Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

There are countless books that will supposedly teach you how to properly raise your kids, but only one that takes the opposite approach. How To Traumatize Your Children is part of the ‘Self-Hurt Series’ of books and includes chapters that cover everything from narcissistic parenting to being your child’s best friend to the convenience of neglect and even how to enjoy the legacy of trauma you’ve carefully crafted. Because let’s be serious, what’s the point of putting all the time and effort into traumatizing your kids if you don’t end up becoming pseudo-famous thanks to a tell-all book or movie-of-the-week 30 years later?

At 192 pages with full color illustrations the book should provide more than enough guidance to keep your son or daughter living in your basement well into their 40’s. You can get it from Perpetual Kid for just $10.

[ How To Traumatize Your Children ]

By Evan Ackerman

Reading is such hard work without the internet at your disposal to cross reference anything that you don’t immediately understand. Until now, people had to read books while at the computer if they wanted to look stuff up, manually typing it in to Wikipedia or Google. It’s horrible, I know. The Dixau text scanner from Korean company Unichal makes is so that you only have to be next to the computer. It contains a little camera that is able to take pictures of text, recognize the characters, and then provide on-screen explanations via search engines.

The Dixau may seem totally superfluous (especially for $90), but what I think it’s designed for are Korean students who want to be able to translate words from English scientific texts on the fly. And with that in mind, it really could be useful even for native English speakers trying to decipher English scientific texts. I mean, I majored in geology, which is perhaps not the most technical of disciplines, and I still swear that half of those words were made up just to confuse people.

[ Dixau (In Korean) ] VIA [ TechPin ]

By Evan Ackerman

Nothing too gadgety about this, I’ll admit, but it’s a neat little effect… Flip the pages of this book, and a rainbow will appear above it. Each of the 36 pages has an image of the spectrum on a black background which creates the illusion. Looks like it was just an art project, but you can make your own in 10 minutes with an inkjet and some staples. Vid after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Luke Anderson

One of my favorite things to do before going to sleep is read a book. I’ve found that I generally sleep better after about 20 minutes or so of reading. Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t take kindly to the bedside lamp staying on while she’s trying to sleep. That’s why I love this MARK bookmark, which promises to make the pages of a book readable without the need for an excess of light.

The MARK creates a unique glowing effect over the page of a book by combining a small sheet of plastic and embedded FOLEDs. These tiny lights use hardly any power, and their brightness can be easily adjusted. The only downside to this product is that it is still a concept design. I can only hope that something similar to this is actually released sometime in the near future.

[ Yanko Design ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While the numbers clearly indicate that flying is one of the safest ways to travel there’s always that worry in the back of your mind about what could go wrong. Those who are particularly concerned about something happening to the pilot might find some peace of mind by reading this book.

While How To Fly A Plane is not written as a complete and thorough manual on how to pilot an aircraft it does provide a solid introduction to everything from take-off to the far more important landing. It doesn’t rely on technical jargon either but uses layman’s terms so that anyone can easily grasp the concepts. A ‘First Flights’ section even takes you inside the cockpits of various planes including gliders, single engined aircraft and a Learjet which is great if you’ve ever wondered what all those gauges and displays are really for.

How To Fly A Plane is published in the UK by Thames & Hudson and can be found on Amazon.co.uk for about $30.

[ How To Fly A Plane ] VIA [ Cool Hunting ]