Hasta La Gadget!

Topeak has updated its top-of-the-line Alien bike multi-tool making it smaller and lighter, and easier than ever to carry an almost full bike toolkit in your pocket.

The ALiEN III CB DX comes in stainless steel (the other Aliens are CrMo steel) and has a carbon-fiber shell to keep the weight down. The rather childish alien-head on the side does serve one purpose: it helps you realign the two halves of the tool when putting them back together.

As for tools, what does it have? Everything, pretty much. There are Allen-wrenches, screwdrivers, a chain-tool, 8,9 and 10mm box-wrenches, a tire-lever (just one, and it’s metal), a knife and even a place to store two spare chain pins. The tool weighs in at a not-bad 260 g, or 9.15 oz, so it might not be comfy in a jersey pocket, but in a bag you shouldn’t notice it.

I have a Topeak Hexus tool and I love it. I snapped the tip off one of its two plastic tire-levers, and the chain tool could be a little more spacious for the fat track-chains I use, but other than that it just keeps on working. The Alien should be just as durable and, tossed in a bag with a 15mm wrench, a spare tube and a mini-pump, should make sure you’re ready for anything. $104.

ALiEN III CB DX product page [Topeak via Urban Velo]

See Also:

• Topeak Alien III CB
• Hands-On With the Topeak Bicycle Multitool
• Topeak PropShock Pump Will Get You Home

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Me last week: “A 1080p webcam? Who on Earth would want an HD webcam. This is stupid.” Me this week (after buying a 27-inch iMac) “Hey, my parents look terrible on this Skype call, blown up on this giant screen. What they need is a 1080p webcam.”

And that’s just what Microsoft will sell you, for $100. The LifeCam Studio Webcam shoots its video at 1920 x 1080 pixels and captures stills at 2304 x 1728. The foot is fashioned to either clip over the top of a monitor or to screw onto a tripod, and the box also contains a carrying case so you can make an even better contribution to the landfill this week.

The camera is also auto-focus, and has a built-in microphone (so you can toss that crappy headset, Dad. It doesn’t suit you anyway). Now, all you need is video-calling software that will support hi-def video and you’re done.

The LifeCam Studio Webcam is available now, from Best Buy.

1080p HD Sensor: Closest Thing to Being There in Person [Microsoft]

LifeCam Studio Webcam product page [Best Buy]

See Also:

• Young Engineer Uses Webcam, Laser to Build Budget 3-D Scanner …
• Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner …
• Lasers, Webcam Make a DIY Multitouch Surface

You know when your uncle Pete comes back from a fishing trip and tells you about the giant trout he caught? “It was this big,” he says, stretching his hands out in front of him. Well, with the Smart Finger, you’d know exactly how big “this” is, and you could put an end to uncle Pete’s stupid lies and exaggerations right away.

The Smart Finger actually uses two fingers. The pair of plastic tubes slip over your real fingers and measure the distance between themselves. This distance is shown on an OLED display in your choice of unit, in metric or good ol’ ‘merican, and a click of a switch will store it in memory for later transfer to a PC.

It’s a wonderful concept. Just like uncle Pete, we tend to use our hands and fingers to describe size, and measuring length is a natural extension. The gadget itself is also rather nicely designed. The two halves join together to make a single bullet-shaped capsule which slips into a USB charging-dock, and the interiors of each part have a silicon membrane with a hole in the centre to grip any size of finger. Thank God they made it in green, though, as it already looks a little too much like a Fleshlight.

Is it as useful as a tape-measure for a quick check to see if the new fridge will fit in the gap left by the old one? Probably not, but for an extended measuring session, this concept design would work great. And if it gives you chance to shut uncle Pete up once and for all, it’s got to be worth it.

My Fingers Are So Smart, They Measure [Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]

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This accessory was as inevitable as the hangover that follows the annual Gadget Lab post-CES party (where we enjoy a fabulous dinner at Denny’s followed by cheap wine sipped from stolen paper-cups in the liquor-store car-park). As soon as we saw the new iPod Nano’s clock-face app, we knew there would be a wrist-strap for it. We weren’t disappointed.

The strap has the pun-tastic name Rock Band and comes from a company called iLoveHandles. The Nano can be set to use the clock as its lock-screen, so a simple touch is enough to bring up the face and check the time. The Rock Band is a wrist-strap onto which the Nano clips (it has the same clip on its back as the Shuffle) and becomes an oversized wristwatch. Well, oversized if you’re not used to hefting a tacky chunk of gold Rolex on your arm, that is.

It’s a great idea, and not really that much different than the sports armbands that have held Nanos to the upper-arms of sporty people for years. I guess that if you were actually going to listen to music while wearing this, you’d need to run the cable up a sleeve to stop it constantly snagging, but that’s not big deal.

The Rock Band is $20, and is surely only the first in what will be a rather crowded market.

Rock Band product page [iLoveHandles. Thanks, Avik!]

See Also:

• IPod Nano

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

This ugly monster is either the most ridiculously niche iPad accessory yet, or it’s a photographer’s best friend. Actually, it could be both. The HyperDrive iPad Hard Drive is an external USB storage box for your tablet, holding up to 750GB of movies and photos and serving them up to the iPad via the Camera Connection Kit.

The iPad is a wonderful device for viewing photos and movies. I have the Camera Connection Kit and its a great way to check, edit and send photos when on a trip away. The problem is that even a 64GB iPad will fill up pretty quick, especially if you’re shooting a lot of RAW files.

The iPad can in fact read files from any USB drive that is formatted the right way. It needs to use the FAT 32 file system (the same as all camera memory cards use) and files need to be in a folder called DCIM. The problem is that there is a limit on the size of the drives that can be used: anything over 32GB won’t work.

The HyperDrive gets around this by only offering photos in 32GB virtual drives that the iPad can see. You load the images onto the dive itself via two card-reader slots (any card will fit) and can browse the file-structure on the built-in screen via an interface even uglier than the unit itself.

If you need something like this, then you’ll already have skipped to the link below and be ordering one. Otherwise you’ll likely be slightly bemused as to what possible point this could have. If you are in the latter group, let me give you another chuckle: the bare-box comes in at $250. Add in a 750GB hard-drive and you’re looking at $600. Ouch.

HyperMac iPad Hard Drive [HyperShop via Digital Story]

See Also:

• IPad Camera Connection Kit Supports External Hard Drives
• iPad USB Camera Connector Works With Keyboards, Audio In-Out …
• Chinese Knock-Off: Two-in-One iPad Connection Kit

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