Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

The Yogen Max foldable laptop charger eschews fuel cells or any other fancy schmancy type of portable power technology for the worst source of power ever: you. Although the details are sketchy nonexistent, Easy Energy’s charger purports to recharge things like MP3 players or even laptops with your beastly muscles. Just step on the pedal for an unspecified amount of time, and your batteries will be charged an unspecified amount. It’s an eco-friendly and potentially convenient concept prototype, especially if you travel a lot, but seriously, they expect me to work to charge my laptop? That’s nonsense. Utter nonsense.

No information yet on price or release date.

[ Easy Energy ] VIA [ Coolest Gadgets ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I think every grade school student has a little bit of Gene Krupa inside them, particularly when they get their hands on a pair of brand new pencils and start drumming on their desk, textbooks or whatever produces a unique sound. And that’s why I like these Drumstick Pencils designed by Moko Sellars. One end features the rounded tip like you’ll find on a real drumstick, while the other end can be sharpened like a standard HB pencil.

But like I discovered at a young age, even accidentally dropping your pencil on the floor can shatter the carbon inside, and if you’ve ever had to re-sharpen your pencil only to find the tip breaking off again and again, you’ll see the crucial flaw with this design. But for around $7.40 from SUCK UK, I think the novelty of these pencils outweighs those practicality concerns.

[ SUCK UK - Drumstick Pencil ] VIA [ designboom ]

By Andrew Liszewski

It’s been over 30 years since we first saw R2D2 project Princess Leia’s distress call via a slick hologram, and even though that supposedly happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, you’d think our own galaxy would have developed a similar technology by now. But when it comes to holograms, they still seem to be just a novelty to us. Case in point, the holoCube. It’s a fully integrated 3D projection platform that the manufacturer is selling for displaying products at a store or trade show. Now I’m sure it will draw a crowd, but is that the best application we can come up with?

Inside the holoCube you’ll find a 40GB hard drive (do they still sell those?) that’s capable of storing 8 to 18 hours of video depending on the data rate/compression, and demo videos can be easily uploaded via a USB connection. As for the price? Well apparently the holoCubes start at around $9,000, but you do get your choice of a black or white finish, so I guess that’s reasonable.

[ holoCube ] VIA [ TechEBlog ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’ve seen plenty of demos where a digital camera is sitting at the bottom of a fish tank to show how waterproof it is, but these are the first SDHC cards I’ve seen that are just as H20 friendly. Elecom’s new 4, 6 and 8GB Class 6 SDHC cards are completely waterproof so even if you happen to drop your non-water-friendly digital camera overboard, at least all of your vacation photos won’t be destroyed. Assuming you can retrieve the camera that is. There’s no word on pricing at this time, but you can probably expect them to run just a bit more than your standard SDHC card.

[ Akihabara News - Elecom's New Waterproof SDHC Card ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Over the years I’m pretty sure I’ve had at least one piece of fruitcake that was actually edible, but for the most part those logs of candied cherries remain a traditional Christmas gag. And given the fact that fruitcakes rarely get eaten, why spend all that money shipping the real thing to your boss, ex-wife or other assorted enemies when you can send this inflatable version instead?

To an inebriated Christmas party guest the Inflatable Fruitcake probably looks like the real thing, but they’re actually better than the real thing because A) You don’t have to eat it. B) Even being made of vinyl they’re probably less toxic than the real thing if you do, and C) They’re easier and cheaper to mail since they can be sent inside a standard sized envelope.

So if you’re interested in sending someone an Inflatable Fruitcake as a gift, you can do so on their website for just $9.50, shipping included. But if you want to order 2 or more, you’ll have to visit Archie McPhee instead.

[ Inflatable Fruitcake ] VIA [ bookofjoe ]

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

I still haven’t gotten around to playing LEGO Batman, but I loved the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games. I don’t know if it’s the nostalgia of those little bricks, or the love of the movies they are based on, but I can’t seem to get enough of them. Well according to the latest rumors, we may have another successful franchise turned into a LEGO game. This time around, it’s Harry Potter.

I can’t actually say that this is surprising in the least. First, Harry Potter is still huge, and will likely remain so for many years to come. Not to mention the fact that there have been LEGO Harry Potter sets available for some time. Aside from naming Warner Bros. Interactive as the publisher, there really aren’t any other details to go along with this rumor.

[ CAV ] VIA [ GamerFront ]

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

With the New Xbox Experience requiring that your console have at least 128MB of free space, that leaves owners of new Arcade models in a bit of a jam. Sure, Microsoft was nice and offered up free memory cards and cheap hard drives to owners of older Core systems, but do new console owners have to use up a portion of their memory card for this dashboard update? Apparently not.

Without any great fanfare, Microsoft quietly upgraded the internals of the new Arcade model. While so far this doesn’t seem to have included the new Jasper chipset, it does include 256MB of internal storage. Unfortunately this does replace the usual memory card that is usually shipped with the console. I suppose this is really for the better, since if you were to for some reason remove and lose that memory card (which contained the data for your dashboard update) you’d probably be in a world of hurt.

[ Xbox360Fanboy ] VIA [ GamerFront ]

By Evan Ackerman

Electronics used to be just a bunch of humming beige boxes with blinking green lights. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last decade or so, and now electronics are mostly humming black boxes with blinking blue lights. This vase router take a refreshing approach, forming a wireless router into a sort of nuclear power plant shape with space for a flower in the top. If it’s got space for water in there, I imagine you could fill it with soil and actually get something to grow, and the radiation from the router will undoubtedly cause all kinds of exciting and potentially horrific mutations. Like exploding petunias. Kaboom!

Or, you could just set a vase on top of your existing router and try to grow something in that. Your call.

VIA [ Dezeen ]

By David Ponce

We went from tackling 4 questions a week, to 8 questions a week… And then it hit us: why not be really useful, and try to answer 25 questions every week? Brilliant, right? Except we’re not going to give you a rundown of every single one of those. Instead, here’s a little sampling of four.

Last week started off with some broken wireless troubleshooting, a particularly difficult task without access to the ailing laptop. We then looked at the significance of hexadecimal error messages and addressed the ever popular Windows XP downgrading. The fourth question we’ll mention here concerns missing drivers following a reset BIOS.

The site is gaining even more traction, while at the same time adding more experts. Looks like we’re ramping up to full production. If you got a question, chances are we’ll be able to answer it.

[ Toshiba's Laptop Experts ]