Jun 23

iPhone Gun Accessory for Augmented Reality Shooting

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, augmented reality, iPhone, Today's Chili

Shoot aliens as they invade your home with the AppBlaster

Slot your iPhone into this toy gun and you can blast away at aliens that only you can see, overlaid on top of the scene ahead of you thanks to the magic of augmented reality.

The AppBlaster is a £20 ($32) plastic gun with an iPhone case. Load up the (free) companion game, called Apptoyz Alien Attack and you’re off. The attacking aliens are projected on top of a live view of your bedroom or kitchen, fed in through the iPhone’s camera. Your aim is detected by the iPhone’s gyroscope and you fire by pulling the trigger, linked to a capacitive pad that touches the screen.

To reload, just throw the gun up to your shoulder, and the accelerometers do the rest. It looks like a blast.

The game itself looks cheap and tacky at best, though. My suspicions are also raised by the App Store reviews, too many of which contain the line “Best free app I’ve ever played.” At least it’s free to try before you drop dollars on the gun itself.

Maybe other games will be written for the AppBlaster. I’d love a LaserTag style game where you could actually shoot friends who were also toting the AppBlaster, but that might be too tricky to implement. Still, imagine playing the N64 classic Goldeneye, only in your apartment instead of in a secret underground lair.

AppBlaster [Red5 via Engadget]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 23

Bike Takeout Basket Carries Beer, Burritos

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

The Takeout Basket is perfectly sized to carry a six-pack

If you live in Portland, you do everything on your bike. You take the kids to school. You do the weekly shop. You even bike down to the gas station to fill up a gas can and bring it home to juice your car. And of course you go to the liquor store to pick up some beer.

This last just got a little easier with Portland Design Works’s Takeout Basket, a small alloy rack that you clamp to your handlebars. The basket measures 155mm x 255mm x 105mm. That’s big enough for “a six pack of bottles, five burritos, three chinchillas or an extra layer of clothing,” according to the blurb. It weighs 500 grams, or 1.1 pounds.

The Takeout Basket also comes with a waterproof rolltop bag for times when you don’t need to carry a six-pack with you (those times will, of course, be rare), and clamps to any handlebar between 25.4 and 31.8mm in diameter. There’s even a slot at the front to hold a D-lock.

This is a nice, modern take on the handlebar basket, and the bag and lock holder are great additions. I’d totally put one of these onto the handlebars of my otherwise sparsely decorated single-speed bike. If only it came in a color other than black. $120.

Takeout Basket product page [Portland Design Works via EcoVelo]


No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 21

Pinzacord Lays The Smack on Your Tangled Cables

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

The Pinza shows your unruly cords who’s boss

Your desk, like mine, is a mess of cords. Worse, those cords tend to slip and slide onto the floor beneath where they immediately multiply and tangle themselves like Medusa’s hairdo. What you need is one thing to rule them all. That thing is the Pinza.

The Pinza is a fancy variation on the home-made bulldog clip cable-wrangler. You run your cables through the slot in the center of the stainless steel cylinder and then pop an o-ring over the end. This pairs up with another rubber ring to stop the Pinza from sliding around. To extract a little more cord, just pull. When you let go again, the weight of the cord pulls the Pinza back. It rolls on its rubber runners and pinds the cord in place.

Better still, it looks great, which is important on my desk as it needs to contrast with all the half-empty espresso cups and unopened bills that litter the top. It’s also cheap, as these things go, costing $12 or $16 depending on which size you choose. Available now.

Pinza cord wrangler [Pinzacord via Werd]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags:
Jun 17

Griffin DJ Cable Splits Output Between Headphones and Speakers

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, ipad, Today's Chili

DJcable 01 HiRes1

Griffin’s DJ Cable is little more than a fancy splitter

Griffin’s DJ Cable lets you split the output from Algoriddim’s award-winning Djay app so that you can cue and mix like a real disk jockey. The y-shaped cable plugs into the headphone socket of your iPhone, iPad or Mac and sends the master and cue outputs down different wires. And unlike expensive USB sound devices to add a second output (to a Mac at least), it costs just $20.

