You can kind of consider the the Kapten Talking Pocket GPS from Kapsys to be the iPod Shuffle of GPS devices. It’s easily one of the smallest GPS navigational aids on the market, and it manages to stay so petite by foregoing an LCD display. Instead, it talks you to your destination with spoken directions. And to tell the Kapten where you want to go, you quite literally tell it where you want to go using spoken commands and voice recognition like “Restaurant: McDonald’s.”
The Kapten is also Bluetooth-equipped, allowing it to be paired with your cellphone and used to answer or make calls, and there’s a handy geo-tagging button that lets you remember a favorite location and share it online later. 3GB of on-board storage can be used for uploading additional map content (this version covers the United States only) or you can fill it with music since it also functions as a voice-controlled MP3 player, just like the iPod Shuffle. However, unlike the iPod Shuffle, the display-less Kapten doesn’t come with a budget-friendly price tag. It’s currently listed on Amazon for a whopping $475.
Built and programmed by Blair Neal as an art installation, ‘Color A Sound’ uses an overhead projector and a long roll of transparency to create a sort of manual jukebox that requires a user to essentially doodle the sheet music. A set of colored markers are used to make lines, dots and even complex illustrations, and a camera pointed at the projected results converts the seemingly random drawings into music, playing back corresponding samples from an actual musicbox, or really any instrument including a Roland TR-808 drum machine. The manual scrolling works in both directions and at almost any speed, and until you clean the transparency, any and all musical creations are stored indefinitely.
We geeks tend to decorate our houses in a different manner than most people. For instance, my dining room houses a pool table and arcade cabinet, rather than a regular table and chairs. So what do you do if you have a cozy fireplace in your living room? A bearskin rug hardly suits the geek lifestyle. No, what you need is a Wampa Rug.
That’s right, the latest in a long line of awesome Star Wars offerings from ThinkGeek is the Wampa Rug. Sure, it’s no Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, but it’s still amusing to say the least. For $100, you’ll have to be a pretty big fan of the Wars to get in on this deal. You will, however, be the envy of your geeky friends if you do make the purchase. Look for it in limited quantities this August.
I guess if you’re an iPod/iPhone accessory maker, the easiest way to make your product appeal to the Apple crowd is to basically rip-off the design of another Apple product. In this case it’s an iPod dock/speaker that looks like it was constructed from a discarded iMac of yesteryear. But in its defense, this particular dock does bring something relatively unique to the table.
Instead of featuring a traditional speaker, it uses resonance to transmit the sound from your iPod, iPhone or anything you connect to the 3.5mm line-in jack, through a hard surface such as a wooden table, a marble floor or glass windows. The audio output is rated at 12W, though I have no idea how loud that translates to with a resonating object, but there’s a built-in amp as well which should help boost the intensity. The arm holding the actual dock does articulate if you were wondering, though at just a couple of inches in length I can’t see how that’s beneficial in any way. ~$42 available from Chinavasion.
Besides the toll on your employee’s souls (or what’s left of them) long, drawn-out office meetings can end up costing your company a lot of money when it comes to lost productivity. So the TIM, or Time Is Money, clock makes it easy to calculate the true financial cost of a boring meeting.
Before things get under way you enter the number of people in the room, and an educated guess at the average hourly wage of everyone in attendance, and then hit the large illuminated Start button. As the seconds tick by the true cost of the meeting is displayed on the TIM’s monochrome LCD display, hopefully encouraging everyone to get to the point, and to quickly get back to their desks. And the first time you use the TIM you’ll probably want to factor in the clock’s $24.99 price tag to the cost of the meeting as well.
Earlier in the year Klipsch announced their LightSpeaker system which combined LED bulbs and wireless speakers that could be installed into standard recessed lighting fixtures, making it easy to route your music around the house without unsightly wires. Well Sylvania’s decided to get in on the action too with a nearly identical product known as the MusicLite system.
Each MusicLite ‘bulb’ features a 10-watt cluster of LEDS producing the equivalent amount of light as a 65-watt recessed lighting reflector bulb, but manages to squeeze in a 25-watt speaker as well, edging out the built-in speakers in Klipsch’s system by about 5 watts. Sylvania’s wireless audio transmitter also has a range of about 90 feet, compared to 50 feet with Klipsch’s transmitter. But the real deciding factor will be the price, which Sylvania hasn’t announced yet since their MusicLite system won’t be available until the Fall. But if they can beat Klipsch’s $600 expected price tag they just might come out on top.
First it was Jerry Lewis, and now it seems like the French have embraced another North American icon that we all find horribly annoying: the Big Mouth Billy Bass. Ad agency Grey Paris created this interactive billboard for their client Findus, a frozen food company, that features 25 animatronic basses singing KC & the Sunshine Band’s Shake Your Booty. The billboard was installed on the busy Rue de Passy in Paris in an attempt to educate consumers that the company was committed to only selling responsibly sourced fish, but since the chorus of bass only sings whenever someone walks by, the ad could only have served to educate consumers that the company was committed to being incomprehensively annoying.
Sure, there’s a chance these horrible knockoff toys might actually hurt companies selling real Superman and RoboCop merchandise, but the endless amusement they provide is worth the risk in my opinion. While RoboCop roams the streets serving the public trust, protecting the innocent and upholding the law, I can imagine Robert Cop spends his days behind a desk pushing pencils. And it takes a lot to make the man of steel seem boring, but the packaging makes his alter ego Specialman seem anything but.
But nothing’s better than seeing Darth Vader, errr, Star Knight, leaving the Empire to join the ranks of the California Highway Patrol. You’d think his mastery of the force would at least allow him to dispel of those training wheels. Head on over to Geekstir for a few more.
Maybe it’s the fact that Black & Decker has gone to the trouble of printing a mean-looking alligator graphic on this lopper that has drawn me to it, but the super villain-esque combination of pruning shears and a miniature chainsaw doesn’t hurt either. A 4.5 amp electric motor and a wide set of jaws allows the Alligator Lopper to chew through a branch up to 4 inches thick like it was a wounded gazelle’s hind leg, and the clamping action ensures it won’t let go until it’s all the way through.
Of course Black & Decker includes a gallery of suggested applications on their site showing how it can be responsibly used for various types of yardwork, but I suspect it would be just as useful in the kitchen for opening canned goods, tearing through baguettes or making short work of that Thanksgiving turkey. $79.97 available wherever awesome tools are sold.
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