Hasta La Gadget!

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

Trust the folks over in Japan to come up with something crazy from time to time, and here we are with the $56 USB Pollen Blocker that is a surefire way of getting you noticed whenever you are around at the office. After all, who the heck wears a mask like this at work? It might sound nuts, but the USB Pollen Blocker is actually justified in its existence, since each year would see the general Japanese populace get attacked by pollen, and this more or less happens during the spring. Thanko hopes that with the introduction of the USB Pollen Blocker, one’s eyes and nose will be protected against the irritating pollen.

Granted, the USB Pollen Blocker would look a whole lot like a beekeeper’s mask as well as a hazmat suit, where it is touted to offer 99.9% protection from the pores in the air, as though you are in your very own clinical isolation chamber. It comes with a USB-powered fan on top so that the entire shebang will not mist up, all the time ensuring that nasty pollen will not enter into your breathing path. It works great at work, as the visor boasts of a large viewing area so that you can still see what goes on in front of the computer.
[ USB Pollen Blocker looks zany, hopefully it works great copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

I am quite sure when we first started to jump aboard the World Wide Web bandwagon, one of the initial things that were introduced to us included the wonders of email as well as a Web browser. Having said that, do you still remember your Yahoo and Hotmail (which has since been transformed to a Live account) email addresses? Well, receiving an email was a big thing in those days, way before there was this thing called “Spam”. These days, we might even choose to turn off the email notification on our smartphones simply because we are flooded with too many mails, that it gets tedious. Why not enjoy something more visual with the $9.99 Webmail Notifier?

The Webmail Notifier comes in a multi-color and optional sound indicator which will inform you of just which particular account has experienced new activity. Playing nice with Windows-powered machines, the Webmail Notifier will offer support for the likes of Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook Express, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, and POP3 accounts. All you need to do is to plug in the Webmail Notifier into the USB port, where it will sport 9 different colors and 10 (optional) sound indicators, allowing you to set it up according to your tastes.
[ Webmail Notifier lets you know that your inbox is busy copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Do you happen to have an exceptionally strong interest in all things Doctor Who? Should the answer be “Yes”, then you might be pleased to check out this $52.99 Yellow Dalek USB Desk Protector that ought to do its job to make sure that your desk remains off limits to people whom you do not really like, especially at the office. Of course, the Yellow Dalek USB Desk Protector will not be able to zap anyone into submission, but considering how it comes with a flashing light, a motion detector as well as a quartet of Dalek sounds, it is about as real as it gets – the rest of it depends on your imagination.

All you need to do is to plug in the Yellow Dalek USB Desk Protector into any available USB port, and you can be sure that the other items on your desk such as paper clips and stapler will remain there without being touched by anyone else, ever again. The light that is located on its ‘head’ will flash whenever it picks up any kind of motion in the vicinity, thanks to the infrared beam. Apart from that, it will also reacts with one of four sounds: namely hover sound effects, ‘Exterminate!,’ ‘Time, Jump, Imminent Repair,’ and gun sound effects.
[ Doctor Who Yellow Dalek USB Desk Protector gets rid of unwanted colleagues copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The folks over at ZTE have just announced that they will be shipping a home-grown LTE modem within one of its very own LTE USB dongles. If you are one who loves to dive knee deep into model numbers and names, then it would be better known as the ZTE ZX297502. This would come across as a second-generation LTE modem from ZTE. According to Jim Mielke, VP of engineering at ABI Research, “ZTE recently announced the WiseFone 7510 LTE modem for release early this year but the 7510 is a third generation LTE chip. The first generation was mainly a prototype; the second generation was the first real production chip and is certainly the basis for the 28nm 7510 scheduled to be released early 2014.”

The ZX297502 would strictly remain as a modem baseband; where it is accompanied by ADI and ACP transceivers, not to mention a TI power management unit (PMU). ABI Research has also performed a complete teardown of the ZTE LTE chipset as well as the accompanying chips, where one would be able to gain access to the complete bill of materials alongside rough cost estimates, high resolution dismantling and board photos, and component die photos and X-rays. We wonder when will we see these products being used widely by the masses. [Press Release]

ZTE To Ship Own LTE USB Dongles original content from Ubergizmo.