By Andrew Liszewski

I’ll admit I got a little excited when I saw that Takara would be releasing 3 miniature Nintendo Game & Watch keychains including classic titles Parachute, Octopus and Chef, and the fact that they were completely solar powered was just the icing on the cake. But then my world came crashing down when I found out the Game & Watches aren’t actually playable, but just have an animated sprite loop on the LCD display. They should be available in Japan come March for about $12 a pop, but what’s the point?

[ Gigazine - Takara Game & Watch Keychains ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I can’t say that I do much ironing, mostly because I don’t wear many clothes that specifically require an iron to make them look right. I have done a bit and one of the things I am always most paranoid about is knocking over the hot iron when I’ve set it down for a moment. With that hot metal plate exposed while it’s just sitting there, it is rather dangerous. Not only could you bump into it and burn yourself, but since it is resting on one of its smaller sides, it could also be easily knocked onto the floor.

The Auto-Lift iron was designed to eliminate the aforementioned hazards, along with one other. The otherwise-regular iron has a pair of feet on the hot metal part which extend outward when the device is not in use. This leaves less of the iron exposed, and keeps it considerably more stable. The best part is that it actually knows exactly when you are using it. There is a sensor in the handle which detects whether or not your hand is upon it and engages the feet when appropriate. Now you also won’t have to worry about getting distracted while in the middle of ironing. The Auto-Lift currently retails for around $95.

[ Ariete ] VIA [ Dvice ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While I know they’re still used in educational institutions and offices around the world, the occasional graphing calculator I stumbled across at CES just seemed terribly out of place and dated. However, they have a come a long way from the model I remember using in high school. A few years ago we brought you Texas Instrument’s TI-Nspire Graphing Calculator which was ‘cutting edge’ at the time, but it’s taking another step forward with the TI-Nspire Navigator System which allows teachers to wirelessly snoop monitor their students progress with the devices.

The graphing calculators each require a slide-on sleeve and a central access point to give them wirelessly capabilities, but once that’s all up and running a teacher can call up any student’s display on their PC to see how they’re coming along with a math problem, or allow them to present a solution or answer to the rest of the class when using a projector. There’s also a clever little polling system that allows students to privately participate in multiple choice questions without the embarrassment of getting an answer wrong in front of the class. A 32 student kit which includes the wireless cradles and central access point (but not the calculators) is available now for ~$4,000.

[ TI-Nspire Navigator System ] VIA [ SlashGear ]

By Andrew Liszewski

A Cessna might be the affordable choice when it comes to personal aircraft, but if fun ranks high on your feature list you’re probably not going to do much better than this pair of Sukhoi Su-27 Flankers which can be yours for just $4.5 million a piece. They were brought to the U.S. by Pride Aircraft, who acquired them from a company doing high-altitude research that went bust, and each have been completely restored and now feature zero-time airframes and engines. (Minus test flights.)

Both aircraft are de-militarized, with all weapons and military hardware having been previously removed, and Pride Aircraft has gone to the trouble of relabeling all the dials and gauges in the cockpit in english, and adding updated IFR U.S. instrumentation and avionics. Now even though modern aircraft like the F-22 Raptor eclipse the Su-27 when it comes to capabilities, there’s still a lot of fun to be had here thanks its top-speed of over 1,300 mph and its 1:1+ thrust-to-weight ratio. And I particularly like that serious buyers can contact the seller, John Morgan, via his @aol.com email address.

[ Pride Aircraft - Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker - For Sale to Discriminating Owners - $4.95 million each ] VIA [ Wired ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Anyone who’s had at least a couple of high school science classes is familiar with Newton’s laws of motion, but just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a quick refresher.

First Law: “An object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force” or “A body persists in a state of uniform motion or of rest unless acted upon by an external force.”
Second Law: “Force equals mass times acceleration” or “F = ma.”
Third Law: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Fourth Law: “An unattended mop will always fall over.”

