By Andrew Liszewski

If you ever find yourself caught up in a Brewster’s Millions type situation where you have to spend a lot of money really quickly, I highly recommend the custom furniture offerings of Luzzo Bespoke. Specifically, their Bugatti Grand Prix racing car inspired desk that features intricate details that reflect the company’s design sensibility of the 20′s and 30′s. If you were hoping to find something that looked like the Veyron, you’ll want to move on.

The front of the drawers are covered with honeycomb pattern grills that are reminiscent of those featured on their early racers, and the hand-cranked height adjuster uses scaled-up versions of the drive gears used in their cars. It even appears to include an iMac that automatically raises and lowers as needed. All in all the desk represents some 3,000 hours of designing, machining and finishing, which is probably why it’s got a price tag of £150,000, or about $240,000+.

[ Luzzo Bespoke Bugatti Inspired Desk ] VIA [ Born Rich ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Designed by Japanese studio nendo, Elecom’s new upcoming line of Otokurage earbuds were apparently inspired by the translucent, blobby appearance of jellyfish. In fact, Otokurage is a combination of the words ‘oto’ which means sound, and ‘kurage’ which, not surprisingly, means jellyfish. The silicon ear caps, which are available in a variety of colors, were enlarged to completely envelope the earbuds, so that all you see is the headphone cord sticking out. And to further the image of a jellyfish lazily floating through the water, the Otokurage earbuds are packaged in miniature plastic water bottles, sans the water. Available by the end of this month, presumably only in Japan though.

[ Elecom Otokurage Earbuds ] VIA [ designboom ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’re the paranoid type and have diligently worked to keep your personal details, including fingerprints, out of various government databases and the like, you might soon want to start wearing tin foil gloves as well. That’s because a company called Advanced Optical Systems has developed a device they call the AIRprint which can collect fingerprints from up to 6 1/2 feet away. It uses a pair of cameras that have just 1.3MP of resolution each, but adding polarized light into the mix apparently allows them to capture fingerprints that are detailed enough to be analyzed. MIT’s Technology Review explains how it works:

Slightly smaller than a square tissue box, AIRprint houses two 1.3 megapixel cameras and a source of polarized light. One camera receives horizontally polarized light, while the other receives vertically polarized light. When light hits a finger, the ridges of the fingerprint reflect one polarization of light, while the valleys reflect another. “That’s where the real kicker is, because if you look at an image without any polarization, you can kind of see fingerprints, but not really well,” says Burcham. By separating the vertical and the horizontal polarization, the device can overlap those images to produce an accurate fingerprint, which is fed to a computer for verification.

The current prototype has a few limitations in that it can only scan one finger at a time, it has to remain at a fixed distance in order to produce accurate results, and the processing time clocks in at around 4 seconds. But future versions will be able to handle multiple fingers at once, even if the person is in motion, in less than a second.

[ AIRprint Long Range Fingerprint Scanner ] VIA [ MIT Technology Review ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Don’t have the room for both a billiards table and a work desk/dinner table in your small home? Well if you can cough up $20,250+ (£12,497) that’s one less home furnishing decision you have to make. The oddly named Very(Tables), from French company Chevillotte, is another one of those converting billiard tables that hides it’s true nature when guests are over for a meal. Instead of just slapping a 3/4-inch piece of plywood and a tablecloth on top of your standard pool table like most civilized folk do, the Very(Tables) features a cranking mechanism that raises the table’s playing surface until it’s flush with the table’s edge.

Underneath the table is a web of metal wires that serve to catch and collect the pool balls as they’re sunk, as well as removable ‘plates’ that sit atop the playing surface when it’s raised so you don’t damage or stain the felt. I guess the fact that the table’s clever engineering means that it’s just 4 inches thick might be worth the price tag, but I haven’t got my chequebook out just yet. Of course if you’re already dropping that much money on a pool table, I doubt you’ll want to spend your time manually cranking it up and down. So you’ll probably want to go for the motorized option, which adds an additional $4,500+ (£2,797) to the bottom line.

