Hasta La Gadget!

This might look like a joke product, but designer Paul Kweton has actually built and used the Ring-O-Star (ho ho) bike cup holder. The silicon ring attaches to a bar-end via an aluminum expanding bolt, and then the cup of hot joe is placed inside ring and transformed into a dangerous weapon.

This is obviously a bad idea, but if used for a bottle of water or a soft drink (in a can, of course) it could be a handy addition to a bottle cage. Actually, let’s be honest. It’s a terrible idea. I would buy one, though, and load it with an empty cup and use both for handy storage and to baffle pedestrians.

Update: Our New York Bureau Chief, John C Abell, put me on the trail of a real, gyroscopically controlled cup holders, meant for use in boats or clamping to fishing rods. The $15 device swings on two axes to keep things steady, and comes with a insulating foam insert. You can even get it with a “Rail Mount Adapter”, which should clamp nicely to a handlebar. You’ll find it here. All it needs is some garish coloring and it could be marketed to the fixie-fashion crowd.

Coffee Cup Holder for Bikes by Paulbaut [Design Boom]

See Also:

• Coffee-Cup Power Inverter for In-Car Charging
• Cup Holder Blows Hot and Cold

Amongst the real gadget gems in Sierra Club Green Home’s “50 green Gadgets” list, there are some hilariously under-thought items. For every solar-powered Nintendo Wii system, there’s a Helios Solar Grill (the monstrosity above), which actually pipes heat from its parabolic sun-gatherer through to the grill on the other side, and manages to look like the kind of Jetson-junk “inventions” I drew as a kid.

Our favorite, though, has to be the Wind-Helmet Power Generator, a device so wilfully and impractically green that it is almost like the practice helmet Luke Skywalker wore in Star Wars, blinding the wearer to the obvious before them. The blurb:

The Wind-Helmet has a windmill in your helmet. Wind flows over the helmet, through the propeller in the rear, and stores energy in a set of rechargeable batteries for later use. Although there are a lot of power chargers out there, the Wind-Helmet allows for you generate power with something you will already be using. [emphasis added]

This is extraordinary. Lets take a look at the bike and consider what else “you will already be using”. Spinning wheels, perhaps? Wheels which have been used for decades to power the bike’s lights, or even trickle-charge iPods? Wheels which can generate power either with a dynamo or an almost drag-free rare-earth magnet setup?

But, you know, a giant, Tron-style helmet with a bunch of fans and turbines inside, hooked up to a battery pack via a cable is much more efficient, don’t you think? We have a couple of suggestions ourselves. What about a pump somehow operated by the turning wheels which would squeeze air into a pressure tank. It would then squirt out into a turbine and the energy produced then stored in batteries.

Or what about giant loops of cable buried beneath the road, and bikes loaded with magnets. Bike lanes could be painted in swooping zig-zags to make riders cross and double-cross the subterranean wires and power whole cities. Or perhaps that is a little impractical?

We kid, but there are a bunch of handy little widgets in the gallery, too. Did we mention the solar-powered Wii? Amazing.

50 Green Gadgets You Can Use To Help Save The Planet [Sierra Club. Thanks, Emma!]

OK, we were wrong. We said, prematurely, that the business card was dead, when in fact all it needed was a new case. The NES Controller Type Card Case, to be exact, a ¥2,900 ($31) anodized aluminum folder with a pair of compartments within — one for your cards, and one for those you receive.

There are two designs, neither of which do more than the other. Each looks like an NES controller, but one has a fake mic and volume switch in addition to the fake D-Pad.

You know where we’re going here, though, right? The case should actually be a fully functioning controller, for an iPhone or a Nintendo DS, perhaps. And if you’re going to put a USB plug on there, throw in some flash memory at the same time. Then it could be a little closer to justifying the price-tag.

Product page [GeekStuff4U via Akihabara News]
See Also:

• Augmented Reality Business Cards: WoW For Suits?
• LEGO Business Card
• How to Make a Business Card Vanish, Palm a Coin

Ho ho ho! The iPill. It looks like a pill. Do you see?

Bad, pun-tastic name aside, the iPill is a cheap solution for sound recording on the iPod. Compatible with the iPods Nano 4G, Classic 120GB, and Touch 2G, the little capsule breaks open to reveal its jack plug, which you than shove into the headphone socket to enable mono recording.

The little $13 mic has been tested by iLounge and the verdict is that it is actually better than Apple’s own microphone. This isn’t a surprise. In the realms of accessories, Apple pretty much sucks. The company has never made a decent mouse, and its headphones seem engineered to break after a few months of use.

So, should the iPill show up in the US in useful numbers rather than the trickle currently dripping in, it might be worth picking one up. Just don’t try to take it through customs yourself.

Ozaki iPill On-The-Go Mic [iLounge]

Photos: iLounge

If you took a roulette wheel and the old electronic follow-the-music game, Simon, you’d end up with something like the Route O-Clock. It is a (prototype) broadband router which detects bandwidth use and displays this information using colors on a clock-like display which divides the day into half-hour segments. The idea is that it helps you plan you most bandwidth-heavy activities for parts of the day during which less traffic is flowing.

It’s a little like the SmartSwitch, a light switch that gets harder to turn on as power consumption in your home increases. It’s a nice idea, we guess, but wouldn’t it be better to have the tech built into a router which could then load-balance for you, for instance firing up BitTorrent only when the tubes are fairly clear?

Also, why so big? A small circle LEDs should do the trick. This reminds us more of King Arthur’s Round Table. Or a dart board. Or a… well, you get the idea. Ambient metering of environmental variables? Good. Honking, glowing disks on the mantelpiece? Not so good.

Product page [Future Routers via The Giz]