So now that you’re back up to speed you can understand my complete amazement and awe at this floor mop that seems to laugh in the face of Newton’s oft contended and regularly disputed fourth law of motion. According to the Pro-Idee website this mop will automatically lock when the handle is placed in the vertical position and is guaranteed to never fall over thanks to magnets or wormholes or something. Unfortunately innovation doesn’t come cheap, so those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge of technology are going to have to pay upwards of $60 (£35.50) for this modern marvel of science and spill management.

[ Pro-Idee - “Magic Click” Floor Mop ]

By Evan Ackerman

What do you get when you take a pretty decent Oppo $500 Blu-Ray player, strip off the black metal case, and then drop the entire thing (chassis and all) into a slightly fancier silver metal case with a different logo on it? Lexicon, apparently, thinks that you get a $3500 Blu-Ray player. After noticing some similarities between the front and back layouts of the Oppo BDP-83 and the Lexicon BD-30, Audioholics tore them both open to check and see what was going on inside:

As far as we could determine, Lexicon didn’t change a single thing in terms of the hardware. Heck, they didn’t even lift the boards out of the chassis, opting instead to cut out the bottom of their own chassis to accommodate the venting locations, and putting a darker blue filter over the Oppo’s VFD display to give it a slightly deeper hue.

But wait, the Lexicon BD-30 is THX certified and the Oppo BDP-83 isn’t, so they must have done something to it, right?

…Right?

Or, it could be that the BD-30 actually fails the basic THX audio certification, and since Audioholics pointed that out to THX and Lexicon, all of the branding and mentions of the BD-30 being THX certified disappeared from the THX and Lexicon websites.

I can’t say that this kind of thing surprises me, but it does make me wonder just how many mid to high end electronics out there are just slightly modified and dressed up versions of basic units… All the more reason to do your research before you plunk down a whole bunch of money for something that may just be a budget model in disguise.

[ Audioholics ] VIA [ Slashdot ]

By Evan Ackerman

There’s some kind of threshold that electronics with a high cool factor but questionable usefulness have to cross in order for them to be worth buying, and this Sanwa pico projector is awfully close at $120. I can’t figure out how many lumens it is (safe to assume not many), and it only pushes out VGA (640 x 480), but it does take both data and power over USB, which is nice, and includes an assuredly crappy speaker. It weighs 85 grams and comes with a lil’ tripod, too. So yeah, it’s a pretty “meh” little thing (not nearly as fancy as the one from AAXA that we reviewed last year), but it may be cheap enough to justify your first foray into pico projecting.

[ Amazon ] VIA [ PicoProjector.info ]

By Evan Ackerman

If you’re selling a borderline useless USB accessory, you have to keep in mind who your market is. Do you really think that people who spend so much time in front of their computer that they need a peripheral to make it smell better are going to be attracted by scents like Ocean Breeze, Purple Lavender, Pink Jasmine, or White Chamomile? Of course not. Those are outside smells. Instead, you should try scents like Vanilla, Chocolate Chip Cookies, or Bacon. Or you could try even more familiar scents for the hardcore gamer, like Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and Shame.

In the mean time, though, you’ll have to content yourself with the aforementioned flowery smells. $9.99 gets you a USB Scent Flower plus three refill cartridges that should last you a couple months.

[ USB Flower ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Evan Ackerman

In the future, all of our food will come in tubes. Why? Because that’s just how things work in the future (the pre-replicator future, obviously). And I know you’re thinking, “wow! That’s convenient!” But only uncultured heathens would eat food straight out of the tube. I mean, spluh! This is why you need a food printer, and MIT is getting way ahead of the future by starting to work on one in the present.

The Cornucopia personal food factory is essentially just a 3D printer that uses cartridges of food instead of cartridges of plastic or whatever. So like, if you feel like an apple, you just put an apple cartridge in, run the apple program, and wait while printer extrudes an apple shape. Heating and cooling elements in the print heads do all of the cooking for you, and by combining different cartridges in a single dish you can potentially create some truly horrific meals.

[ MIT Fluid Interfaces Group ] VIA [ Shapeways Blog ]