Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

We’ve been waiting for over two years now, but the Alien Abduction lamp is finally almost ready for production. The picture above is the final prototype; the production version of the lamp should be virtually identical, glow in the dark aliens and all.

The UFO itself is very solid and cast in metal with a beautiful black pearl finish (you can’t really see how nice the finish is in this otherwise great photo). The antenna functions as the on off switch, and it also has a third position for pulsing light. And of course it comes complete with glow-in-the-dark aliens, real fake grass and a poor removable bovine abductee!

The biggest difference I see from the original rendering is that the cow is no longer suspended beneath the UFO. I really liked that touch, and thought it added a lot of character. I can see how it might be hard to realize in a production lamp, but maybe it could be rigged up anyway with a bit of fishing line or something.

There’s no release date or price yet, but you can sign up to have the opportunity to purchase one of the first 2000 Abduction Lamps in a special limited edition run at AbductionLamp.com.

[ Abduction Lamp ] VIA [ herrklein ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Have you ever tried to eat dinner at 2:30 in the morning during an eclipse while in the middle of a power outage? Let me tell you, it’s almost impossible to see what you’re eating! Thankfully the forward thinkers at Sylvania have come up with the perfect solution. Through some manner of reverse-engineered alien technology they’ve found a way to embed LED lighting into your standard terrestrial placemat. You’d think that such a breakthrough would have been confiscated by the government, placed in a non-descript wooden crate and buried somewhere inside a giant warehouse, but believe it or not they’re actually available for sale to the public!

On a single set of coin cell batteries the placemats will stay lit for about 20 hours, and they’ve been treated with Scotchgard so they’re also spill-friendly. And they’re available in sets of 2 from the Sylvania online store for $24.99.

[ Sylvania LED Placemat ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Evan Ackerman

We first saw Monkeylectric’s persistence of vision LED bicycle wheel system at Yuri’s Night back in 2008. They’ve updated their software and hardware with the m464q wheel display system, which is capable of full motion video at 256 pixels resolution. The wheels have linear LED arrays along all four axes, and if you’re going faster than about 8 mph, the LEDs blur together and thanks to some ingenious computer programming they look like a solid circular screen.

The video system is fully programmable, includes a wireless interface, and costs a couple grand, but there’s also a system that does only simple patterns (like these) for a mere $60.

[ MonkeyLectric ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Turning something as mundane as a vacuum cleaner into an object of techno-lust can be a hard act to follow, but when it comes to the Dysons, it looks like design runs in the family. The Motorlight Wall was created by Jake Dyson, son of James Dyson, the vacuum guy, and it’s a wall mounted light that features an adjustable beam that can be angled between 10 and 120 degrees, creating a wide or narrow shaft depending on your illumination needs. The lights are also remote controlled, and up to 30 of them can be adjusted via a single remote which is handy if you have a series of these installed in a large room.

According to Jake Dyson’s website, the Motorlight Wall was supposed to be available for sale last November for just shy of $400, plus an additional $44 for the remote, but that doesn’t seem to be the case just yet.

[ Jake Dyson Products - Motorlight Wall ] VIA [ designboom ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I don’t know about you, but I find those dynamo powered flashlights pretty useless. The minimal amount of light they put out just isn’t the worth the endless cranking or shaking needed to keep them powered. But spinning a mapless globe to produce light? Well that’s something I can easily do all night long! Thankfully, that’s exactly what Karin Johansson has created with her Dynamic Lamp. It looks like a run-of-the-mill globe, minus the map graphics, but thanks to a dynamo hidden inside it will actually softly glow when you give it a spin.

Now it’s not exactly as portable as a flashlight, but it can be used anywhere since it’s not tethered to a power outlet. And as you can see in the video I’ve included after the jump, it actually doesn’t take that much of a spin to keep it glowing for quite a while.

[ Dynamic Lamp ] VIA [ Gizmodiva ]

Read the rest of this entry »

By Chris Scott Barr

When I go camping, I do my best to keep things as low-tech as possible. After all, half the point of spending a few nights in the wilderness is to get away from people and technology. Of course there are a few essential pieces of equipment that are almost a necessity (no, I’m not talking about your iPhone). One of these is definitely a lantern of some sort. I have a batter-operated one, which does the job, except when I forget to bring a spare battery.

