Hasta La Gadget!

This inner-tube vending machine is outside a bike store in Cologne, Germany, and a new tube will cost €6 ($8.50) — a pretty normal price in Europe. It’s certainly handy — If you need a new tube, you don’t want to wait for the store to open. It would be even handier if there was an air pump underneath it, but sadly the photograph doesn’t go down that far.

Writing this reminded me of last year’s post, “The World’s Weirdest Vending Machines”, and I re-read it while grabbing the link. Head over and take a look at the comments. You’ll find out that in Austria, you can buy whole bike tires from an automat, in Germany you can buy sausages (hot or cold, “I ate one once and didn’t die, although it was far from being delicious.” says reader Erica), and un upstate New York you can buy live bait. Vending machines are truly the pinnacle of modern civilization.

Biketube Vending Machine Cologne [PresleyJesus/Flickr]

What with the wooden flashlight and now this solar-powered radio, it’s quickly turning into eco-Wednesday. I almost bought one of these little gizmos at the weekend, but shied away as the boutique gift-store price was way more than the $25 you US residents can buy it for.

The Kikkerland radio can run off the Sun, but there’s also a crank to juice things on cloudier days. The product specs say that one minute of cranking gives half an hour of radio-play, and it will run for seven hours when fully charged. What they don’t say is that to achieve that full charge, you have to leave it in sunlight for the better part of a day (yes, I read the details on gadget boxes even on my days off). Still, for outdoor use it’s perfect, and the styling makes it look like a prop from the Jetsons. It tunes to AM and FM, and there’s a headphone jack, but sadly no line-in.

Product page [USeful Things via Red Ferret]

“Torch” is a 160 lumen LED flashlight, and it’s made from wood. Apparently it is also “eco-friendly” according to the blurb at the seller’s site, Areaware. We might be old fashioned, but last time we looked, chopping down trees wasn’t considered friendly to the environment. Especially not hardwood trees like the maple used to make this.

The Torch is, however, beautiful, and the LEDs at least will save on juice and replacement bulbs. And if the batteries do run out, you can always set fire to it and  read by the light. The price? A wallet-unfriendly $75, available next month.

Product page [Areaware via Book of Joe]

LightSource is, as you might guess from the name, a source of light. It’s an iPhone application which, like one zillion other iPhone applications, turns the screen into a flashlight. The difference with LightSource, other than the dollar you’ll have to drop to buy it, is that the colors mimic known light sources: sunlight, tungsten, flourescent and the hideous sodium vapor, among many others.

This turns your iPhone into a color-balanced light, useful for putting catchlights in a model’s eyes or just adding a little extra illumination. There are free solutions, like myLite, which let you dial in the exact shade you want, but LightSource’s presets make things a lot easier for photographers. Sure, the interface is makes Excel look pretty, but at least it’s easy to use.

Product page [iTunes]

Robots that can self-replicate aren’t new. But a new DARPA initiative is a little more frightening as it looks to create robots that can take part in their own construction, according to The Register. That means they’re “alive” before they’re finished and can help their forebearers put …