Remixable Lego Remote Control

dream_lego_remoteWe see no reason why this Lego remote control shouldn’t become reality. In fact, quite the opposite. We don’t see why the world should be deprived of such a superlative setup.

Think about it. Not only can you, as designer fueledbycoffee intends, endlessly rearrange the switches to suit your tastes, much like icons on the iPhone screen, you can play around with this during more boring shows. Connecting the various components shouldn’t be too hard — the base could take care of power and actually beaming the info to the TV and the “buttons” simply contain switchable RFID tags.

Just don’t tell Sony. The company would probably bring out a licensed version missing the skip and fast-forward buttons to force you to watch ads.

Core-Toon:Dream Product – Lego Remote [Core77]


Coffee-Cup Power Inverter for In-Car Charging

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I may be wrong, but in-car cup holders seem to be a mostly US-only phenomenon. It might be that Europeans simply don’t live in their cars like Statesiders, or that our coffee tends to be smaller — espresso sized rather than delivered in buckets, the weak, watery brew sucked through a plastic teat while sitting safely inside the protective steel and rubber womb.

Which is a shame, as this little cup-holder mounted gizmo looks genuinely useful. The $30 Coffee Cup Power Inverter plugs into the 12v cigarette lighter socket and up-converts the power to 120v AC. There’s even a USB socket on there for charging iPods and the like. The unit can supply a continuous 200 watts, so unless you’re hooking up hair dryers and soldering irons, you should be good for anything. Actually, I’ve just thought of another reason this wouldn’t work here in Europe (aside from us needing 220v to power our gear): We tend to use our car cigarette lighters for lighting our cigarettes.

Product page [ThinkGeek via BoingBoingBeschizza]


‘Eco-Friendly’ Wooden Flashlight Made from Dead Trees

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“Torch” is a 160 lumen LED flashlight, and it’s made from wood. Apparently it is also “eco-friendly” according to the blurb at the seller’s site, Areaware. We might be old fashioned, but last time we looked, chopping down trees wasn’t considered friendly to the environment. Especially not hardwood trees like the maple used to make this.

The Torch is, however, beautiful, and the LEDs at least will save on juice and replacement bulbs. And if the batteries do run out, you can always set fire to it and  read by the light. The price? A wallet-unfriendly $75, available next month.

Product page [Areaware via Book of Joe]


New Wii Accessory Measures Your Heart Rate

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Nintendo on Tuesday gave a sneak peek of the Wii Vitality Sensor, a Wiimote accessory that fits on your finger and takes your pulse.

Previewed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the Wii Vitality Sensor will serve as much more than a heartbeat gauge, said Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo.

“It intends to have you see the information relating to the inner world of your body, achieve greater relaxation,” Iwata said. “Everyone under pressure in our stressful society could use this as a way to relax … [and it] could even make it easier to fall asleep.”

Nintendo did not announce games it had in mind for the Vitality Sensor. We’re guessing it will have something to do with the Wii Fit exercise game at some point.

No word yet on price or a release date. See another image of the Vitality Sensor below the jump. Also, visit Wired.com’s Game Life blog for more coverage of E3 2009.

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See Also:

Images: Nintendo


QWERTY Grips: Keys for Your Bike

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Back when I was a kid, in the middle of the 1980s BMX scene, it was all about the Mushrooms: ribbed, rubbery handlebar grips which had been so overdosed with friction at the factory that just brushing your pinky against one could give you blisters. Combined with the then-fashionable two-finger brake levers, impossibly stiff sticks which had been similarly over-endowed, this time with torque, and you had a disastrous recipe for manual trauma, with top riders ending up as shovel-handed freaks.

I didn’t care. My parents bought me a racing bike: my damn brother got the BMX. Which is why I have a writing job and he spends his days playing cricket – without a bat. Sweet irony, then, in the Aaron Ross Signature Grip from Odyssey, a BMX handgrip that features an embossed QWERTY keyboard. At least it looks like a QWERTY. Look closer and you’ll see Ross’ name spelled out on the top row, along with “Odyssey” where the numbers should be.

