Hasta La Gadget!

I have a friend (let’s call him Dave) who used to joke that his wallet was so fat that it gave him spine trouble from sitting with it, swollen, in his back pocket. But what of those bill-packed status symbols in the age of electronic money? It’s not like your debit-card gets fatter the higher your bank balance.

Enter the free-wheeling innovators of MIT’s Media Lab, who have come up with three billfolds that give tactile feedback based on your transactions. These “Proverbial Wallets” hook up to your cellphone via Bluetooth to grab details from your bank account, and then perform for you.

The Bumblebee buzzes its vibrator with every transaction, giving you a physical reminder that money is entering and leaving your bank account. Put it in the correct pocket and you’ll get a little thrill every time you spend.

The Mother Bear is more thrifty. Its hinge gets tougher to prize open the more you spend. As your balance ticks closer to zero, the Mother Bear shuts up tight like an oyster.

Finally, the Peacock, the perfect gift for Dave. The Peacock swells proudly depending on the size of your balance. As the video voiceover says, “Your assets will be on display to attract potential mates.” Quite.

Proverbial Wallets [MIT Information Ecology]

See Also:

• When Cash Is Only Skin Deep
• Paper or Plastic?
• French Railway Trials USB Tickets
• You’ve Got Bills!

Forget Batman: This is a utility belt. The Rocker Stud Snow Toolbelt is a leather and steel multi-tool. The buckle contains both flat-had and Phillips screwdrivers, and the bit that stops the end of the belt flapping about (what is that part called?) contains three wrenches, in 8, 10 and 11mm sizes. There’s even a bottle opener in the buckle’s rim, so you can “impress” people by popping open a beer with your crotch.

For such a utilitarian piece of apparel, the Rocker Stud Snow Toolbelt isn’t nearly as dorky as its name suggests. But its name does suggest (and deliver) something far worse: Studs. Really? I guess you could buy this $55 belt as a gift for the DIY-crazed punk in your life.

Rocker Stud Snow Toolbelt [686 via Geekologie]

See Also:

• Hands-On with the Drinkclip Belt-Mounted Cup-Holder
• Spider Holster, A Belt-Mounted Camera-Hitch
• $750 Folding Hermès Travel-Belt Features Multiple Flaws

How do you tell if a shoe is a good fit? Take a short walk? Squeeze the front-end with your fingers to make sure there is space for your toes? What about a dangerous, 20-second blast of unshielded x-rays? If you were buying shoes in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, it’s likely that you regularly inserted a tootsie into one of these death-rays.

The wooden cabinets, possibly first built by a Clarence Karrer in Milwaukee in 1924, had the x-ray source in the base, and it would fire upwards through your foot and shoe. Due to a lack of any kind of shielding, it wouldn’t stop there: the radiation would shoot right up into your baby-maker, clearly a perilous occurrence.

The machine, called a “Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope” put out 50 kv from its x-ray tube, which – according to Wikipedia’s figures for today’s machines, isn’t too bad:

In medical radiography voltage from 20 kV in mammography up to 150 kV for chest radiography are used for diagnostic. Energy can go up to 250 kV for radiotherapy applications.

The problem was repeat exposure. While it was recommended that children not be subjected to more than 12 doses a year, there was no such luck for shoe-store employees. According to the article Shoe-fitting with x-ray in National Safety News 62 by H. Bavley (1950), store clerks would put their hands into the beam to squeeze shoes during fitting. Worse still was the fate of a poor shoe model, “who received such a serious radiation burn that her leg had to be amputated.”

Thank God there’s nothing this dangerous around today. Like, you know, full-body backscatter x-ray machines in airports.

Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope [ORAU.org via Kyle “Mr. Fixit” Wiens]

What do you give the man who has everything? Well, nothing, obviously, because he has everything, and if he doesn’t have it, he clearly doesn’t want it. So you do what every other poor sap does. You buy some piece of novelty crap, something that combines two other things into one brand new and ill-conceived hybrid that maybe, just maybe, your man never even knew existed. And you get bonus points for wasting a few hundred bucks instead of just blowing a couple of dollars.

By this reasoning, the Robert Graham USB cufflinks are the perfect gift for the man who has it all. They are both novel (USB! cufflinks! Together!) and expensive ($250). They are also, depending on the pair you pick, quite tasteless, although thankfully not Donald-Duck-necktie-tasteless. You can pick between Paisley, Black Leaf or “Black/Rainbow”, all of which are guaranteed to clash with even the most conservative of shirts. Each ‘link pops open to reveal a 2GB USB drive, for a total of 4GB per pair.

Kidding aside, this always-with-you storage is actually pretty handy. I guess the problem is the patterns which have been vomited onto the cufflinks in the form of colorful enamel. Still, one thing can reassure should you be buying this as a gift for the man who has everything: if he has any taste, you can be certain he won’t already have a pair.

Robert Graham USB cufflinks product page [Cufflinks.com]

See Also:

• Dura-Ace Bike-Chain Cufflinks
• Transformer Cufflinks
• Inside the Mind of a Steampunk Jeweler
• Thermometer Cufflinks

This is a call to arms, a plea for all you lovely Gadget Lab readers to do your sacred nerd-duty. Head over to the Tokyo Flash blog right now and vote for this amazing Tron-inspired watch. Did I just say “Tron” and “watch” in the same sentence? Yes I did. Off you go now, but hurry back.

The watch is called 7R0N, neatly sidestepping trademark troubles, while clearly signaling its inspiration. Designed by Scott Galloway in Yorkshire, England, it has bioluminescent strips that represent the trails of the Lightcycles in the movie, and the hour and minute “hands” are replaced by the frisbee-like light-discs the battling computer-dwellers hurl at each other when enacting their deadly video-games.

Scott says “I tried to think of a way to get the watch noticed. I have several light-up LED watches, but as cool as they are, it’s always been about the clock face with little attention to the strap itself. I wanted a watch where the strap was just as important as the face itself.”

Your watch, Scott, is awesome, and we want to send everybody we can to the Tokyo Flash site to vote and hopefully get this thing made. There’s just one problem: It’s actually pretty easy to tell the time on this thing, in contrast to pretty much any watch made by Tokyo Flash. The outer ring shows minutes, and the inner ring indicates hours. Thus you can quickly and easily decipher the times in the picture above: 8 o’clock, 4 o’clock and 4 o’clock. Simple.

Seriously, people, go vote on this thing. Even if you don’t want it, we need some for office Christmas gifts. Obviously, fop-haired Daniel Dumas will be needing one to keep his Tokyo Flash collection complete, but even the normally punctuality-challenged Gadget Lab slave driver Dylan Tweney wants one of of these. And what Dylan wants, Dylan gets.

Tron-inspired LED Watch [Tokyo Flash. Thanks, Scott!]

See Also:

• Peugeot Concept Bike Channels Tron
• Recumbent Trike is Less Portland, More Tron
• Lazer Bike Helmet Turns You Into a Space Pilot
• Pimp Your Ride: Cyglo Bike Tires with Embedded LEDs