Hasta La Gadget!

If ever there was a solution to a first-world problem, this is it. Behold, the Omega Headphone Stand, a perfect answer to a question that was never asked.

The stands are exactly what they claim to be, nothing more: a place to keep your over-the-head headphones. If you have been suffering the awful chaos of a pair of expensive cans sitting messily on a table, or even worse, sprawled across a shelf, offending the eyes of every sensitive soul who visits your luxury, minimalist home, then you can stop your painful worrying. Now you can perch those high-end headphones onto a curved plywood stand.

The swooping veneer sculptures come in a variety of forest-killing hardwoods – cherry, maple, zebrano or walnut – and mimic the shape of a human head, which makes a lot of sense as the ‘phones are designed to cosset the noggins of audiophiles the (first) world over.

The price? A mere $180, meaning you’ll have to spend at least that on a pair of headphones or risk your superficial friends chuckling at you. Oh,and you’ll have to do something about the cords, too. In the photo, they’ve just been cleverly hidden from the camera’s view. In your home, they’ll make a mess that will drive you crazy. Crazy enough to spend another $180 on an ivory cable-tidy, no doubt.

Omega Headphone Stands [Elusive disc via Uncrate]

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• Boattail Racer, the $350 Wooden Toy Car
• Monster Cable Defends Overpriced Cables: The Short Form
• Overpriced Junk Shelf is Actually Kind of Neat

Place the handsome Unity box on your coffee-table, download the companion application from the App Store, and you can control your TV, DVD player and pretty much anything else in your living room, direct from your iPhone.

The black, cylindrical Unity seems a lot like the soft, rubber Peel which we saw a few weeks ago. Both allow you to remote-control any IR gear you have, but while the Peel hooks into your home’s Wi-Fi network, the Unity uses Bluetooth. And while the Peel is a system that learns your tastes and breaks down the entire concept of channels, the Unity is a flat-out nerd-fest.

Once you have told the Unity app which devices you own, you can flip channels using on-screen keys. But then the fun begins. Central to the Unity are “actions”, step-by-step instructions that execute with a single touch. So one press can fire up your home-theater gear, switch the TV to the right channel and start the movie playing. The one thing it won’t do is make the popcorn.

Unity also has one other big advantage over the Peel: You can buy it. While the Peel is still little more than vapor (and a free app), the Unity can be had for $100.

Unity product page [Gear4 via Macworld]

See Also:

• Case Turns iPhone Into Universal Remote While Charging It
• Peel Turns iPhone into Dongle-Free Universal Remote
• IR Dongle Turns iPhone into Ugly Universal Remote
• 5 Nifty Apps That Turn Your Android Into A Universal Remote …
• First Look: Accessory-Powered App Turns iPhone Into Universal …
• Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote …

The Solar Vox, from Detroit-based designers  Eric Strebel and Jim Nogarian, is a USB charger powered by the sun. The project has been launched on Kickstarter, the place where potential customers can pledge their cash for startups, in exchange for getting one of the first products off the line.

The Solar Vox consists of a solar panel and a pair of rechargeable AA batteries, housed in a box shaped like a tiny air-hockey table. This odd design, a rather 1980s-style vision of the future, has a purpose: the case can be tilted to fully soak up the sunbeams. The odd angles let you prop the box at 0, 30, 70 and 90-degrees.

Once charged, you hook up your cellphone or other portable device and pop it into the inner chamber. This keeps things tidy, and protects the phone from the sun.

Eric and Jim plan to have the first units ready in the first quarter of 2011. To sign up and get one when they’re done, you’ll need to pledge $100.

Solar Vox product page [Kickstarter via Core77]

See Also:

• Solar MacBook Charger Costs More than MacBook Itself
• Personal Solar Panel Twenty Time More Powerful Than Rivals …
• DIY Friday: Charge Your iPhone With AAs or Solar Power
• Solar-Power Box Plugs Straight into Your Home

Why should amputees have to wear the same, boring prosthetics as one other, day after day? It turns out that they don’t, if they buy a new leg from Bespoke Innovations.

Above you see a few of the custom-built designs from the San-Francisco company. Bespoke tailor-makes fairings: The actual mechanics of the prosthetics are standard, but the outside can be made to look like anything you like. Like to ride a Harley? Then why not get a matching chrome calf? Leather? Hardwood? You got it.

Scott Summit, the designer at Bespoke, explains that in single amputees, the remaining leg is scanned and mirrored to give the correct geometry for the peg leg. For double amputees, a donor is found of the same size and shape, and their legs are scanned.

And why not? After all, we change our spectacles to match our clothes, and now you can choose a leg based on its look instead of just buying a standard, ugly titanium rod.

If this interests you, and you have seven minutes to spare while you sip a coffee, it’s worth watching Core77’s interview with Summit (embedded below). He has a very nice take on why these one-off pieces are so rewarding to design, and goes into some detail on the manufacturing process, which uses additive manufacturing, a species of 3-D printing.

Interview with Scott Summit of Bespoke Innovations, creator of kick-ass prosthetics

See Also:

• DARPA Pushes for Fail-Proof Prosthetics
• Dean Kamen's Robot Arm Grabs More Publicity
• Bionic Cat Walks on Prosthetic Legs
• Tentacle-Like Prosthetic Arm Will Haunt Your Dreams

[Core77]

I’m predisposed to love the CardSharp, just because of its name. I’m no big stickler for the use of “correct” English, but when the meanings of words drift we often lose very useful expressions. “Infer” is often used to mean “imply”, for example, and “random” is currently mangled to mean “unexpected”. And “card shark” is, of course, an ignorant deviation from “card sharp”.

The CardSharp is a knife that is created by unfolding a credit card-sized kit. The blade flips out, and the rest of the card folds over to make the handle. Here it is in action:

Neat, huh? And scarily easy to carry. The whole package is just 2mm thick, weighs only 13-grams, and the 65mm blade is made from stainless steel. I have no idea what it will look like on a baggage Xray screen, but my suspicion is that it will look a lot like the Swiss Army Card I have successfully (and usually unknowingly) taken onto most flights I have made over the last nine years.

Want one? The CardSharp will be on sale in January, for a very reasonable £15 ($23).

CardSharp product page [Iain Sinclair via Mr. Liszewski]

See Also:

• Art Lebedev Turns Utensils into Giant Folding Knife
• Living on the Edge With 3 Summer Slicers
• 1800-Year-Old Roman Multitool
• Circular Chopping Knife Great for Herbs, Murder
• MacGyver