There always seems to be one person who forgets to bring a flashlight when camping, so with the Quad Lantern from Coleman you can be an illumination philanthropist, sharing your light with up to 3 other people. The base station features 4 removable panels that each contain 6 x 5mm white LEDs, and when they’re all ‘docked’ it can be used as a single lantern thanks to a master power switch on top.
Each of the panels can also be removed and used individually, and when fully charged they’ll each run for about 75 hours. The base station does require 8 x D size batteries instead of having its own built-in rechargeable power source, but when ‘roughing’ it they’re probably easier to replace when they die. $69.99 available directly from Coleman.
You’re probably thinking “oh no! what’s this? another crappy sounding, cheap looking fake guitar?” and for the most part you’re pretty much bang on. But what the Air Guitar Pro has going for it when compared to other cheap fake guitars is that it forgoes a body and strings in lieu of using an infrared beam to detect when you’re strumming. So while your living room might be overflowing with Guitar Hero and Rock Band accessories, this thing can be tossed in a drawer when you get tired of it after 3 minutes.
Surprisingly for just $10.99 it’s got 7 buttons on the neck for playing chords, buttons for playing sharps, minors etc. and even a built-in tilt sensor that lets you change the sound just by moving it around. Now I can’t speak for how well it works, but based on the video below it actually doesn’t sound horrifically terrible.
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for an engineer, or even someone who appreciates hand-crafted works of art, you don’t have to look much further than Brad Litwin’s line of MechaniCards. Sure, at $45 assembled (or $35 assemble it yourself) they’re probably the most expensive greeting card you’re ever going to buy, but just watch the video below and you’ll realize why they’re worth every penny. There are 5 different ‘models’ to choose from, but I’m partial to the hypnotic Radial Engine pictured above.
Should you decide to order one, you’ll probably want to take a picture of the Gear Wheel IQ Cube before you start playing with it because that’s probably the last time you’re ever going to see it as a perfect cube. Designed to take the Rubik’s Cube to a whole other level, the twistable pieces on the IQ Cube are designed to work as gears so rotating a single one causes other pieces to rotate as well in a chain reaction. It really does look like an interesting twist (ha!) if you’ve gotten bored of the original Rubik’s Cube, but here’s to hoping you can easily disable the ‘turning wheel’ sound effects when you play with it. I assume a well placed screwdriver jab would do the trick. $11.90 from Toys.Brando.com.
The iPad is a lot of different things to a lot of different users. An ebook reader, a digital photo frame, a gaming platform, and for a lot of us, too damn heavy! (Sorry Charlie, I have to disagree with you on this one.) On the plus side you can use this to your advantage. The Hand-e-holder is actually designed as a sort of mitten-y thing that makes it easier to hold your iPad from behind without obscuring the screen, but I think it could turn the iPad into a handy weightlifting tool. You do have to stick an adhesive piece of 3M’s Dual Lock ‘better than Velcro’ material to the back in order to attach the Hand-e-holder, but the contraption spins making it easy to re-orient the iPad, and it’s just $39.99 available from their website.
Logitech has always been known for their great peripherals and have consistently released some down right marvelous mice. To many consumers when they think “mouse” they think Logitech; unfortunately, not every GAMING user thinks Logitech when think gaming mice. This is the crux of the matter, so what can Logitech do to not only outdo their past models but more importantly, entice even more jaded PC gaming aficionados away from the competition and back to Logitech?
The answer Logitech has come up with is to offer a seamless wired / wireless combination mouse with a down right whopping 13 buttons and call this beast the “G700″! The Logitech G700 gaming mouse certainly is an interesting solution and one that merits closer investigation. One thing that is now gone is the weight customization which has been with the G5, G9 and G9x. So, the mouse could be too heavy for some. The G700’s battery life also fails to impress. You could only get about six to eight hours out of the single AA battery. Perhaps this is the reason why Logitech provides a USB cable that also turns the G700 into a wired gaming mouse and at the same time re-charges the 2000mAh battery inside. The Logitech G700 isn’t perfect, but it certainly qualifies as a killer gaming peripheral as well as a all round everyday mouse. Everything USB has the full review.
Last time we spoke of the HP Envy 14 was just this week. A couple days seem to make a huge difference as we now have a $200 coupon that can be applied on configurations that go above $1,199. That means that you can get a Core i5 HP Envy 14 for $999 (even a decked out Core i3 as long as it reaches $1,199) or a Core i7 config for $1,049. The last $1,048 price is a result of the cheapest Core i7 config costing $1,249. You can get more expensive configurations of the above, but to qualify for the coupon you must meet the $1,199 pricepoint.
What do you get for this, aside from the Core i3/i5/i7 difference? Well, the base specs are as follows:
4GB DDR3 RAM, 320GB Hard Drive, backlit keyboard, 1GB ATI MObility Radeon HD 5650 graphics (or switchable), 14.5″ BrightView Infinity LED Display, Slot-load DVD Burner, HP TruVision HD Webcam + Dual microphones, Wireless-N + Bluetooth, mini displayport and HDMI
Of course the above are just base specs and are meant for guidance as the idea here is to customize as you see fit until you reach the threshold for the coupon and then, you can save $200.
If you’re one of the few people that actually owns an electric car, you might be wondering where you can charge it, when not at home. Well next spring you might not need to look any further than your local Best Buy store. The company has announced that 12 of its locations will have Blink EV charging stations installed by next March.
Tucson, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle are the five lucky cities that get to test out this idea. If people actually start using them, Best Buy will consider expanding the program to more stores. You have to admit, this is a pretty great idea. If people are waiting for their cars to charge, they’re probably just going to poke around Best Buy and eventually buy things. I wonder how many years it will be before these kinds of charging stations show up in all large cities.
DealExtreme, purveyors of bizarre, unlicensed video game crap (plus other stuff) and masters of the watermark are now offering this Wii console shaped SATA hard drive enclosure ($9.70) that for some reason includes two plastic Wiimote-shaped whistles. Tiny Wiimote-shaped USB flash drives makes way more sense to me, though including those as a premium probably costs a lot more than 1/3 of a cent.
Related Tags: Lighting, Outdoors
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