Hasta La Gadget!

If your point-and-shoot needs to stay clean, you should, too. Enter this spearmint-scented soap.

Big Apple residents, get ready to rock the H to the O-V lane in your EV, because downtown recharging just got a little bit easier. Coulomb has dropped one of its ChargePoint stations in a parking lot near the Port Authority. It’s just the first of 100 hitting the city and 4,600 coming to other major metropolitan areas around the US by September of next year. And, unlike other NYC-based charging stations, you can use this one. Parking is even free for customers, amazingly, but you’ll need to sign up for an account to get access to that sweet 120 and 240V current. Even recharging won’t cost you a penny — but only for a month. After that the fees start. Sadly, even when saving the planet only the first one is free.

Coulomb gets in an Empire State of mind, switches on NYC’s first public EV charging station originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After publicly declaring a search for the perfect iPad stand yesterday, Gadget Lab’s benevolent dictator Dylan Tweney put this question out over Twitter: “@mistercharlie Think you could use a Gorillapod as an iPad stand?” I rushed to grab my trusty Joby Gorilla Mobile, pausing only to set down a bottle of cold German beer. Blinking as I moved out of the bright sun and into the cool dark interior of Gadget Lab’s Berlin outpost, I bent the jointed tripod into shape …

The result is best summed up by my reply: “Dylan, you’re a genius. Tested and it works great. 2 legs curled to hold iPad, one pushed out back as a stand. Steady.”

Further testing and photographing this morning led to some deeper insights. As you can see from the pictures, the stand is fashioned from the smallest of Joby’s grab-anything tripods, meant for compact cameras and cellphones. Two legs are splayed and bent up at the tips to hook the iPad’s bottom edge. The head — in this case the tripod screw — is bent back to stop scratching, although removing the screw or replacing it with the soft suction-cup attachment would also work. The third leg is bent back to balance the whole thing.

I’m amazed how well it works. The Gorillapod is sturdy enough to hold the iPad at any angle, in both portrait and landscape orientations. In normal use — typing and tapping — it is rock solid, but you can also push the iPad back to adjust the angle. For proper typing, you need to lean it back a little further. This is best done by flattening the front legs a little and curling the back leg up to meet the head, like a scorpion’s tail, providing extra support and a narrower angle. You’ll need to do some jiggling to get it rock-steady.

Because all you see at the front is the two feet curling up, it is minimally intrusive. And it even works in bed, letting you prop up the iPad on the mattress to watch a movie. Best of all, the Gorillapod folds up tiny, and is worth carrying along with you anyway because of its multitasking abilities. To see how it did in our testing (grimly hanging on to the basket of a bike while it supported a Canon G9 shooting video), follow the link below.

If you already have one, this could be the best iPad stand yet: It’s effectively free. If you don’t, it’ll cost you $30.

Product page [Joby]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Joby Gorilla Mobile
• Joby Gorillabike: Dangerous, Bendy, Awesome
• Joby Announces 'New' Gorillamobile Cellphone Tripod
• Joby Gorillamobile 3GS, Tailor-Made for the iPhone

We put out the call for geeky reader tattoos and we got an impressive display of super-nerdy graphical markings.

No matter how frustrated a cyclist gets at badly-behaving drivers, there’s nothing they can really do against two-tons of glass and steel piloted by an idiot. But if you and a few friends happen to be riding the BigDog, a four-wheel, four-man-powered behemoth of a “bicycle”, you could crush drivers and their vehicles like the Hulk crushes… well, like the Hulk crushes everything.

The giant bike, made by Tom Wilson, is a “wonderfully impractical assemblage of bicycle, go-cart, and golf-cart pieces and parts, drainage pipe, steel tubing, and patio chairs.” Tom is not from the home of bike smugness, Portland, but from the equally appropriate Detroit. His big-wheeled, traffic-stomping creation will be rolling around the Maker Faire Detroit on July 31 and August 1 this year, so you might even be able to get a ride. In the meantime, head over to the Makezine blog and read the interview with Tom.

Maker Faire Detroit: BigDog interview [Makezine]

See Also:

• Behold! The Car-Crushing Monsterbike

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