Hasta La Gadget!

The handy meter gets into the flow

One sure sign that the news-desert of August is almost upon us is that concept designs outnumber real new products. With this in mind, take a look the the Handy Meter, a digital measure for your faucet that looks more useful than some of the real gadgets you can buy in your local department store.

The device, designed by Jeon Hwan Soo, slips onto the end of the faucet and measures the flow of water. The total amount delivered is displayed on an LED readout. The idea is that you can measure water into a recipe straight from the tap instead of going via a measuring jug.

Or can you? The “instructions” for this widget only show it counting the cubic centimeters as they flow through. Thus, unless you are letting the water drip drip slowly into the waiting receptacle, you might want to measure into another container anyway, just in case you go too far.

To be truly useful, you should be able to set the volume first, and have the flow cut when it is reached. Otherwise its quicker just to use a graduated jug.

The Handy Meter isn’t confined to the kitchen sink, though. You can also put it over the opening of a bottle for accurate dosing. True accuracy would require liquid of the same density as water, though.

Like I said, this isn’t a real product, but I’d probably buy one just so I could eyeball things like water for boiling pasta. It’s certainly better than junk like the Egg Cracker.

See Also:

• Strawberry Slicer: Most Useless Kitchen Gadget Yet?
• Today's Useless Kitchen Gadget: The Egg Cracker
• Kitchen Physics
• Kitchen Kit Lets One-Handed Cooks Slice and Dice
• The Only Five Kitchen Tools You Really Need

The Prius PXP’s sleek lines hide a futuristic secret

Remember Firefox? No, not the bloated open-source web browser, but Craig Thomas’ sleek Soviet fighter plane which had thought-controlled weapons systems. Wouldn’t it be cool if somebody, somehow, did that to a bike?

It turns out that somebody has. Toyota, in cahoots with Saatchi & Saatchi, Parlee Cycles and the boffins at Deeplocal, has come up with the PXP, or Prius Bike. The “Prius” part might be mere branding, but the bike itself is pretty damn awesome, right down to the thought-controlled gears. Yes, you read that right. Thought-controlled gears.

The frame and most other parts are fashioned from carbon fiber, shaped to be aerodynamic and integrate almost every component: cables are routed internally, brakes are built into the forks and the stem is indistinguishable from the headset. This not only makes for a bike that barely distracts the air as it slices through it — it also results in a bike that is so gorgeously minimal that it makes many fixed-gear machines look fussy. There’s even a hole ready to be filled with your smartphone, for the usual kind of cyclo-computer shenanigans.

Using electrodes to read brain activity, the helmet lets you shift gears with your mind

But we’ve seen this stuff a hundred times before. The real meat is in the gears. Human/digital interface specialist Deeplocal has built a helmet that lets you shift gears just by thinking about it. Just like Clint Eastwood was able to blast enemies out of the sky by thought alone in the Firefox movie, the PXP’s rider can flip up and down through the electronically shifted derailleurs with his mind.

Ten minutes of training is enough to tune your brain to the EEG in the helmet and allow seamless shifting. The thought-control system is built from off-the-shelf hardware and custom software, so it could actually be put into production pretty soon. And fear not. There are levers for manually shifting should you need to do so.

Thought-controlled shifting is clearly mind-boggling sci-fi tech, and could probably be very helpful for pro riders. But for us bike-riding proles, maybe it’s a little too much. After all, one of the biggest advantages of a bike is its simplicity. With a basic toolkit and a connection to Google, you can fix anything.

Are these fancy electronic advances going to ruin home-maintenance the same way that electronic engine management spoiled things for the home car mechanic?

