Hasta La Gadget!

Look! No, not at those hideous, atrophied monstrosities pretending to be handlebars. Look instead at that mini pump, the PUYL, which contains copper coil, a battery and an LED light. When you pump your tires, you charge the battery. It also solves the problem of where you should put your pump — in a pocket or hidden somewhere down near the bottle cage? No, it goes proudly on the top tube, shining for all to see.

It is a rather clever idea, marred by the fact that unless you ride across a river of broken glass and nails every morning you’re unlikely to keep the battery topped off enough to use it daily — even maintaining high-pressure tires in their almost rigid state requires no more than a few stiff strokes. However, as it is a patent pending design (which won designer Kai Malte Roever an award at Eurobike this year) you’re unlikely to find many people using one. Thus you can leverage their curiosity and let them give the shaft a few sharp tugs to keep the batteries full.

Product page [PUYL via Corpus Fixie]

Steve Lee, aka Essell, thought that his aluminum and plastic was rather an eyesore, despite its clean lines and super-slim profile. So he did what any design obsessed neat-freak would do: he took a can of white spray paint to it.

The result is a confusing white version of the blank black DAS keyboard, a beautifully sleek object which will no doubt start to flake and peel after a few weeks of use. The irony is that Steve has it hooked up to a PC.

Over at Gizmodo, the lovely Matt Buchanan calls it “the Apple keyboard Steve Jobs secretly dreams of.” We’d disagree. The Steve Jobs dream keyboard has, of course, just one big key.

Just One Color [Essell via the Giz]

You know, one of the main reasons for owning a dog (apart from picking up girls) is to get a little exercise. Every day you take a stroll with your filthy, butt-sniffing pal, tossing him a ball and generally getting the blood flowing.

Now, with the Autofetch Motion Pet Ball you don’t even have to take the wet rubber lump out of pooch’s slobbering mouth and strain your poor weak shoulder by throwing it. The ball isn’t actually auto-fetching, but it will certainly keep a dog entertained: in the same way pushing bamboo shoots under somebody’s fingernails will keep them entertained.

You drop in a piece of food or doggy-treat through a special slot and set off the gyroscope inside. The ball spins, wobbles and gallivants around the place as your poor pet struggles to get at the food within, while you lean back from a hard minute of Segwaying (yes, you’re on a Segway, you lazy thing) to chuckle at his clueless desperation.

So go ahead and buy one. It’s only $15, and your dog will love you for it.

Product page [Chinavasion via Red Ferret]

If Howard Hughes hadn’t shuffled off this Earth in a pair of tissue-box shoes 33 years ago, this is doubtless the keyboard the notorious OCD sufferer would be using.

It is, according to the maker Vioguard, the world’s first self-sanitizing keyboard. Rather than wait for you filthy shaved monkeys to get around to cleaning it, the keyboard automatically retracts into its own motorized home and is therein bathed in glorious, cleansing UV light, which will kill a satisfying 99% of germs (although it will do nothing for the cookie-crumbs languishing inside).

How much is this wonderful, sanitary machine? A mere $900, which will pay itself back in un-bought hand-sanitizer in just a few thousand years.

Product page [Vioguard via SlipperyBrick]

Take a peek at the new TwitterPeek, an always-on, always connected Twitter machine. It comes from the folks that make the Peek and Peek Pronto, two bare-bones email-only handsets that can be bought and used without monthly contracts.

The TwitterPeek stays with the simple approach, and does nothing but send, receive and search Twitter posts. It doesn’t do SMS, and it doesn’t even do email. At first we thought this was a joke, but the Amazon listing looks real enough and a quick visit to the Peek discussion forums shows this request from the company: “As usual we have a couple things cooking in the Peek oven. We’re looking for Peeksters that use Twitter a lot.”

The package will cost $200, and that includes a lifetime of Tweeting — you’ll never pay for your connectivity. We expect that we’ll start to see more and more devices with “free” internet connections over cell networks, where the seller does a deal with the telcos to provide low-bandwidth hook-ups. It has worked for the Kindle, so maybe we’ll get the long promised internet-connected Toaster after all. One which burns a Tweet into your breakfast slice.

The picture, by the way, is from Peter Hu’s (of Time and CrunchGear) Twitter feed. We’re running this instead of the regular product shot because a) it is ironically appropriate and b) there’s a huge WIRED logo on the front of the box.

Product page [Amazon via Peter Hu’s Twitter]

See Also:

• Peek Now Available in Cheap Packs of Five
• Peek Leak: Pronto Email Device is Twice as Fast
• Official: Peek Pushes Pronto with Unlimited Texting
• Peek Could Kill Subscription Fees For Its Email Device
• Review: Peek Device Delivers Peak Email Performance And Not Much …