With a breakthrough that’s sure to have far-reaching ramifications, Thanko’s latest USB card reading pen includes not one, not two, not three, but four SD card slots! Now I find it kind of odd that I didn’t see this headlined on CNN last night, since it’s been theorized that pen-sized card readers could be built to maybe handle two cards, three at best if certain laws of physics were re-written. But four? Almost unthinkable. Until now that is. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what a time to be alive…
Brando, the ball’s in your court. I know you’ve got the know-how to make a five SD card slot pen, but have you got the guts?
Ugh, I guess this is another sign of the times. Instead of kids blowing up test tubes with strips of magnesium, they have to settle for making square shaped or smoke filled bubbles with this Bubble Experiment Lab from ‘Mad Science’. I’ll give them credit though, when fully assembled the lab does look like a crazy contraption cooked up by a Disney Imagineer, but I’m afraid the accolades end there. While it comes with bubble solution and a smoke elixir (sounds delicious) according to one of the reviewers on Amazon “the smoke was less visible than the steam coming off a cup of warm coffee.”
So if you live for the look of disappointment on your kid’s faces, you can order the Bubble Experiment Lab from Amazon for $42.99. Otherwise, just spend like 50 cents and buy them a bottle of bubble solution. It’s a far cheaper way to confirm the scientific hypothesis that bubbles are lame.
You can think of the new Xcaster ST5000 from Pixavi as a really rugged webcam that’s not tethered to a laptop, allowing it to be used in a variety of in-the-field locations. It’s able to capture and stream high-def video and CD-quality sound over a number of different networking options including WiFi, WIMAX or even a satellite hook-up, and it will automatically encode the live feeds to a number of different codecs like H.264 and AAC.
It’s also built to survive a bit of abuse, with an aluminum body making it impact-proof and drop-proof even up to heights of 2 meters onto a concrete floor. And if that’s not enough, the company will be soon introducing a military-friendly version that’s also explosion proof. But at the moment you’ll have to settle with the ST5000 model which is expected to be available in May of this year for a reasonable $7,950. Oh did I say reasonable? I meant ludicrous.
The best reason for buying a DSLR from a reputable camera store is that there’s a good chance they offer a sensor cleaning service, done by someone who knows what they’re doing. Of course cleaning the sensor yourself is always an option, particularly if you’re swapping lenses on a daily basis, but it can be a bit of a nerve-wracking experience. So it’s best to make sure you have the right tools before you give it a shot.
The SensorKlear Loupe, from the people who brought you the Lenspen, works like a miniature microscope when mounted to your camera, allowing you to see the illuminated sensor surface magnified 6x so you can make sure you’ve removed every last piece of dust. It also has a convenient access hole on the side allowing you to use it conjunction with a Lenspen, or even sensor cleaning swabs, whichever you prefer.
The SensorKlear Loupe sells for $79.95 and comes with a SensorKlear II which is basically one of the company’s Lenspens with an articulated head. And if you consider that a professional sensor cleaning might run you $20-$40, it could be worth it in the long run.
Making OhGizmo! isn’t the easiest of jobs. Every day we have to comb through so much noise (blog posts, press releases, unsolicited phone calls) in a never ending quest to find you the few gems we end up writing about. Usually, we’ll bookmark a good number of products that we think are potential articles… and only end up writing about a few of them. The rest? Well, that’s The Overflow.
We figured that instead of simply never writing about these products and leave them confined to the places where we found them, we’d give at least some of them a chance to live on in our sidebar. We’ve decided to use Twitter to do this, because frankly it suddenly seems like the world is on Twitter. While we may occasionally write about something else, most of everything you see there are links to products we considered writing about, but didn’t.
So, go ahead, follow us on Twitter!. Or better yet come back every day to check out what’s new in the sidebar.
From Andrew: On a related note, I’ve also recently revived my long-dormant Twitter account, and if you’d like to follow my random, self-aggrandizing, often confusing, occasionally sarcastic updates, then check out my Twitter page as well.
One of the things I’ve always been happy about is that I never picked up smoking. My parents both smoked a lot when I was a kid, so I think that seeing a cloud of smoke in the living room was enough to turn me off to them. Unfortunately for those that have picked up the habit, it’s a tough one to kick. We’ve seen gum and patches that are supposed to help you quit, but what about gadgets? We’ve already seen a couple of electronic cigarettes, and now SuperSmoker’s Blue is the latest one to his stores.
SuperSmoker has launched their interesting cigarette alternative, which should be much healthier than your ordinary cancer stick. These devices look very much like a regular cigarette, but instead of having you inhale all of the toxic chemicals that you usually find, you’ll only find nicotine. Since nicotine is the addictive ingredient, most people should be able to switch without much of an issue. They even went as far as to use the same filters, giving you an even more realistic experience.
I’ve seen all sorts of gadgets and accessories that help my iPhone with outputting sound, but rarely do you find one for input that’s not just another Bluetooth headset. Well the folks over at Brando decided that they needed to create a very simple microphone with the iPhone in mind.
This is definitely one of those gadgets where its size is both a positive and negative thing. On one hand you wouldn’t want to have some giant mic sticking out of your phone or sitting in your pocket all the time. However, I still lose my car keys on a regular basis, I’d give it a week before I lost this thing. Still, at $13, it’s not a bad deal.
Whatever you may or may not like about Microsoft, their vision for what their products could be in ten years certainly is impressive:
What struck me most about this video was how possible everything actually is. Yeah, it’s all very render-y, but if you look at the underlying tech, much of it is stuff that we’ve already seen working (and in some cases consumer) examples of: Surface, transparent LCDs, augmented reality, gesture interfaces, e-paper… It’s all already here. Well, not here in front of me here, but don’t forget, tech tends to develop on an exponential, rather than linear, scale. My hope is that we’ll see at least some of these concepts well before 2019. Because by then I’ll be all, like, old.
We’ve been fans of Eye-Fi cards since they were prototypes in 2006. I mean, what’s not to be a fan of? It’s a SD card that automatically uploads all your pics to your computer or the website of your choice over WiFi. Cool!
Now there’s a bunch more to be a fan of, as Eye-Fi has released their next generation of cards. The new cards have 4 gigs of storage, and can upload not only pictures, but also video (even HD video) to YouTube or Flickr. They’re available in two versions: the Explore costs $99 and includes low-res geotagging and hotspot access, while the $79 Share doesn’t include these features. You can preorder the new cards now, and the should be shipping by the end of the month.
Meantime, the original 2 gig versions of the Eye-Fi now start at only $49.
Related Tags: 
Permalink
By Andrew Liszewski
