-scratching and peering into dark holes. Named Instaload, the invention lets you stuff the batteries into a device any which-way you fancy, eliminating the need to read dark directional diagrams. The most impressive part is the low-tech way this is handled. Each contact in the battery compartment has both positive and negative terminals. If the fat, flat end of the battery is pressing against them, it touches the outside contact.
Back in 1982, Clint Eastwood flew Firefox, an airplane that had thought-controlled weapons.
Thought-Control Headset Reads Your Mind | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Drift Innovation’s X170 sports-camera, or “Action Camera”, is a great looking, lightweight camcorder with a lot of very clever features. It is let down by just one thing: a mere hour of battery life. The X170 is a solid-state camcorder that records straight to SD (a half-hour will eat 1GB) and has a tiny 1.5-inch screen for playback (or more usefully, a quick check to see you got the shot). Video is shot through a wide-angle lens with a 170-degree field-of-view, and is recorded in 720 x 480 pixels at 30fps.
Remote-Controlled Sports-Cam Clamps to Anything | Gadget Lab | W
That plastic ball up there might look like a simple plastic ball, but it is in fact a simple plastic ball packed with tech. Inside the Orbotix, as it’s known, are robot guts that let you control the ø74mm (2.9-inch) sphere with an Android or iOS device. It works via Bluetooth (along with some secret-sauce robotics and motors), and charges via induction, so you don’t need any plugs. We first saw the Sphero, then nameless, back in August when it was just a prototype. Now the cute rolling toy is almost ready for production, and will be shown off in Las Vegas at CES next month.
Phone-Controlled Robot Ball, Like Marble Madness in Meatspace | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
If you’re anything like me, the sight of somebody turning on the faucet to wet their toothbrush and then just letting the water run and run while they scrub their stupid teeth will drive you crazy. You should just save up $40 and buy them the Smart Faucet, an add-on for any existing water-tap. The device is simple. It screws into the end of the faucet and blocks the water.
Smart Faucet Saves Water, Teeth | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
When Spencer Nugent cuts something with scissors, he likes to be in control. For him, a bouncing bottom blade is waste of time and just plain uncomfortable, while the double-handled design of conventional scissors twists your wrist to an awkward angle. Nugent decided to fix this, and came up with the Comfort Grip Scissors.