I’ve worked in a couple of places that had some really disgusting microwaves in the break room. One sticks out particularly well in my mind. A brilliant co-worker of mine accidentally put some sort of frozen dinner in it and set the timer very, very wrong. We’re not sure what he was trying to do, but 20 minutes and 5 rooms full of smoke later, it finished cooking. When I left the company months later, the smell still lingered. So how does one warm up their food without using the shared microwave? You harness the power of your faithful USB port with a ridiculous gadget.
Only Thanko could come up with a gadget that keeps your food so hot that it might actually burn down your building. This lunchbox will warm your leftovers of last night’s meatloaf with 140 degrees of USB power. I’m sure that the product is perfectly safe, but it scares me just the same. Even at $20, I think I’ll stick to the microwave.
Aside from the less-than-stellar camera, one of the other disappointments from my iPhone has been the external speaker. The quality is about as good for sound as the camera is for pictures. I almost never listen to music through it, though I do use it for calls once in a while. Well like any shortcoming for an iPod or iPhone, there’s always someone out there just waiting to make a cheap accessory to fix it. I give you the SoundClip.
This little sucker just clips into the 30-pin connector port of your iphone and situates itself over the speaker. It will then amplify the sound by 10 dB. So as not to lose the tiny gadget when you’re charging it up, you can simply clip the device to your USB cord. So how does this magical creature work? Instead of using some sort of fancy hi-tech electronics, it simply has a conical deflection chamber which concentrates the sound in a single direction. For $8, I’d say it’s certainly worth looking into.
While most of us would just leave a discarded V8 engine sitting on our front lawn until the grass grew high enough to hide it from the neighbors, Kai Grundt decided to use his to build the mother of all walk-behind snowblowers. Now you have to understand that not only is Kai a metal fabricator by trade, but he also lives in a small town called Muskoka (north of Toronto) where the winters can be particularly harsh. So having a V8 powered snowblower actually seems practical, instead of just insane.
Once it was built, Kai’s snowblower tipped the scales at over 800 pounds, so he opted to switch from rubber tires (which couldn’t bear the weight) to custom made tracks that are powered by a couple of hydraulic motors fed by a pump powered by the V8 itself. The massive auger on the front of the blower spins about twice as fast as those found on a conventional (translation: boring) snowblower, which not only allows Kai to clear more snow, but throw it farther too. How far? Try 100 feet easily, which is far enough to bury his neighbor’s truck under snow from two houses away. Almost makes me wish I had a driveway, or at the least, be thankful that Kai isn’t my neighbor.
It really wasn’t until the infamous third iteration of Grand Theft Auto that the game became a target for the media and the poster child for video game violence. But believe it or not, many of us were stealing cars and committing unspeakable acts of civil disobedience long before GTAIII was even announced. That’s right, while it might have lacked the fancy 3D graphics of its descendants, the original Grand Theft Auto was still a heck of a lot of fun. The game featured a top-down perspective of the original versions of Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, and relied heavily on sprite animations for the cars and characters, though 3D effects were sparingly used for the buildings and other elements.
Oddly enough, I don’t remember seeing the original Grand Theft Auto pop-up on the evening news in stories about how it was corrupting our youth, even though you could pretty much do everything you can do in the current versions of the game. I guess sprite-based characters just aren’t as endearing or realistic as their modern 3D counterparts.
One of the reasons I really liked the original GTA(and its sequels) was the sandbox approach to the gameplay that basically allowed you to ignore the missions, and just drive around ‘having fun.’ In fact I rarely completed a single mission in the game, even though I played it for hours on end. And while it might not be the most admirable thing to be remembered for, we can’t forget that it was the original GTA that first introduced us to the phrase, “Kill Frenzy!”
Whenever I go camping I’m happy to walk away from my cellphone, computer and the small arsenal of electronics I carry with me every day, but the one thing I refuse to leave behind is my deep fryer. You thought freshly caught salmon was delicious? Try deep frying it. And while squirrel cooked over an open fire is ok, after just a minute in the deep fryer it’s like nature’s real candy.
Thankfully Coleman’s Frywell portable fryer makes it easy to travel with 6 quarts of boiling oil since it comes with a metal basket that can not only hold up to a pound of food, but also features a collapsing handle so the whole thing can fold up for easy storage. It’s also powered by a standard 16-ounce propane cylinder which means you don’t need to carry a generator just so you can enjoy delicious beer battered raccoon. The Frywell is available on the Coleman website for $159.99.
Not that anyone prints anything anymore, but if you’re one of the few who prefers hard copies of colorful things like digital pictures and you can’t stand waiting the thirty seconds or so it takes for a nice print, have a look at this new type of printer called a Memjet. Memjet printers don’t use a traditional print head that scans back and forth over a piece of paper; instead, the print head is just as wide as the paper is. All that has to happen is that the paper gets fed through the printer, some 70,000 tiny little individual ink nozzles do their thing, and there you go, one second per print. No warm-up time, no slowing down, just really fast 1600 dpi color ink prints:
Memjet technology should be showing up in printers in the US later this year for between $300 and $500.
Surround sound is pretty awesome, but it’s rarely easy to set up, what with the wires and the other wires and the connectors and all that crap… Not to mention having ugly-ass speakers sitting all around your living room, and if you’re doing it properly, bolted to the ceiling. The SoundBulb is a combination lightbulb and wireless speaker system designed to solve all of these problems by letting you stick everything up in the ceiling and inside lamps.
Stuffed inside the form factor of a regular incandescent bulb is an array of LEDs to provide (eco-friendly!) light, with an 8-ohm speaker behind it. The speaker is connected wirelessly to your home entertainment system, and you can adjust the volume of each speaker by simply twisting the top of the bulb.
No idea when this concept might see production, but it’s a damn good idea and I’d absolutely buy a bunch of them. If they’re cheap. Which they probably won’t be. Internal diagram after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft’s Photosynth, which we’ve covered here once or twice (or three times) before, is being used by CNN to photosynth (it’s noun and a verb, I guess) the moment when Obama was inaugurated. If you’re not familiar with the photosynth software, it’s able to take a bunch of different images of the same thing and put them together to create one big streaming three dimensional scene. CNN asked anyone who was at the inauguration to submit pics, and you can browse the result here.
There are more, better synths from different vantage points at the Photosynth website, here.
Yeah, yeah, I know, another pair of touchscreen-friendly gloves. But these ones are different, trust me. First off, they’re from The North Face, a company who knows how to do cold-weather gear right. Not some fly-by-night operation who promises their gloves will keep you warm, only to have you end up in the emergency room with severe frostbite. They also feature the company’s ‘X-Static’ material on the tips of the thumbs and index fingers which allows you to operate a touch-screen device like the iPhone, without having to take them off. And secondly, that high-tech looking circuit pattern on the palms is actually made from silicon silicone, providing an extra bit of grip so you don’t accidentally drop your toys. At $40 from The North Face website I’m not going to pretend they’re cheap, but you do get your choice of black, black or black color schemes, so it seems totally worth it.
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