[ Chevillotte's Very(Tables) ] VIA [ 7Gadgets ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Normally I’m put off by pointless trinkets and crapcessories that connect to a USB port just to draw power. Like miniature desk fans and the like. But for some reason this circuit board keychain doesn’t set off the angry center in my brain. One side features a “field of traces and techno glory” while the other features one of Mario’s longtime foes- a piranha plant. And it’s an old-school piranha plant too since when plugged in to a USB port it spits a fireball. Something not seen in Super Mario titles for a few years now.

But as features go that’s pretty much it. There’s no built-in flash memory, no battery to power the red LED when it’s not plugged in, nothing. And that’s probably why they’re available from Etsy seller ‘Boardaments‘ for just $9.99 each.

[ Etsy - 'Piranha USB Circuit Board Keychain - Lights Up' ] VIA [ GoNintendo ]

By Paul McCollum

Following Kingston, PQI and Super Talent, LaCie has also jumped onto the USB 3.0 bandwagon with its FastKey. Bearing a strong resemblance to the IronKey drive, the $499 FastKey USB 3.0 flash drive keeps with the company’s tradition of devices that are easy on the eyes (and pricey). A smooth metallic exterior and a slim form factor make the FastKey a nice conversation starter. The cap and body are lightweight and metallic, giving the feel of a smaller drive. However, the above average width may cause problems blocking adjacent USB ports.

While the FastKey is slightly larger than most flash drives, it packs a whopping 120GB of storage. With this amount of storage, speed is a necessity. What good is 120GB of space if it takes an hour to fill it up? For FastKey’s real world performance, you can expect a read rate of 125MB/s and write of 85MB/s, provided you have a fast internal drive to match the speed. So, it will take about 16 minutes or so to copy everything from this thumbdrive to your PC.

Not all flash drives are built the same, even those as bold to call themselves an Express or Blaze are deceptively slow. When selecting a flash drive, pay close attention to the actual speed rating of the memory as opposed to the version of USB that they support. Full details on how well the LaCie FastKey lives up to its name can be found at Everything USB.

[ LaCie FastKey Review @ Everything USB ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While giant retro-looking horns and intricately carved resonating chambers are the shapes I usually associate with natural sound enhancing iPhone docks, apparently an IKEA salad bowl turned on its side works just as well. Well almost as well according to Apartment Therapy Unplggd. The Clingo ‘dock’ not only boosts the sound levels of the iPhone or iPod Touch’s built-in speakers, but it also serves as a sort of lens hood, shielding the display from ambient light. While the design is certainly simple and eye-catching, Unplggd found the sound to be “a little bit on the softer side” and chocked it up to a case of form over function. $34.99 available directly from Clingo.

[ Clingo Parabolic Sound Sphere ] VIA [ Apartment Therapy Unplggd ]

By Andrew Liszewski

They spend their days being pushed around and largely ignored, but Microsoft is hoping to bring a little style and recognition to the lowly computer mouse by enlisting the help of a series of renowned artists. Their Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 Studio Series already feature bright, colorful graphics, but they’re now taking things even further with six new designs that are sure to appeal to consumers, even if they’ve never looked at their mouse as a piece of art before.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

Instead of turning a crank or awkwardly shaking it to squeeze a few minutes of illumination out of it, the Lightstarter flashlight takes the Survivorman approach by having you rub it between your hands as if you were starting a fire with a stick. Of course we all know that starting a fire in the wild isn’t quite that easy, but it’s a nice throwback to times when fire was really are our only artificial source of light. And like other dynamo powered flashlights the Lightstarter will run longer the more effort you put into it. Three seconds of rubbing gives you about thirty seconds of illumination, while a full minute rewards you with up to ten minutes of light.

Unfortunately at the moment the Lightstarter is just a concept waiting for partnership or purchase, so you’ll probably be better off actually finding a pair of sticks and starting a fire yourself than waiting for this to go into production.

[ Lightstarter Flashlight ] VIA [ Inhabitat ]