By Andrew Liszewski

A decent stereo system is a pretty essential part of throwing a great party but unless you’ve gone to the trouble of wiring speakers throughout your whole house the music is going to be limited to only a couple of rooms at best. Designer Jinseup Shin has created a pretty simple and flexible solution to this problem with the Plug In & Enjoy speaker concept.

Roughly the size of a power adapter the speakers plug into any outlet and are designed to receive an FM signal from your stereo, iPod, cellphone or anything else that can be connected to an FM transmitter. Once plugged in you turn the front part of the speaker (which acts like a knob) until if finds the signal coming from your music player. Once the signal is located an LED light will turn green. If it has found the correct station simply wait 3 seconds until the LED turns red at which point the knob will control the volume instead. And if full volume is not loud enough you can simply plug in additional speakers in the same room.

[ Plug In & Enjoy @ Yanko Design ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Last week in downtown Vancouver the billboard you see above was exlusively powered by volunteers pedaling a single bicycle over a span of about 5 days. The advertisement was sponsored by DDB/Vancouver and BC Hydro (hydro is a Canadian term for power or electricity) to show off how energy-efficient LED Christmas lights are. While the reindeer used on the billboard was lit with about 1500 LED lights BC Hydro claims that with the traditional type of incandescent lighting there would only be enough electricity to power 120 bulbs.

While this is definitely a very energy-efficient way to power a set of LED Christmas lights the hard part is finding enough volunteers to keep the bike going. The 5 days this billboard was lit up required some 120 volunteers from the ad agency and local organizations so if you’ve got a large family you might want to consider this alternative next Christmas to help keep the electricity bills down.

[ Pedal Powered Billboard @ Advertising/Design Goodness ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The chances of having a naturally white Christmas drastically increase the farther north you live but then again so does the chances of having a heart attack while you shovel the white stuff away. So those of you who choose to live in slightly warmer climates probably have a slim chance of seeing snow on Christmas morn. But since you’ve already got the fake tree, fake fireplace, fake LED candles and fake pine scent drifting through the house why stop there? With a bucket of water and a packet of instant snow you can guarantee a white Christmas no matter where you live.

SnoWonder is a non-toxic plastic based material that when mixed with water expands 50 to 100 times its original volume resulting in a material that looks pretty close to real snow. Because the final product is 99% water it also has the tendency to feel cold even when used indoors but of course won’t melt all over the place. A batch of SnoWonder can last for months at a time but may need the occasional misting to compensate for natural surface evaporation drying it out. The product is also environmentally friendly allowing it to be safely disposed of no matter what time of year you finally decide the holidays are over.

SnoWonder comes in a wide variety of sizes from a $2.95 packet perfect for sticking in a stocking to a $595, 44 pound tub which can be used to keep snow in your backyard all year round.

[ SnoWonder ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If for some reason you still have a bunch of cassettes you need archived to a digital format but feel hooking up your walkman to your PC’s sound card with a stereo cable is too low-tech then this is for you Mr. Overkill. The Plus Deck converter is easily installed into a spare 5 1/4 inch bay on your tower and can either be used for simply playing back that old mix tape or recording it to a format that might still be in use in 5 years.

As novel as this device is I think the chances that most people having any type of recordings that only exist on a cassette tape are pretty rare. Any album has long since been re-released on compact disc and while you can complain about digital not sounding as good as analog I can guarantee they’re at least better than what cassettes were capable of. There’s a reason professionals used the larger format reel to reel tape instead of these. However if you did the whole ‘garage band’ thing back in the 80′s and 90′s you do probably have a shoebox full of old recordings but I suggest just leaving them where they are.

The Plus Deck converter is currently available from Firebox.com for just under $200.

[ Plus Deck Converter ] VIA [ Coolest-Gadgets ]