By Andrew Liszewski

The only downside to owning a dog that I can see is having to deal with their unmentionables left in the backyard. Now there are contraptions of all shapes and sizes designed to make cleaning up after your pup a bit less unpleasant, but this is definitely the first vacuum I’ve come across designed specifically for the task.

The cordless Pooch Power Shovel sucks the waste directly into specially designed plastic bags making them easy to dispose of (up to 150 on a single charge) and at first glance you might think the clear plastic tube provides an unpleasant view of the business being dealt with, but when used properly the waste apparently never touches the machine or your hands. At $99.50 from Frontgate it’s easily the most expensive pet poo solution I’ve seen, short of hiring someone else to do it, and the refill bags will set you back an additional $19.50 for 50 or $35.50 for 100.

[ Pet Pooch Power System ] VIA [ GadgetReview ]

By Andrew Liszewski

On Friday we brought you the i-tab which was a 5-inch touchscreen device I described as a “sort of musical teleprompter for guitar players.” It came complete with an online store allowing users to download new tabs, but with a price tag of $199 I wondered if the same thing couldn’t have been done on the iPhone or iPod Touch with a simple app, and a more reasonable price tag.

Well shortly after writing that post the good people at Agile Partners dropped us a line to let us know that the same thing does exist for the iPhone and iPod Touch, with their TabToolkit app. And the fact that it’s written by the same people behind the excellent and highly recommended GuitarToolkit doesn’t hurt either. With a price tag of just $9.99 available on the iTunes App Store right now, TabToolkit is useful for musicians learning songs on a wide variety of instruments, and includes other features like an audio synthesis engine for recreating the sounds of other instruments playing along, and the ability to upload your own tabs to the app, or download them from websites through its built-in web browser.

Of course it doesn’t come with a handy accessory for clipping your iPhone or iPod Touch to your guitar’s headstock like the i-tab, but that seems like a minor trade-off given the considerable difference in price.

[ Agile Partners - TabToolkit ]