A bargain, right? Well, not quite. The cable is little more than a splitter that takes the stereo output from the app and turns it into two mono signals. Given that the software to do this is built in to the app itself, you could use any old stereo to mono splitter to do the job.

Then again, Griffin gear is usually pretty well made (apart from its first-gen inline mic and remote adapter for the iPhone, of which I broke two within weeks), so it should last a little longer than generic splitters. The last thing you want when you’re in the middle of a set, even if it’s just in your bedroom, is to have a cable break on you.

Available now for $20. the Algoriddim Djay app is $10.

DJ Cable [Griffin. Thanks, Madison!]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags:
Jun 16

Adapter Adds USB Port to Galaxy Tab 10.1

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, samsung, Today's Chili, usb

After ditching USB for an iPad-like 30-pin port, Samsung will now charge you $20 to add it back

Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab Adapter adds a USB port to your ten-inch tablet. Just like Apple’s camera connection kit, it hooks into the 30-pin connector and provides a USB port. Unlike Apple’s connector, it will let you hook up pretty much any kind of USB device, including but not limited to “keyboards, mice, thumb drives,” according to Samsung’s blurb.

Mice? Yup. The pitch continues “Insert a USB mouse or keyboard to improve enterprise efficiency at the office or at home.” I did a little digging and it turns out that if you hook up a mouse to the Tab (via USB or Bluetooth), a mouse pointer will appear on the screen.

This could actually prove pretty handy. Whenever I use my iPad along with a Bluetooth keyboard, it’s jarring to have to reach up and touch the screen for editing. While I know that Apple will never, ever add a mouse pointer to iOS, I can appreciate that the feature would be useful on occasion.

The dongle is designed only for the Tab 10.1. The seven-inch Tab already has its own USB port, so you don’t need this anyway. $20.

Galaxy Tab Adapter USB [Samsung via Engadget]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 16

PhotoFast i-FlashDrive Shifts Files Between Computers and iPhones

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, ios, storage, Today's Chili

The i-FlashDrive works as a thumb drive for both computers and iPhones

The i-FlashDrive is a curious device, although it looks as if it may be obsoleted by Apple’s upcoming iCloud service. The i-FlashDrive is a dongle with a USB plug on one side, a dock-connector on the other and a chunk of flash memory in between. The idea is that you load it up with files from a computer and then transfer them to your iPhone or iPad.

If you name a folder on the drive “DCIM” and filled it with pictures, you should be able to open them directly into the iOS Photos app, just like with the camera connection kit. But the i-FlashDrive also works with a companion app of the same name. This lets you transfer files to and — crucially — from the iDevice, something that can’t otherwise be done. You can also transfer files between iDevices.

You can also view these files on the device, but it is unclear whether you can then open them in other apps via the standard “open in” method. If so, then this is very cool indeed. If not, it is pretty pointless.

The i-FlashDrive comes in three sizes. 8GB for $82, 16GB for $100 and 32GB for $161. Considering these crazy prices, the fact that the i-FlashDrive app is another $10 seems rather cheeky. The i-FlashDrive app is available now, and the dongles ship in July.

PhotoFast i-FlashDrive [PhotoFast via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags:
Jun 15

Waterproof Headphones Fear No Puny Washing Machine

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, earbuds, Today's Chili, waterproof

Pioneer’s waterproof headphones can survive a trip through the washing machine

Running your iPod through a washing machine cycle might not be fatal, but it’s certainly not a good idea. On the other hand, sometimes I wish I could wash the earbuds I use with it, especially after they get to be a few months old and end up caked with wax and fluff.

So I’m very interested in Pioneer’s Washable Inner-Ear Sports Earphones, which are rated as waterproof to one meter. You might not want to swim with them (your MP3 player is still not waterproof, remember?) but you can throw them into the washing machine or just rinse them out in the shower after a workout. Better still, you can sweat as much as you like while wearing them. I’m sure I have killed at least one set of ‘buds with excessive perspiration.

Pioneer’s earbuds are available now, for $60, and come in a bewilderment of hideously bright colors.

