By Andrew Liszewski

At $18 a roll for roughly 108 feet (33 meters) this My First Autobahn tape is a little expensive to use as a whimsical alternative to regular packing tape, which is probably why Sleek Identity is instead positioning it as an alternative to those ‘roadway’ rugs for a child’s playroom. Just lay it down in any pattern creating a unique highway system, and when your kid inevitably gets bored of it you can just pull it all up, hopefully not taking the finish off the floors as well. And yes, it does come with a small, slightly out-of-scale toy car.

[ My First Autobahn ] VIA [ bookofjoe ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Talking on the phone while driving can be a real hassle. Between concentrating on the traffic, holding the phone, turning the wheel and changing gears, it can even be a dangerous thing to do. If you find yourself in this position a lot, you might want to consider getting a Bluetooth speakerphone to ease the stress of talking and driving.

What’s that? You’d like to get one, but don’t have the funds? That’s alright, we’ve got you covered. The good people at Moshi want us to give one of our lucky readers a Moshi Lifestyle Voice Control Bluetooth Car Speakerphone. It’s got 13 voice activated commands, requires no programming, has noise cancellation and up to 7 hours of talk time. If you’re located here in the US, just drop us a comment before Friday, and we’ll randomly select a winner. Good luck!

[ Moshi ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Last week we decided to have a little giveaway, with a pair of Coloud Marvel Comics Headphones as the prize. After scanning through the comments, relawson was selected as the winner. They chose Iron Man, citing his killer gadgets as the reasoning for the selection. While I’m more of an X-Men fan myself, it’s hard to argue their justification. As we all could do with some more gadgets.

Congratulations to commenter relawson on winning! As for the rest of you, stay tuned, there are more gadgets to be given away this week.

[ Coloud ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Being lazy is something that comes naturally for me. When you sit in a chair for most of your day, it’s pretty easy to develop habits that make your life easier, while not needing to leave your desk. Yet still, there are some things that take laziness to heights I wouldn’t even climb. The Candwich would be one of them.

The amount of effort it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is rather insignificant. That’s one of the perks of the sandwich (in addition to being cheap and tasty). However, now you needn’t bother making the sandwich yourself. You can simply buy it in canned form. Or at least you’ll be able to sometime later this year when they’re due to hit the market. No word on pricing, but you can expect to pay a premium for the pre-made canned sandwiches.

[ MarkOneFoods ] VIA [ GearFuse ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I like the idea of noise canceling earphones, I just don’t like the bulky in-line unit that handles the actual noise canceling bit. But as Blackbox shows, it doesn’t have to be so bulky if you can just eliminate the battery, which is what they’ve done with their i10 earphones. Instead of a standard headphone jack on the end, they’ve got an Apple 30 pin dock connector which allows the earphones to draw power from an iPhone or an iPod, so they don’t need their own battery. Of course on the flipside it also means the i10s will only work with Apple’s hardware, but I suspect that’s not a huge issue for a lot of people. The inline unit also allows you to control volume and turn off the noise canceling if you want to speak to someone and the earphones are available from Blackbox’s website for ~$125.

[ Blackbox i10 Active Noise Cancelling Earphones ] VIA [ Stuff.tv ]

By Andrew Liszewski

It seems pointless to go out and buy a proprietary home automation system when Apple already sells what is essentially an ideal touchscreen interface with the iPod Touch and the iPad. So that’s why iPort has created these in-wall mounts that lets you use either device, via various apps, to control your home’s AV gear, lighting, home automation and even wirelessly stream audio to wherever they’re installed.

A built-in dock connector provides access to either device’s line level audio output and also provides constant power so they never need to recharged while docked. And in case you were wondering, once installed your iPod or iPad isn’t trapped forever since the front faceplate of the mount is held on magnetically providing easy access. The CM-IW100T pictured above sells for around $250 while the larger iPad-compatible ’2000T’ is $499.

[ iPort CM-IW100T ] VIA [ Electronic House ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While it’s not the first power strip to come along that attempts to intelligently curb energy usage in your home, the Power USB does bring some interesting functionality to the table. On one end of the strip you’ve got a 6 foot extension cable, but on the other you have a rather unique 6 foot USB cable. That’s because 2 of the 4 outlets on the Power USB can actually be controlled VIA an application on your PC.

The program allows you to assign hot keys for manually powering up those 2 controllable outlets as needed, or they can be programmed to automatically turn on or off at set times. They can even be activated after you’ve performed a certain function on your PC, like when you print a document, so your printer is only on and using electricity when you’re actually using it. I also like that all 4 sockets on the Power USB are universal, meaning it accepts plug designs from all countries. Orders aren’t being accepted until sometime in August, so pricing info has yet to be announced, but hopefully the extra technology doesn’t add too much to the bottom line since it’s not going to save much energy if no one buys one.

[ Power USB ] VIA [ EverythingUSB ]

By Andrew Liszewski

AgaMatrix, maker of the Jazz blood glucose meter, already has an extremely popular free database app for the iPhone available that lets you manage and track your diabetes ‘scores’ which is an important part of managing the disease. But until now, or very soon at least, users have had to manually enter the results from the meter into the application. Not a giant inconvenience mind you, but one that’s soon to be a thing of the past thanks to the company’s new WaveSense Direct Connect Cable which allows the glucose meter to transfer the results directly to their app on the iPhone, iPod Touch or the iPad. The cable is currently pending review and approval from the FDA, but when available it will sell for around $25-30. Until that time you can sign up on the AgaMatrix website to get a notification when the cable is finally ready for sale.

[ AgaMatrix WaveSense Direct Connect iPhone Cable ] VIA [ DiabetesMine ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Instead of promoting civilized table manners like eating slowly with utensils and what-not, this Frame Napkin encourages you to eat with your fingers, drip food everywhere and essentially act like a human version of Cookie Monster. Why? Well the border of the napkin is silk screened with a fancy painting frame, so at the end of the meal your BBQ sauce and mustard stains end up looking like an abstract piece of art suitable for mounting. As for pricing? They’re about $40 a pop (3,465 yen) but you can probably make that back after just a couple of gallery showings.

[ Napkin Frame ] VIA [ SPGRA ]