Living with a roommate can be an interesting experience. Splitting the rent and having someone to hang out with all the time can be fun, but fighting over food in the fridge isn’t. Nothing is worse than going into the kitchen, only to find that they’ve taken your last slice of leftover pizza or swiped the last beer. Sure, you’ll talk to them about it, and they’ll claim not to do it again (or that they never did in the first place) but some people never learn. That’s why someone created the Fridge Locker.
The Fridge Locker is a small cage that you use for storing your own private food. The metal combination lock keeps your food safe from “Refrig-A Raiders” (poor joke courtesy of the manufacturer). It measures 7.5” wide, 7.5” tall and 11” deep. At $20, it could easily pay for itself with all of the food it keeps safe. Granted, your roommate will not take kindly to seeing this. Purchase and install at your own risk.
While I certainly applaud the concept behind festooning random gadgets with solar cells, I have to question how useful it actually is. I mean, even with dedicated solar chargers with lots of panel area you have to make a special effort to leave them out in the sun for them to be useful. Still, I guess hypothetically a little tiny solar cell that spends most of its time in your pocket is better than no solar cell at all. This particular befestooned gadget is a USB key called the Sun Drive, available in capacities of 2^1 gigs, 2^2 gigs, 2^3 gigs, and 2^4 gigs. The solar cell and associated battery make it way fatter and less convenient than it needs to be, but fully charged, it can give your cell phone an extra 100 minutes of talk time or power one of those budget MP3 players for an additional 35 hours through some kind of interface that looks suspiciously non-friendly.
The biggest redeeming factor of the Sun Drive is the fact that it starts off at only $23, so worst case, you just end up with an overpriced flash drive, and best case, you get useful little portable and eco-friendly gadget charger.
As if breaking your foot or ankle wasn’t already painful enough, having to hobble around on a pair of crutches for weeks just adds insult to injury, literally. Unless you manage to get your hands on one of these Freedom Legs from Forward Mobility. Made from lightweight composite materials it allows you to walk on your injured leg by off-loading the weight to your thigh. There’s no pressure on your injured foot or ankle like when using crutches, but the Freedom Leg lets you stay mobile without tying up your hands and arms and it keeps the injured leg in use during the recovery period, reducing the atrophe of the leg muscles.
Take your cubicle wars past the archaic stage of just spitballs and elastic bands with John Austin’s book, Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction. It provides 35 different ways to effectively raid the office supply cabinet at work in order to protect your desk and all the innocent files who call it home.
Toy designer John Austin provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for each project, including materials and ammo lists, clear diagrams, and construction tips, for mayhem-loving MacGyvers. The 35 devices include catapults, slingshots, minibombs, darts, and combustion shooters. Build a tiny trebuchet from paper clips and a D-cell battery. Wrap a penny in a string of paper caps to create a surprisingly impressive “bomb.” Several of the projects even include variations where combatants mount laser pointer sights to their shooters to increase their accuracy.
It may not look like much, but physicists from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have invented the “perfect” coffee cup. Why “perfect?” It’s all about the temperature: this coffee cup is capable of maintaining your coffee (or any other beverage) at an ideal temperature for a full 20 – 30 minutes. The ideal temperature for coffee, incidentally, is 58 degrees Celsius, but personally I prefer to drink tea (not coffee, tea, thank you) at something closer to 59… Yeah, I like living dangerously.
The cup is constructed of a swirly looking aluminum frame covered with a ceramic material. The spaces around the frame are filled with a PCM, or phase changing material. PCM is super neat stuff that is only happy at a very specific temperature. When you add heat to a PCM, it absorbs it and turns into a liquid, kinda like wax. If things start to cool down, the PCM turns back into a solid, releasing the heat as it does so, doing its best to keep itself (and its surroundings) as close to that happy temperature as possible. So when it comes to coffee, the PCM will first cool the liquid down to the ideal temperature by absorbing heat, and then keep it at that temperature as it releases that heat. Best part is, it’s totally free, in that it’s “powered” by absorbing heat from something that’s too hot. And hey, did I mention that it also works in reverse? A different type of PCM can be used to stabilize cold liquids, too.
The only catch to this technology is that PCMs are temperature specific. So, you’d need a hot PCM cup for hot beverages and a cold PCM cup for cold beverages. And they’re not likely to be cheap:
In the meantime, it won’t be long before the IBP’s new table products arrive in stores. Their steep price tags should easily give them away. “We don’t know how expensive they’ll be yet,” Sedlbauer says. “We are already talking with different companies. If we can find a partner to work together with, the first mugs could already be on sale by the end of the year.”
I’d imagine that a steep price tag wouldn’t dissuade that many people from a coffee cup that keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature… I mean, you only really need one, right? And if you drink coffee (or tea, which is way better) every day, it’ll easily pay for itself in convenience. As long as they dress it up a little bit first, of course.
I have to be honest again here. When I first came across the SoundRacer I thought it was another ridiculous accessory for wannabe gearheads who can only ever dream of owning a V10 powered supercar. But after watching the video I’ve included below, I don’t see how anyone who’s ever revved the family sedan at a red light wouldn’t want one!
The SoundRacer plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter and uses an FM transmitter to play real V8 or V10 engine sound effects through your vehicle’s stereo. And it’s not random effects either, according to the SoundRacer website the sounds actually correspond to the RPMs of your car’s engine.
SoundRacer has a developed a special technology to sense and calculate the car engine rpm and produce the sounds of a powerful Super Sports Car engine. The sound changes as you drive and SoundRacer even increases the speed of the engine sound so that you can drive at a normal speed and still get a very exciting engine sound.
If you’re skeptical as to how well it could work (as I was) please take a few minutes to watch the following clip, which totally sold me on the device.
And it’s just $39.99, for either a V8 or V10 model, from SafeWireless. Guess who just finished half of his Christmas shopping?
This fish tank is a real object, designed for a real (albeit conceptual) purpose. I’ll tell you all about it after the jump. But first, take a good look at that picture, and see if you can guess what you think is going on… From the perspective of the girl, or the fish. My first thought? Those fish are in trouble, ’cause that girl is thirsty. Read the rest of this entry »
For years people have been predicting that The Beatles would finally make their way onto the iTunes store. Fans collectively held their breath when Apple announced a press conference on 9/9/09, the same day that the remastered collection of tunes was to be released on CD. Unfortunately it seems that the two still haven’t gotten over that fruit-based trademark issue. Well if you’re wanting your digital Beatles fix, there is a different way to go about it.
The entire remastered collection is being released digitally on a limited edition apple. No, it’s not a real apple (though it does look rather tasty), but a 16GB flash drive. It includes the exact same songs as the CD collection, but encoded in FLAC to achieve the best sound quality possible. They’ve also included 320Kbps versions of each song. Why? Because lossless music can take up a good bit of room on your portable media player. The flash drive will be limited to a run of 30,000 and will set you back $280. Strangely enough, it will be released on December 8th, which Beatles fans will recognize as the day John Lennon passed away.
Remember the Tauntaun sleeping bag from April 1st? If so, you probably remember this from April 3rd:
ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one of these, click the link below and we’ll try!
Well, they did it. For reals. It’s an official, fully licensed Lucasfilm™ Collectable Tauntaun sleeping bag with a built-in embroidered Tauntaun head pillow, a plush Lightsaber zipper pull, and a printed intestines pattern on the inside of the bag that smells just as good as the outside, thank you very much. For $99, this is definitely the sleeping bag that you’re looking for. Congrats, ThinkGeek, on making it happen.
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