If you’re looking for a more eco-friendly way to shed some light on your camping trip, you might want to check out this K-Light LED Lantern from PiSAT Solar. Instead of using a large throw-away battery or even burning oil for light, it gets its juice from the sun. A large solar panel is included, which is big enough to net you 1-2 hours of light per hour of clear sunlight. You can choose from high or low settings which uses 16 and 8 LEDs respectively. The $50 price is really reasonable, especially when I’ve seen regular LED lanterns go for almost as much.

[ PiSAT Solar ] VIA [ Dvice ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you never actually use your bed for sleeping, you might want to consider switching your standard bed sheets for these luminous bed covers made from a patented material called Luminex. The fiber optics glow along the entire length of the fibers creating a “dazzling” luminous effect, and even though they need to be plugged in to light up, the bed cover doesn’t get warm, there’s no risk of electrical shock and they’re even hand washable. And a single 63 x 78.8 inch cover will set you back a mere $660.

[ LumiGram - Bed Cover ] VIA [ 7Gadgets ]

By Evan Ackerman

A combination USB card reader and flashlight might not seem like the most straightforward thing in the world to rationalize, but that’s just because you’re not trying hard enough. I mean, what happens when World War 3 comes and you take some incredible pictures of Belgians storming the White House that the press would pay a fortune for and could turn the tide of the war by stimulating international sympathy if you could only upload them to the internet but if you turn any lights on you’ll be arrested because there’s a curfew and the Belgian spies are everywhere so it would be perfect if you had a little flashlight with which to find your memory card that you accidentally dropped while hiding from your neighbor who you thought was a member of the Belgian secret police coming to arrest you although it seems he only wanted to borrow an oven mitt but it doesn’t really matter because even if you had a flashlight to find the memory card you don’t have a memory card reader just a USB port on your camera but all the USB cables were confiscated by the resistance to make garrote wires and makeshift crossbow strings which are proving to be horribly ineffective against the hordes of Belgian robots since they don’t even have necks?

What happens then, huh?

But since you don’t have a combination flashlight and memory card reader, you have to turn the lights on and look for a crossbow that you can take apart to get at the USB cable but before you can get it to work the Belgian secret police break down your door and charge you with anti-Belgian activities and put you on a ship and send you to a labor camp in Antarctica where you freeze to death as Belgium takes over the planet because the rest of the world has no idea what’s going on since nobody was able to publish any pictures of them attacking the White House.

See? If you don’t buy this, you run the risk of having the world overrun with Belgians.* Do you really want that on your conscience? Well? Do you? How’s THAT for rationalization?

The USB Rechargeable Flashlight with Card Reader has 3 LEDs, a 40 mAh integrated battery, recharges when plugged into a USB port, reads SDHC and MMC cards, and costs $12 from (surprise surprise) Brando.

[ Brando ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

*Just for the record, OhGizmo! likes Belgium. A lot. Really, we do. They make good chocolate and that’s where Tintin comes from. They just seem like the sort of chaps who might be able to take over the world if they put their minds to it, you know?

By Chris Scott Barr

Being from the US myself, I don’t always pay the most attention to what’s going on in the rest of the world. Apparently over in Europe frosted incandescent bulbs are going to be banned as of September of this year. This means that if you’re still wanting to buy the cheap incandescent bulbs, you have to see that blinding light given off from the filament. The point of the ban is that people would rather switch to more energy efficient lighting than get stuck with the brighter bulb.

For all of you crazy rebels that don’t feel like buying those fancy new bulbs, there is a solution. Light bulb condoms. That’s right, the same things that prevent babies can solve your lighting problems. I really wish this were some sort of joke, but this is exactly what Europeans are facing if they want lights that are actually bright when they first turn them on (but aren’t blindingly so). So far this looks like a concept, so after September you’re going to be out of luck.

[ IngoMaurer ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]