Hasta La Gadget!

This is a neat-o little shelf, ideal for the everyday clutter that usually ends up in the fruit bowl or on the table next to the door. Or even the fruit bowl on the table next to the door.

The Corian (or aluminum) sheet has straps for paper and, neatest of all, magnets sunk into the base from which your keys can dangle. But these things alone aren’t why we’re writing about this shelf. There’s something far more interesting involved. Something rant-worthy, in fact. It is the price. The Bergert (for that is its name) costs $320.

$320 for a piece of bent plastic? Even the aluminum version is a rip off at $160, although alongside this acrylic and alumina trihydrate mix it starts to look cheap.

This is, of course, a prime contender for a Gadget Lab how-to. Ingredients: One cheap acrylic sheet, one electric heater and a handful of neodymium magnets. Throw in a couple of free rubber bands and you’re done. I’m moving to a new apartment next week, and a home made Bergert is near the top of my to-do list. And I won’t be calling it “Bergert”.

Product page [Iacoli and McAllister via Noquedanblogs]

We just talked about some close-to-urban (pretty close, anyway) agriculture going on with Tokyo Milk, but there’s a lot going on in Japan from grass-covered vending machines to, well, grass covered cities. If you’re interested in some personal agriculture, the Green Capsule does all this on the ultimate micro scale. What if we really want a green city? Maybe not as green as this building in Fukuoka, but at least something the breathes a little.

Beverage company Suntory has been working on a project, Suntory Midorie, aimed at bringing more green into Japan’s urban areas, inside and out. To this effect, the company has developed original systems for roof top gardens (“Midori no Yane,” or “green roof”) and wall-side foliage (“Hana no Kabe,” or “flower wall”). These systems draw on a technology developed by Suntory that replaces natural soil with a new synthetic kind, called “pafcal,” that is purportedly light, promotes growth, and requires little maintenance.

Both Midori no Yane and Hana no Kabe were officially launched on March 3rd in the Tokyo and Kansai area (Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe cities). Suntory had already put up a few Hana no Kabe in their Tokyo headquarters and in Café Solare, located in the Suntory Museum in Osaka. We’ve also spotted one for promotional purposes, branded with the tag Suntory Midorie, at the entrance to Shibuya’s Center Gai shopping street (pictured below).

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Shibuya, a trendy teen retail area, get a dose of green. Last season’s Tokyo Girls Collection publicized the launch of the Shibuya +1 no Mori (Shibuya +1’s forest) project, symbolized by the planting of three trees outside of Shibuya station. The Shibuya + 1 no Mori campaign was created in collaboration with the NPO Gaia Initiative.

Trend Potential
Japan is going green, but in ways that are creative and profitable for the businesses pushing these trends. For more information on green “Eco” trends in Japan, subscribe to the Trendpool database for ideas to help businesses innovate.

Old people are stupid. At least, that’s what internet radio makers Myine tell us. In fact, so proud is Myine of this “fact” that it touts it on the front page of its site: “Older folks like tech toys, too.” To this end, Myine has made the Ira, an internet radio so simple that even an old, stupid idiot can use it. The Ira even has an old-person name.

In fact, so simple is the Ira that it apparently needs no instructions. The site is empty of any kind of technical information. We guess that the kind of moron who would buy it is the kind of moron who probably couldn’t work out how to get to a website and read it anyway.

What we do know is that, unless the buyer has a younger, more techy friend, the Ira will likely sit in a box, unused. Take a look at the graphic below to see how “easy” it is to set up. First, you need internet. Next in line, a modem. Then a Wi-Fi router, followed by, at last, the Ira itself. After that you should hook up the Ira, somehow adding the complicated, difficult password (or perhaps not — the stupid buyer probably has an open access point, right?)

Finally, you’ll need to hook up some speakers, a stereo or a “boombox” to actually listen. That’s five elements in the chain, too much, clearly, for anyone over 40 to understand.

The Ira also ships in a box full of doodads —  adapters, power supplies, cables and remotes. So simple! How much for this box of tricks? A mere $150, or – as we prefer to say – just $150 more than the radio you already have on your computer. Because you, stupid as you are, granddad, have a computer. Otherwise, why on earth would you have the internet at home?

Product page [Myine]

In a few words, the story tales in StickieStory are unique; they are a perfect combination of entertainment and fun because they are like a game to put together and they are amazing story tales to read and tell as well. They are stories in which the names and pictures of the characters make the story tale special and unique. To create your story tale is easy and it is fun.

The stories may be customized with stickers that bear the story along with the names and stickers with the characters, including the faces of all the characters. You can include your friends and family as the story characters. You may incorporate one main character and three secondary characters per story, at the most. Though, if you wish, you may incorporate the main character only to make your story.

http://www.stickiestory.com

Over the weekend, the CPO of Netflix wrote on the company blog that the delays experienced by users of the streaming service over the last few months is not Netflix’s fault and instead blames the traffic irregularities of ISP providers and ‘playback devices.’

Problems with video streaming from Netflix (on PCs and set top boxes) started in early November, when users of the Netflix-enabled Roku box started seeing a loss in quality and low bit rates. Among the reasons noted by Roku at the time was a change in the content distribution network (CDN) used by Netflix.

Weeks later, the glitch and slow streaming was mostly fixed but ever since, users seem to have become more vigilant of the problem, and a good number of them are still not pleased. Most notably, audio has been noted to be out of sync is Roku streams.

Netflix’s Neil Hunt says that people need to understand the weird discrepancies between streaming rates occur because "different titles, and different encodes for different playback device types, may come from different CDNs or different servers at a particular CDN, so may have different paths and different bottlenecks."

This is not news, since it was the same type of answer that was given back in November. It’s true, however, that Limelight and Level 3 ISPs are probably mostly to blame, and that different boxes (like the Xbox 360) encode content at higher bit rates that others, causing wild differences in customer satisfaction.

But perhaps the most useful note on the weekend post is the promise from Netflix that most of these problems will end by the end of the year with the full implementation of the upcoming Silverlight 3 player (still in beta). According to CNET,   Silverlight will allow ‘stream loads’ (sounds filthy, yeah?) to be ‘shared by the graphics and main processors, whereas the current version puts all the strain on the CPU.’ This will also allow people to see a huge increase in quality streams in lower-powered machines, like netbooks.

Netflix is saying that once the Silverlight player is ready to go, they’ll push it out to its device partners, including the Roku, Xbox, and recent Blu-ray players.

In other Netflix news, a recent customer service survey put out by the online rental service is causing some to believe that it will soon offer streaming services for both the Wii and PS3 gaming systems.

The inquiry asks current users whether they would be willing to pay for a $10 streaming disc that would enable the feature. As a reader smartly noted in the Hacking Netflix blog, for the PS3, the extra disc would likely push through a Java app running through the player’s Blu-ray Java virtual machine.