Washable Inner-Ear Sports Earphones [Audiocubes]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 15

GRID-IT Tablet Bag Holds Everything. Everything

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

If you can’t shove it into the GRID-IT Wrap, then it’s not worth taking with you

If you played Katamari Damacy by rolling a sticky iPad through your gadget closet (you guys have a gadget closet, right?) then you’d end up with something like the Grid-It Wrap (or GRID-IT!™ Wrap For iPad, to give its full and ridiculous title).

The heart of the GRID-IT is a neoprene sleeve to protect your tablet. On the front of this are a series of elastic straps, criss-crossing each other like a drunk criss-crosses the sidewalk on his way home. These straps form various stretchy nooks and crannies into which you can jam chargers, cables, phones and all the other electronic detritus you deem essential to your life.

Once loaded, a flap comes down to cover the lot, preventing snagging. If it hadn’t happened way back in paragraph one, this is where the Katamari Damacy comparison would fall down.

The GRID-IT also comes sized for notebooks, netbooks and most sizes in between. This one, for 10-inch tablets, weighs just over half a pound and costs $30. Above you also see the 7-inch Galaxy Tab version.

GRID-IT product page [Cocoon. Thanks, Mark!]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags:
Jun 13

Eatensil, A Multi-Tool for Takeout Food

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

The Eatensil puts all the tools an English glutton needs into one hard-to-use package

This is the Eatensil, a multitool for fast food. Currently being hawked to manufacturers by British takeaway (takeout) website Just Eat, the tool is obviously designed to tackle British-style takeout, but I’d argue that the idea is flawed from the beginning, whichever country it is designed for.

The oversized Swiss-Army-Knife style tool includes a knife, a fork and a spoon, a beer-bottle opener, a pizza wheel, chopsticks and a small wooden fork for eating fish and chips (which is totally the best way to eat fish and chips). In short, everything you need for an impromptu meal (unless you prefer wine).

But who would use this? First, every takeout comes with its own utensils. Even pizza can be pre-sliced at the restaurant. If you’re going to carry knives and forks, why not carry real ones? Also, you can only use one tool at a time. How would you use a knife and fork together, for example?

And the inclusion of the disposable wooden chip-fork and chopsticks seems gimmicky at best. Are you really going to wipe these clean and reuse them? Which brings us onto washing this whole unhygienic mess. Finally, the small, easy-to-wield wooden fork has its entire point undermined when saddled with this giant handle.

Then again, it may just be a publicity stunt to drum up some extra hits for Just Eat, in which case it has been perfectly designed. And in which case it will probably never be made, a boon to the world’s resources of plastic, metal and cheap splintery wood.

Eatensil becomes ultimate cutlery for take away fans [Pocket Lint via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 10

Huge, Heavy Retro-Styled Box Juices MacBooks with C-Cells

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, macbook, Retro, Today's Chili

The Bird Electron charger powers your MacBook for a whopping two hours using ‘just’ eight c-cells

If you were looking for the most expensive and least ecologically-friendly way to power your MacBook, then you could do a lot worse than pick the MacBook Air External Power from Bird Electron. If your other criterion is to have a device that looks like a 1970s cassette tape recorder, then you really have no choice.

Here are the numbers. The asking price is ¥23,100, or around $290. Then you have to buy enough C-cell batteries (yes, I said C-cells) to fill it. It takes eight of them. Next, you’ll need to buy a MagSafe airline adapter, which is another $50.

Then, when your 11-inch MacBook Air has finally exhausted its five-hour battery life, you plug it into this money-sucking behemoth and enjoy mere two extra hours. At least you can head to the corner store and buy up their entire stock of C-cells to keep the thing going. Or, you know, spend the money on a coffee and recharge at a Starbucks.

It gets worse. The box weighs in at a whopping 1,050 grams, or 2.3 pounds, or just about the exact same weight as the 11-inch Air. And that’s without batteries. Add in eight c-cells and, according to this chart, you’ll add another 520 grams, or 1.1 pounds.

As a backup for disasters, when you can’t recharge even an external li-ion battery, this could be worth it. That’s a rather rare use-case, though. Still, it looks awesome, and that counts for something, I guess.

MacBook Air External Power [Bird Electron via Akihabara News]

See Also:


No Comments | Tags: ,