Reebok sets sights on flexible computing sportswear, partners with startup team

Science has prototyped flexible versions of just about everything a ever-loving geek needs: displays, memory, batteries, LEDs, speakers and an input device or three. Now, Reebok’s looking to put some of that computing power up our sleeves. The apparel manufacturer’s teamed up with MC10 — a startup founded by our old friend John Rogers, who helped pioneer the field — with the intent to build “conformable electronics” into high-performance clothing for athletes over the next couple of years. Though the company told MIT Technology Review the devices typically consist of thin silicon strips printed onto flexible materials, and that they might they might measure metabolism and performance using embedded sensors, hard details are few — the only thing we know for sure is that a flexible tech scientist just scored a partnership with a major company, and we’re hopeful they’ll make something neat. PR after the break.

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MIT’s Wallets Swell, Buzz and Clamp Down on Digital Spending

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]

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F-Stop Watch: The Perfect Gift for the Photographer You Hate

Geeks like to show their colors. Bike polo geeks will wear jewelry made from old bike-chains, and the tackier car geeks will don Ferrari jackets and caps, hoping to trick people into thinking they actually have something better than a Ford Taurus parked outside,

Camera geeks already have their badge: a big swinging camera around their neck. But for the times when you can’t wear a giant 24-70 ƒ2.8 phallus on your chest, the F-Stop watch will do. It has a face with a “fetching” aperture-inspired design, and instead of boring old 1,2,3,4 running around the dial, you get markings at numbers 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6 and so on. The strap is faux-leather, like so many classy camera accessories, and it is made in China, just like almost everything in your kit-bag.

Want one? No, me either, but if you insist on inflicting a themed gift on a “loved” one this Christmas, you could do a lot worse, and it’s just $36. And if he or she is a Canon owner, may I interest you in my own entrepreneurial Christmas gift? It’s a “My other Camera is a Nikon” sticker (kidding!).

F-Stop Watch [Uncommon Goods via Oh Gizmo]

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‘Stud’ Utility-Belt Hides Six Handy Tools

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]

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Lens Bracelets: Too Nerdy Even for a Geek?

Just how dorky do you have to be to wear one of these lens bracelets? Pretty damned dorky, I’d say, and that’s coming from someone who is still seriously considering making a bracelet from a bike-chain.

The Lens Bracelets are made from silicon, and ribbed to further emulate the nodules that help focussing on a real lens. They’re both the same size, but styled as either a 50mm prime or 24-70mm zoom. Would anyone really wear one of these? A bike-chain bracelet is at least kind of cool, in a tough-guy, mechanical way. Jewelry in the shape of a lens-ring, though? You may as well just become celibate right now.

The bracelets are $10 each, or $15 for the pair, available now.

Lens Bracelets product page [Photojojo]

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Vintage Shoe-Fitting X-Ray Machines Will Zap Your Feet

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]


Webbed Latex Diving Gloves Will Terrify Mermaids

Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you, sir, have a filthy mind. And I admit that on first seeing these terrifying webbed-gloves, I thought the exact same thing. So let’s get our minds out of the gutter and take a look at the other advantages of wearing gloves that make you look like an amphibian gimp.

The name doesn’t help any: Darkfin sounds like a lame fish-wizard, but the contoured latex gloves will help you to swim more like a fish. The finger-flaps increase the surface area of your hands by 70%, letting you push harder against the water when diving, swimming, surfing or even sky-diving (in the air, obviously, not the water).

The Darkfin company says that the rubber won’t impede your manual dexterity, and that the gloves – if looked after – are tough enough to outlast a wetsuit. They have one other advantage, too – because of the increased force needed to push, you’ll get some hot-looking upper-body musculature in no time.

Just make sure that you never, ever leave these on your nightstand. $25.

Darkfin product page [Darkfin via Uncrate]

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USB Cufflinks, For the Man Who Has Everything (Except Taste)

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]

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Award-Winning Braille Bracelet Looks Good, Feels Even Better

How do you design a learning aid for blind people? By making a tactile, easy-to-find tool, that’s how.

The Braille Alphabet Bracelet was designed by Leslie Ligon, who has a blind son, and has just won a People’s Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The bracelet is simple, with an embossed letter on one side of each segment and its Braille equivalent on the other. It is also beautiful, and makes a lovely piece of jewelry in its own right.

It’s easy to use, and the blind owner can pick up the dotted alphabet just by touch, wherever they are, like a guilty Catholic nervously fingering a rosary. This is important, as only ten percent of legally blind people in the US can read Braille yet “at least 90 percent of the blind that hold jobs are Braille literate.” So it seems like – as in the sighted world – you need to be able to read and write to earn a living.

Want one? They’re just $40. Amazingly, they used to be on sale at Amazon, but now you’ll need to head over to the National Braille Press to get one. Available now in silver.

The Braille Alphabet Bracelet Wins the 2010 People’s Design Award [Cooper Hewitt]

Braille Bracelet product page [NBP]

Image: Cooper Hewitt

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Vote for This Amazing Tron Watch to Get it Made

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!]

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