Hasta La Gadget!

Budwrap wraps buds

Budwrap isn’t an insulating collar to protect your delicate office-worker’s hands from your chilled can of watery beer, although it could presumably be used as such. No, Budwrap is a silicon bracelet around which you can securely wrap your cellphone’s earbuds.

Designed by Mark Williams, a high school teacher from Texas, the Budwrap was inspired by two things he saw students doing every day: wearing rubber bracelets and wearing earbuds. The band sits on your wrist and has two ears which wrap over and provide open-sided tunnels into which the earbuds themselves are slotted. Then you wrap the cord gently around the band (the edges are raised to keep it from slipping off) and the jack socket has its own hole to keep it safe.

Because the Budwrap is sized for Apple’s white earbuds, the holes are in all the right places. What’s more, it turns out that your wrist (or the notionally perfect Budwrap wrist) is the same size as the iPhone 4. Or at least it also wraps around the iPhone, longwise, so you don’t have to wear this on your arm.

Mark is soliciting funding from Kickstarter, where a pledge of $15 will get you a black Budwrap “sent directly to your doorstep.” More colors will appear once the project is successful.

Budwrap product page [Budwrap. Thanks, Mark!]

See Also:

• Ingenious Cord-Winder Fashioned From Business Card
• Readers' Hacks: New, Improved Headphone Cable-Winder
• Zip-Together Headphone Cords Eliminate Tangles

The K750 soaks up ambient light and can run for months without new AAs or a plug-in charge. Photo courtesy of Logitech

Wireless keyboards are great for keeping your desk clutter-free. But no one wants to make a trip to the store for a fresh pack of Energizers when their keyboard dies.

Enter: Logitech’s Wireless Solar Keyboard K750, now available in a Mac-compatible model.

Essentially, it’s your high school calculator revisited. Solar cells lining the top of the unit use ambient light — desk lamps, fluorescent ceiling bulbs, and even sunlight for the old-school types — to charge the keyboard. Once set up, it runs without interruption so long as there’s at least some illumination. On a full charge, the K750 can run for three months in complete darkness.

The keyboard has the standard OS X layout with shortcut keys, and each key cap is slightly concave for pleasant typing patter. Choose either all black, or Apple white, with the option of three candy colors to accent the solar panels.

Along with eliminating all of that earth-killing battery waste, the K750 is made without PVC and arrives in a fully recyclable box. Mother Gaia would be proud of you.

Hopefully the BoomCan won’t sound as tinny as its name suggests

Portable speakers are awesome. And while I’m not sure if Scosche’s BoomCan is awesome without testing it, it’s not going to cost much to find out: the little pocket-sized speaker is just $25.

The BoomCan has a single 35mm driver, mounted in a cylinder and pointing upwards. It hooks up to any device using a 3.5mm jack, and runs for up to seven hours on its rechargeable li-ion battery. It also has a line-out connection so you can daisy-chain a bunch of speakers together.

I have almost stopped using my proper home-stereo speakers. It’s just too convenient to beam music over Bluetooth the a SuperTooth Disco or a JawBone JamBox, and the sound is good enough. The BoomCan needs a wire, and is unlikely to come anywhere near the sound quality of a $200 speaker, but it’s still rather handy. And one thing is pretty certain: There’s no way on Earth that this could sound worse than the speaker built into the iPad 2.

BoomCan product page [Scosche. Thanks, Mark!]

See Also:

• Bike Mount for Foxl's 'Audiophile' Portable Speaker
• SuperTooth, a Block-Rocking Portable Bluetooth Speaker
• Altec Lansing Orbit: Stripped Down Portable Speaker
• Bass-Bustin', Battery-Powered Speaker Invented by Rocket Scientist …
• Great Balls With Wire: Razer Ferox Notebook Speakers

The Eraser Pencil does away with wood

Why buy a pencil and an eraser, or even a pencil with an eraser, when you could have the Eraser Pencil? The design, from Deuk Young Lee of Korea, ditches the wood entirely and replaces it with a long length of stiff rubber. Thus, as long as the pencil is long enough to write with, it still has an eraser.

Why Lee made it a cross shape is a little less obvious. It certainly limits the amount of available eraser, and also looks rather uncomfortable to hold, despite Lee’s assertion that it is in fact more comfortable. And what happens when the rubbery exterior bends? Will the lead inside shatter and snap into several shards? Almost certainly.

Deuk Young Lee: Eraser Pencil [Design Boom]

See Also:

• Video: Inside a Pencil-Making Factory
• Drill-Mounted Pencil Sharpener: What Could Possibly Go Wrong …
• Sharpie Reinvents Pen with Liquid Pencil
• Neither Pen Nor Pencil: Write Endlessly In Metal
• Continuous Pencil Means No More Stubs

When I’m drunk, I always think it’s a fantastic idea to fall asleep while listening to some kick-ass rock like the White Stripes’ Catch Hell Blues, only to wake up a few hours later tangled in my headphone cable. These Bedphones won’t save me from drunken nocturnal choking, but they’ll sure make it more comfortable to fall asleep in the first place.

Instead of sitting inside your ear, the Bedphones have flat speakers which sit on top of your ear-hole, held in place by a short length of “memory wire” that wraps around the ear itself. Because they are so thin, you can lie on your side without them being jammed into your head.

So is it a good idea to fall asleep with headphones? I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on a YouTube soap opera, so I have no idea, medically speaking. But it seems like a bad idea, what with all the cables and noise.

I can see that they’d be useful for watching movies quietly in bed, though. My other favorite drunken bedtime ritual is to put Back to the Future or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on my iPad and sip whisky until I nod off. The Bedphones won’t help with the spilled scotch, or the iPad that slips off my lap onto the hard tiled floor, but at least I can sleep the whole night soundly and deal with these problems in the morning.

Bedphones product page [Bedphones via Werd]