Hasta La Gadget!

During winter, one ought to maintain a careful balance between keeping everyone at home warm and cozy, alongside making sure that the electric bill at the end of the month does not throw your monthly budget out of whack. Having said that, it is pretty nice to indulge once in a while, and for some of us, we tend to cozy up to our favorite couch with a nice, thick fleece blanket covering us to keep us nice and warm underneath. That is fine and dandy if you want to sleep, but what happens when you still want to read a book and yet keep most of your body warm? Enter the $159.95 Heated Furniture Cover.

This particular heated furniture cover will be able to offer an instant cozy place to sit during the cold winter months. It is made out of soft microsuede, where the quilted cover will drape over the back, seat and arms of furniture, while sporting a textured backing to make sure that it remains in place. The cover itself will be able to produce an even, all-over warmth which will go a long way in reducing home heating costs simply by targeting heat directly at a room’s occupants. Not only that, thanks to its generous polyester filling within, the embedded heating elements are virtually undetectable for a comfortable lounging experience. There is a tethered controller that lets you play around with the temperature settings; while an auto shut-off feature will turn off heat after four hours.
[ Heated Furniture Cover keeps everyone warm this winter copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

As the old saying goes, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” At the rate people are skipping meals these days, I think you can tweak that to, “Three square meals a day keeps the doctor away.” Skipping meals is unhealthy and basically messes with your digestive system. But with people so busy these days, who has the time to cook and eat three (or more) proper meals a day?

Working with that in mind, designer Ranhee Chung came up with the Plate Cooker concept.

It basically looks like a sandwich maker, except it doesn’t have grills on the inside. Instead, it has a plate with compartments to hold meat, soup, and veggies that’s just perfect to hold a balanced meal.

It’s essentially designed as a food heater, so it could individually heat frozen foods that you prepared earlier. A lot of people actually do this, and by this, we mean cook a big batch of good over the weekend and freeze it to be eaten in the succeeding week.

What do you think? Would you use something like this?

[via Yanko Design]

Summer is right around the corner, which means you’re going to be wanting to have a watermelon with you at nearly all times as it’s never a bad time to chow down on a slice of refreshing watermelon. But the trick to eating a watermelon is to keep it as cool as possible up until you slice that sucker open, which unfortunately for the human body, means we’ll have to lug around a cooler as well. That is – unless you have your own portable watermelon fridge.

The portable mini-refrigerator / heater is called “Tama-chan” and comes from Japanese manufacturer Joynbond. You can power Tama-chan simply by connecting it to your car’s cigarette lighter socket, although it’s unknown just how long the cooler will keep your watermelon nice and chilled for without needing to be recharged. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Bandai Unveils Vending Machine That Targets Elderly Women, Dispenses Handkerchiefs, Asus Cube With Google TV Launched,

For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, most of us are still in the thick of winter, meaning we have to don our gloves each time we go out, and for some of us, shoveling oodles of snow from the sidewalk each morning just so that we can back the car out of the garage and onto the road. Well, things indoors might be far cozier, but you would also need some sort of heating system in place as well unless you want to freeze your butt off. There are dime a dozen heaters out there in the market, but you might want to consider what the $99.95 Three Second Heater offers by basis of its name.

Assuming all goes as claimed, the Three Second Heater will perceptibly raise the temperature of a particular within a mere three seconds thanks to its infrared heating element. Tests performed by The Hammacher Schlemmer Institute claimed that this heater’s 1500-watt halogen element is capable of raising the temperature nearby by 1.3º F almost immediately, while the standard issue quartz models do take nearly an entire minute to warm up. Being different from traditional heating elements, infrared heat will warm the surrounding area in a similar manner that sunlight warms your skin on a sunny day, without drying out the air or lose energy to leaky ductwork. There is an oscillating fan that ensures the heat will be distributed evenly, whereas a pair of heat settings and an adjustable thermostat let users fine-tune comfort levels accordingly.

[ Three Second Heater copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Bob Averill, who introduced us to the world of underwater hamster care, had a couple of other projects to show us during our visit to Portland, Oregon, including the All-Weather Motorcycle Helmet. What, you ask, makes a motorcycle helmet “all-weather?” Why, built-in heating and cooling, of course. Averill started with a standard Vega modular helmet, adding an evaporative cooler powered by a solar panel on top. The cooler pulls air from an intake on the helmet’s side, sucking up more air at higher speeds and blowing it through a sponge, across the wearer’s face. When things get too cold, there’s a heater built into the liner, created from a heated mouse pad and powered by a lithium battery. Averill is looking to get the project mass-produced, but that’s easier said than done, when it comes to a safety products like this — and Kickstarter, apparently, isn’t playing ball. Check out a video of the helmet after the break.

Continue reading All-weather motorcycle helmet heats and cools your face, protects grey matter (video)

All-weather motorcycle helmet heats and cools your face, protects grey matter (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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