The Toyota Prius Projects: Concept Bike Week 10 [Prolly via Fast Company]

See Also:

• Thinking Your Way Through Traffic in a Brain-Control Car
• Winter Olympics to Demo Thought-Controlled Lighting
• Next Step for Darpa's Mind-Controlled Prosthetics: Reliability …
• Hands-On (Or Brains-On) With NeuroSky Thought Control System …
• Thought-Controlled Exo-Skeleton Donned by Brave Tech Journalist …

ICam lets the iPhone hook directly into a real camera

Finally, somebody has invented the camera I have always wanted. Or at least, Turkish designer Zeki Özek has invented the camera tech I have always wanted.

Ozek’s iCam is a way to integrate your iPhone with a proper camera. The camera would have a cutout in the back into which the phone slots, hooking into the camera’s brain via the familiar 30-pin dock connector. The phone’s screen takes the place of a dedicated LCD, and photos are recorded direct to the iPhone’s internal storage.

Thus, the camera is downgraded to a dumb, light-processing terminal.

The iPhone’s camera is pretty good for a phone-cam, but nothing compared to proper, purpose-made cameras. Ozek’s iCam lets you shoot with proper lenses and large sensors to get much better images, but uses the iPhone as the brain so that you can edit and upload your photos immediately.

Imagine having Instagram and an always-on Internet connection in your DSLR and you’ll see what the excitement is all about.

While Zeki’s concept is shown using a Sony NEX 5 as a host, the more obvious system is Micro Four Thirds. It’s a fairly open standard, in that any manufacturer can join in, and there is already a good range of lenses (and lens adapters).

This weekend I took a trip away and carried my iPad and Panasonic GF1 with me the whole time. I took just one photo on the camera, and a whole bunch on the iPad, despite its truly awful camera, mostly because of Instagram and other apps. I doubt any existing manufacturer is going to relegate its range to a dumb photo-pipe anytime soon, but the potential for a proper iCam is huge. In fact, Zeki’s design has been accepted as a candidate for the prestigious Red Dot awards.

iCam. Connect iPhone directly to Camera [Rexplore via the Giz]

See Also:

• Ear Mounted iPhone Camera Is Like Tivo for Your Life
• QuadCamera for iPhone: Time-Stuttering Camera App
• Why the iPhone 4 Camera Is So Promising
• Hipstamatic Gentrifies iPhone Camera

Just a month after a disgruntled employee accused RIM’s managers of failing to make bold decisions, the latter have responded by boldly sacking 11 percent of their workforce. The company says it will notify affected employees in North America and some other countries this week. It also announced a number of changes to its executive team, with Thorsten Heins taking on the expanded role of COO, Product and Sales. Other personnel changes were generally confined to sales, marketing and operations, which leaves us wondering what, if anything, will change in the way RIM comes up with new products.

RIM axes 2000 jobs, changes managers in effort to halt decline originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now you can experience the full confucion of Facebook in a native iPad app. Screen capture MG Siegler

Facebook’s iPad app could be a lot closer to launch than we thought. A full-sized, fully-functional version of the iPad app is hidden inside the current iPhone app. That means that, if you are running the iPhone app you already have the iPad executable on your phone.

Discovered by M.G Siegler, Apple writer for AOL’s Tech Crunch, the iPad app is a lot more modern-looking than the tired old iPhone version, and looks a lot like Twitter’s official iPad app. On the left is a source list to navigate between your Wall, info, photos and friends sections.

Up top, below the status bar, you’ll find more icons to take you to different sections (places and chat, amongst others), and if you flip to horizontal orientation you get a combination of both these navigation “aids,” and the top-bar nav icons remain.

In short, Facebook has managed to fully port the signature confusion of its Web site to a tablet app, a not insignificant achievement.

Siegler, who found the app after reading about it on Twitter, calls the app “spectacular.” The discovery was made by a an engineering student named Marvin Bernal, who also gives instructions on how to get it running on your own iPad:

If you are smart enough to know what that means, and yet you still use Facebook, then go ahead and hack away. The rest of us can either wait for the official launch, or wait for Google to release Google Plus for the iPad.

Facebook’s iPad App Is Hidden Inside Of Their iPhone App [AOL’s Tech Crunch]