I love it because it’s just plain nerdy, and it might be the first ever handlebar grip I actually buy. Around $8 the pair.

Product page [Google via Art of Trackstand]


Nike+ Mashup: Mario Kart Ghost Racers on Real Streets

mario-kartAmidst some wishful musings, Dennis Crowley – blogger, NYC resident and co-founder of the nerd-gasmic Foursquare – has come up with possibly the most fantastic use of “augmented reality” yet. He wants to use an iPhone to play real-life Ghost Racers.

If you have played Super Mario Kart, you’ll know the score. In single-player time trials you get to race against yourself. Your previous best race is replicated by a ghost version of you, and the goal is to beat it. Crowley suggests that a mashup of the iPhone’s GPS capabilities and the Nike+ pedometer could bring this to the streets:

Ghost racers.  Think: Super Mario Kart time-trials, except you’re running against a ghost version of your best time on the map.  I know the Garmin already does this, but make it social… show me the best times of my friends or other local users.  (I really really want to do this for skiing one of these days).

There seems to be no reason, bar a little programming, that this couldn’t be done. Think about it: bike races against friends who aren’t even there, with the tension of Mario Kart somewhat replicated by, say, coded beeps in the headphones to tell you if you are winning or losing. Or, what about racing against Steve McQueen’s famous car-chase in Bullit? Like I said: fantastic. Now we just have to work out how to build a real-world Red Shell, and stars would be pretty helpful for whacking those delivery vans out of the bike lanes.

Idea [Teen Drama via Kottke]


GameDr Video Game Timer Teaches Kids to Hack

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There are so many things wrong with the GameDr Video Game Timer I don’t know where to start. Actually, I do. That name: GameDr. Is is Game Doctor? Or just Game “drrrr”?

The GameDr is a clamp-on lock for a power cord, designed to stop kids getting square eyes from too much game-time. The plastic box covers the prongs and keeps them locked inside with a four digit combination. The parent can then set the programmer to allow a certain number of hours of use per day, repeatable in every 24 hour period. When the time is up, the power is cut, although there are one-minute and ten-minute warning beeps to allow the kids to save their game before everything goes dark.

The problems are manifold. For the less responsible child, this plastic box should pop open with the swift attentions of a screwdriver blade. Other kids could just guess the combo. Chances are that if it’s set by your mother, you should just try combinations of you and your siblings’ birth-dates to crack the code.

Alternatively, buy a new cable. Both the PS3 and the XBox 360 use a standard three-prong “kettle-lead” which costs about a buck. The Wii uses a proprietary power supply, but even this can be found online for around $20, which is within the allowance of many kids.

One of the first (useful) things I learned to do around the house was to rewire a power plug (thanks, dad!). In England, this is quite a complex operation (I’m actually surprised you don’t need some sort of permit, provided by the nanny-state), but Stateside I imagine a screwdriver and a pair of scissors should take care of the job inside a couple of minutes.

Also, what about parents just telling their kids to turn the machine off?

At any rate, we proudly present the GameDr with our Gadget Lab “FAIL” award, reserved for those products that not only tick all the boxes on our “FAIL” chart, but cause us to add new ones (if you are interested, the GameDr has added a new “possible child electrocution” category to the list). Congratulations! $30.

Product page [Essential Tools via Raw Feed]


Hands-On With Griffin’s PowerBlock Charger and Battery Pack

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When we took a look at Griffin’s PowerBlock iPod and iPhone charger two weeks ago, we said it was “almost a no-brainer”. The PowerBlock is your usual USB wall-wart with one difference: a spare external battery. That this costs just $10 more than the official Apple charger is what makes it attractive. Griffin sent us one to look at. Here’s what we thought.

First, the brick is tiny, around the size of a cellphone charger. For me, over in Europe with our fancy-pants power outlets, this proved a little less exciting as I would have to carry a US travel adapter, too, but for US residents, the standard pair of flip-out prongs keeps things compact.

