Hasta La Gadget!

Dr. Carl Koch was sick of fiddling with his tripod to get his camera level, so he spent the next four years inventing and designing the Acadalus, a self-leveling tripod head. Instead of adjusting knobs and levers until the little spirit-level bubble sits obediently between its lines, you just pop the camera onto the Acadalus and wait a couple seconds.

Modeled on an airplane flight-simulator, an inclinometer measures just where the head is and then uses stepper-motors to acquire a level-plane. Further adjustment can be made manually by using the D-pad like buttons on the side.

The Acadalus can be used in the studio, plugged into the mains, or you can hook up the 2800 mAH 18.5 V lithium ion battery which should last you for a day of shooting (or two hours of continual use if you are, we suppose, on a ship yawing and rolling in a stormy sea).

So how much is this five-pound, Swiss-made behemoth? A whopping $5,000 for the studio kit, plus another $500 if you want the battery and charger. If you need both the power cable and the battery option, you’re looking at yet another $100, nickel-and-diming you up to $5,600. No wonder the PDN article which led us to the Acadalus shows it supporting the Leica S2, a camera that costs $26,000 body-only.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be willing to spend a lot of hours in Lightroom using the crop tool to level my drunken, off-kilter snaps before I’d drop this cash, but I imagine that there may be somebody out there who really, really needs a level camera. Good luck if your subject is wonky, though.

Acadalus [Acadalus via PDN]

The Drinkclip/Beltclip is a combination plastic cup-holder. The twist is that you clip it to your belt for on-the-go slurping of the day’s coffee ration. Over the last week, I have been testing it out in a variety of unsuitable situations. But first, a brief recap.

Almost three weeks ago, I gently mocked the clip as being both dorky and dangerous, inviting spillage of scalding-hot coffee directly onto your body. Readers agreed: “Imagine the fun when the crowd surges and the hot coffee is squeezed out of the squashed cup!” wrote ka1axy in the comments (somebody else tried to co-opt the thread with a fundamentalist anti-coffee screed: “coffee is bad for you anyway, stop drinking it and you wont be temped to buy this stupid thing.”)

The Drinkclip people got in touch and issued a challenge to test their device. I accepted. So how did it do?

Pretty good, although as ever I tried to abuse it beyond necessary limits. The clip comes in two parts. A strongly sprung clamp like that found on a workshop inspection lamp, and a detachable belt-clip-able section that does the cup-holding. When used together, the hinged joint lets the cup stay more-or-less upright as the clamp section sways.

The clip works great as a low-slung desk-bracket that keeps your coffee below notebook level for safer spills. And the detachable clamp is strong enough to grip even the thinnest surface safely. But that’s not the point. This is a clip to be used on the move.

I avoided coffee, mostly due to a Starbucks allergy which kicks in every time I see a children’s milkshake packaged for adults. Instead, I chose beer, and slipped the can into the included “koozie”, a neoprene sleeve which both insulates the can and keeps it firmly in the clip. Mounted directly to the belt, it is surprisingly spill-resistant and frees you hands for essential tasks like flipping steaks on the grill or making a turn signal as you cross four lanes of traffic on your bike. In fact, get the clip to sit upright when you’re in the saddle and it is rock-solid, mostly because your waist doesn’t move much as you ride.

Stage two was a stress-test for the full clamp assembly. Again on the bike, but not just rolling down the street. This needed to be brutal. I took the clip and a six-pack to Friday-night bike-polo and clamped the Drinkclip to my handlebars, ready for the full stop-start, herky-jerky ride ahead.

The result? A partial success. The clip did indeed stay put, but inevitably drooped down out of reach, although the can stayed upright thanks to the hinges. Worse was the thrashing around of the beer in the heat of play. As I dodged nimbly across the court, my handlebars were flung from side to side. The can was whipped back and forth like the head of a dropped fire-hose. I lost a lot of beer (although the wet patches did cause some opponents to skid and fall, a definite benefit).

Should you buy it? Sure, if you’re a pro-barbecuer then $15 is a steal, and the Drinkclip is certainly tough enough to last. If you’re looking to carry coffee across the city as you walk, don’t. Take a break, stop pretending your time is so damned important and stop off in a non-chain cafe for a real espresso, not some turgid, watery brew or creamy mocha-choca-fluffball.

Beltclip [Drinkclip]

Photo: Charlie Sorrel

See Also:

• First Look: Dorky Drinkclip Good for More than Coffee
• Too Hot to Handle: Hip-Mounted Coffee-Holder

The iPad Vanity Plate “could be the best investment you make to protect your new iPad.” What is it? More a dog-tag than an actual vanity plate for your new device, it is a steel plate big enough for two lines of engraving.

While you could stick this straight onto the iPad, it might be more elegant to just scrawl your name and number onto the gracefully curved aluminum back using a Sharpie. With this presumably in mind, the folks at New PC Gadgets suggest sticking it to your iPad case instead. If this is their own pointless combination-lock case, then you will now be doubly “secure”.

To entice you further, here are some of the plate’s must-have features, pasted directly from the site:

Fits Any Corner

Makes your iPad stand out from the crowd

Ensures your iPad will be returned by Good Samaritan

The best part is of course the sample in the photo, which has the name and number of Steve Jobs. If only Apple had thought to stick one of these on that lost prototype iPhone: Think of all the trouble that could have been avoided. $13.

Stainless Steel Vanity Plate for the iPad [New PC Gadgets]

IPad owner Jerrod H finally received his iPad Camera Connection Kit and did what any self-respecting geek does with brand new kit: He posted un-boxing photos.

The kit is one of very few accessories which use the USB-ness of Apple’s Dock Connector to hook up to external hardware. In the box, as you can see from Jerrod’s snaps, you get a pair of dongles, one an SD-card reader and the other a USB-adapter for plugging cameras in direct. Once hooked up, the Photos app pops over to the “camera” tab and from there you choose which pictures, both RAW and JPEG, you want to import. The app will detect and ignore duplicates if you like, and you can also choose to have the app delete the images from your card after import. I’d advise against this – to avoid screwing up the card’s file-system, I always format the card in-camera.

From the shots, it also appears that you can pull movies into the iPad, and presumably play them back. The connection kit will be the first accessory I buy when I eventually get an iPad over here in Spain, and I will put the RAW tools to the test. I’m also interested to see some full-scale photo-editing apps on the big-screen iPad. If they’re anything like the excellent iPhone movie-editor ReelDirector, photographers are in for a treat.

iPad Camera Kit received and working [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

Picture 2 [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

Picture 3 [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

At last, somebody has made available the best notebook sleeve in existence. It is a stealth design, made to look just like a creased old manilla envelope, and it is both luxuriously padded on the inside and resistant to spills on the outside. It’s gorgeous and, if you were to leave your computer in a bar, inconspicuous enough for people to just ignore it.

The trouble is, I already have one, and it was free. In fact, generous hardware vendors often include them every time they Fedex a gadget out for review. It is, of course, the padded Tyvek shipping bag used the world over.

But I’m being too harsh. The Undercover Stealth Laptop Case might be made from a “hi-tech material which is waterproof and tear-proof and can be written on” (Tyvek, or similar) but it is also a proper sleeve, with a plush, adjustable lining which will last long after the last of the bubbles has popped in my free version, and it will also seal shut with a Velcro strip. Even the price is a not-too-bad $25, similar to a decent neoprene sleeve. Available now.

Undercover Stealth Laptop Case [Perpetual Kid]