Hasta La Gadget!

Dieter Volker’s Door Claxon replaces your boring doorbell

Dieter Volkers’ Door Claxon is a beautifully clever combination of a doorknob and a doorbell. Or rather, a doorhorn.

At first the Netherlands-based designer’s handle looks like little more than whimsy, but look again. First, it’s plain fun to have the horn honk through the handle, but then we see that the inside handle is also the perfect shape for a horn-speaker. Next, we notice that it is one-way: The inside handle will let people in, but the rubber bulb won’t let you do any twisting or unlocking.

The inside of the Door Claxon is also nicely simple, comprising little more than a metal grommet, a bulb, a handle/horn and a metal “reed” to make the horn buzz. The only thing i don’t like is the color. A pink ball like this is just too tempting for a childish mind such as mine, and pranksters would take a ball-pen and draw little curly hairs on it in no time.

Door Claxon [Dieter Volkers via Core77]

See Also:

• Horn
• Bone Amp Gives iPhone the Horn
• Pump-Rechargeable Air-Horn Great for Tourist-Scaring
• Horn Speaker Whispers Tunes in Your Ear
• Little Horn

The biggest feature of Photojojo’s Ring Flash Adapter is its price. At just $40, it costs less than many home-made solutions.

Like any other adapter, the Photojojo RFA uses the light from the flashgun you already own to provide illuminations. This light fires into the plastic interior and is channeled into a loop around your lens. Thusly redirected, the light now projects evenly onto your subject, giving the tell-tale ring-flash look.

And what is that look? The point of a ring-flash is to give even illumination. Because light comes from every point around the lens, shadows cast from one side are filled by light from the other, giving a flat effect with kind of shadow “halo” behind your subject. It is really meant for macro work, but gives some great effects for all kinds of photos.

A ring-flash adapter will succeed or fail depending on its efficiency. A real — and expensive — ring-flash has its own lights and offers the best, most even coverage. As an RFA uses light being pumped in from the side, it has to hold onto as much as it can as it redirects it. Looking at the example shots on Photojojo’s site tells us that this cheap adapter gives us a somewhat uneven result, somewhere between the harshness of a bare, on-camera strobe and a more expensive adapter. It also has a chunk missing between the 11 and 1 o’clock positions, which adds a shadow to the top of the picture.

Still, it’s $40, and at that price you can forgive almost anything. It’s also light, at just 1.5 pounds (700 grams). That’s not as light as the 18 ounce (500 grams) Orbis RFA, but then, it’s $160 less.

The Ring Flash Adapter [Photojojo. Thanks, Jen!]

Photos: Photojojo

See Also:

• Ray Flash Ring Flash Adapter
• Hands-On With The Orbis Ring Flash Adapter
• Frio Coldshoe Is a Hot, Handy Holder for Strobists
• Halo Effect: 4 Ring Flashes Rated and Tested
• Raid the Kitchen to Build a DIY Ring Flash
• Lomo Ring Flash: Cheap and Fun

David Damshek's Diamove Concept is cute but flawed

David Damshek’s Diamove manages to tick most of the boxes on the concept bike clichéd feature list. Take a look:

• Hubless wheels ✔
• Weird folding design ✔
• Concealed cabling ✔
• Clever looking but unspecified drive system ✔
• Weak, non-triangular frame ✔

The Diamove may have a tiny, thin head-tube taking all of the bike’s structural stresses, a seat that is adjustable by a mere few inches, and a handlebar-stem that looks as if it would snap off in seconds, but it does have some good looks. Those bull-horn handlebars look great, and fairly comfy, and the penny-farthing (p-far) design-motif is clearly the Next Big Thing. And the front-wheel-drive eliminates the risk of wheely-ing on the short wheel-base.

But given that this bike looks pretty unstable, and that even when folded it is bigger than the Bromptons and Dahons you can already buy, we wonder why you’d bother. Oh, and there’s also the small point that it would be impossible to ride in anything but a straight line: Imagine pedaling whilst also steering with the front-wheel-drive setup, and then imagine the resulting fall and subsequent impalement on those bull-horn bars.

Single Motion Folding [Yanko]

See Also:

• Retro-Looking Penny-Farthing Freak-Bike
• Behold! The Car-Crushing Monsterbike
• YikeBike: Cute Electric Penny-Farthing
• Gorgeous Folding Bike Places Form Far Above Function

Some of our UK readers have woken up to the less than awesome discovery this morning that their phones have lost all connectivity to the outside world. 3G, 2G, SMS, and BlackBerry services on the Vodafone UK network are all down for what seems like a significant proportion of its user base — an issue the carrier has since identified as being caused by a break-in at its Basingstoke exchange center. No further details have been provided, though work is naturally underway to repair the damage done and we’re assured customers’ private data has remained so. We can’t imagine quite such a service disruption being caused by a random act of vandalism or burglary, perhaps a disgruntled employee felt the need to vent his or her frustrations in grand style? Or has O2 gone gangster on the competition?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: Vodafone got in touch to say that 2G and 3G voice connectivity has been restored as of lunchtime in the UK and text and data services should be up within “the next couple of hours.” The company estimates the issue has affected “a couple of hundred thousand users”, though it expects that number to drop to zero before the day is through.

Vodafone’s UK network taken down by a break-in (update: some services restored) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 06:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Fabricate Yourself” is like a 3-D photo booth. Using a Microsoft Kinect, anyone can hit a button and have a 3-D model of themselves printed right then. The project, headed by Karl Willis, removes the arcane intricacies of CAD software and replaces them with something anybody can pick up and play with.

Presented at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference, the setup turns a Kinect into 3-D scanner. The Kinect is hooked up to a Mac, and users can pose in front of it and see a real-time wire-frame representation onscreen. When they see what they like, they hit a button and they are captured in an STL (stereolithography) file. This file is sent to the 3-D printer, where a small, low-resolution model is finally spat out.

At the conference, the models were limited to 3 x 3 cm to keep the machine running fast. This used just a quarter of the Kinect’s resolution, but the results have a rather cute, jaggedy 8-bit look to them. The cuteness was also upped by printing the models onto snap-together jigsaw tiles so they could be combined into one big mural (or even joined together to spell out words).

Taking high tech and making it easy and fun to use is clearly awesome. I am slightly disappointed with the conference-goers’ lack of nerd imagination, though. I have studied the resulting models closely and nowhere do I see the most obvious pose, and the first thing I would do if I could play with this machine: hands held up like Han Solo as he was frozen in carbonite.

Fabricate Yourself [Interactive Fabrication via i.Materialise. Thanks, Joris!]

Photos: Interactive Fabrication

See Also:

• Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing
• HP Plans Line of (Relatively) Affordable 3-D Printers
• Open Source Guitar Kit With 3-D Printed Body
• 3-D Printing, Now in Stainless Steel
• The Secret World of Printing Concept Cars in 3-D