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To use the charger you plug it in and hook up your gadget of choice via USB. This means you can power or charge pretty much anything. The spare battery pack is almost unnoticeable at first, distinguishable only by the matt finish which contrasts against the glossy coating of the rest of the block. When the unit is hooked up to power, it trickle-charges the battery, Griffin claims three hours to fill it up, which is about right in my tests. Remember, though, that you won’t be using the battery all the time. You can therefore leave the pack on charge and grab it when you’re off on a long trip or have just forgotten to fully juice-up your iPod.

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Pull the battery pack away and you’ll see the dock connector, which means it will only work with iPods and iPhones. The battery doesn’t get its power from here, though: The connector simply sits inside a plastic hole in the main body. Instead, it is held in place by a couple of magnets and charges via their connections. Neat.

The PowerBlock battery has a row of green LEDS along the front which light up when you plug the charger in, indicating the power level. When it’s giving succour to a nearly dead iPod, you can press the button on the front to see the remaining charge. It looks a lot like the battery indicator lights on a MacBook, in fact.

How much power do you get from a charge? Griffin says that the brick will give a full charge to a Nano, and half a charge to an iPhone or  an iPod Touch, and this seems to be true. You can also just use the iPod as if it were plugged in, in which case, these are the official numbers:

4G Nano

24 hours music

6 hours video

iPhone 3G

1.5 hours Web Access

2 Hours Talk Time

I tried the 2G Nano and it charged to full in no time, just like being plugged in. There is a caveat, though. With an iPhone or almost any iPod, you just hook up the brick and carry on. The Touch and the Nano, however, have a problem: they have their headphone jacks on the bottom, next to the dock connector, which means that you can’t use headphones while charging. One more thing: You’ll need to bring your own iPod USB cable, as there is none in the box.

So, should you buy it? Yes. It costs $40, just $10 more than Apple’s own charger, and it has a spare battery which is so tiny and light you could keep it in your jeans pocket and not notice. If you’re in the market for a charger, then this is the one to buy. Seriously. It’s a no-brainer.

Product page [Griffin]
See Also:

Griffin PowerBlock Charger Packs a Spare


Utility Knife Cards Separated (by $200) at Birth

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Swiss Army Knives, exploded and then packed into (thick) credit-card sized packages, are undeniably useful. I have had one for years, using the little knife for cheese, the weak tweezers for removing splinters (don’t ask) and the small pin for resetting routers and ejecting stubborn CDs from my slot-loading Mac. It even (so far) makes it through post-911 security theater checkpoints.

Today we have two updated versions — The $20 Tool Logic Survival Card and the $325 Hermès/Victorinox Swisscard. The difference? Other than the leather case, almost nothing. In fact, remove that case and the Swisscard can be had for just under $20.

The Swisscard is much like mine, with tweezers, a small paper knife, a mini-biro, a router-booter pin, a screwdriver, scissors and an LED lamp. And, of course, a $305 leather sheath. The Tool Logic from ThinkGeek looks a little beefier with a bigger, easier to wield serrated knife, tweezers, toothpick, a “magnesium alloy fire starter”, a whistle and an LED flashlight. Both look good, although with subtly different aims. In the words of the great Ferris Bueller, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

Product page [Hermes via Book of Joe]

Product page [ThinkGeek]


Apple: Beware Static In Your Earbuds

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Those trendy, white earbuds we’ve all come to know and love could turn against us in the form of a static shock, according to a support bulletin issued by Apple.

According to Apple, static can build up in the earbuds under a number of conditions: very dry environments, very windy environments, taking your device in and out of your pocket, jogging or exercising with your device, or contact with clothes composed of synthetic fibers such as nylon.

Apple’s advice? Buy stuff. A portable humidifier will add moisture to the air; anti-static sprays remove static in the air; anti-static hand lotion will help if you have dry skin; and, well, clothes that aren’t nylon would help, obviously.

Other than that, Apple advises to keep your media player out of the wind by using a case, or leaving it in your bag or pocket. Also, resist whipping out your iPod/iPhone repeatedly like you’re Clint Eastwood.

Apple said static build-up is not isolated to Apple earbuds, meaning other devices could experience the same issues.

Support bulletin [Apple]

Photo: mil8/Flickr