Hasta La Gadget!

Art Lebedev’s Flashkus is a disposable cardboard USB thumb-drive. Or rather, it is four conjoined thumb-drives, perforated for easy separation.

This is a nice, simple product from Lebedev, normally known for high-end, high-concept and high-priced items like the Optimus keyboard with an LCD screen on each key. The Flashkus is about as simple a product as you could make, with some advantages. First, it is light and environmentally as clean as could be hoped for. You can also write on the card body with a pen or pencil. And finally, it is disposable.

Having just limped my way clear of the walk-fest that is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I find my gadget-bag weighed down with what seems to be a few pounds of USB sticks holding press releases. Every year I wonder if i should recycle them into the worlds smallest RAID array, and every year I leave them in a bowl by the front door of my apartment for guests to grab like candy as they leave.

I’d much rather be given these guilt-free paper sticks. Even better, PR people: You could just write the press release URL on the side of the card and I would’t even need to plug it in.

Available in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB sizes, as soon as Art Lebedev gets around to making them (which — given its history — could be a while).

Flashkus [Art Lebedev via Electronic Beats]

See Also:

• Art Lebedev Turns Utensils into Giant Folding Knife
• Art Lebedev's 3D Pop-Up Power Socket
• Art Lebedev Redesigns the Door Chain Lock For Security Fetishists …
• Art Lebedev Announces Optimus Pultius, A Mini-Me For The Maximus …

Then Raindrop Mini is a watering-can which sits in a purpose-built bulge in any water drainpipe. As the rains gushes from your gutter to the drain below, the little can drinks its fill and sits ready to water your plants.

The urinal-shaped bulge in the pipe is actually the little brother of the Raindrop, also designed by Bas van der Veer. The Raindrop is much larger – looking like the belly of a pregnant giant – and features a water reservoir with a faucet as well as the same Raindrop Can as used by the mini.

Both the Raindrops are made from recyclable PE, manufactured in Holland and sold in garden centers, ready to be installed on fancy balconies across Europe. Just make sure not to install them at ground level, or anywhere that the drunken public might find them at night, or they may well end up getting filled with something other than pure rainwater.

Raindrops Mini [Bas van der Veer via Core77]

See Also:

• Easy-Pour, The Feature-Filled Watering Can
• Stylish Swedish Watering Can With Silicon Spout
• Twist and Spout Won't Lose Your Bottle
• GardenBot Brings Geek Power to Green Thumbs

The Eco Printer seems to be based on an invention I came up with around 15 years ago, although as I never told anyone or did anything about it (and my invention used completely different technology), I”ll let it slide. The printer prints onto paper using a special disappearing ink that can be erased by zapping it with UV light. The idea is that you can print things for temporary use and then re-use the paper, over and over again.

It’s a nice idea, promising the advantages of paper but without the environmental costs – even recycling uses resources. But it misses the exact same thing when I was dreaming up re-printable paper back in the 1990s: Paper is useful because of what you do to it after the ink has been laid down. You can scribble and annotate, fold it or tear strips off and rearrange them. These are the things paper does that an LCD screen can’t, and these are precisely the things that will render the paper useless for this particular printer/wiper. It won’t remove your pencil marks for example, or repair creases and tears.

If you’re forced to keep the paper in pristine condition, then you may as well use an iPad.

And what about this magical UV-sensitive ink? Going on the already dizzying prices of regular printer ink, the cost is sure to be terrifying.

Reprinting on One Paper Only [Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]

See Also:

• Printer Ink Now $8000 A Gallon: Boston Man Sues
• Printer Ink Gouging Runs to $6 Billion a Year
• A New Way to Force You to Buy Overpriced Printer Ink
• For Printers, 'All-In-One' Really Means 'Way-Too-Much'

To the Japanese, the crack of splitting apart a pair of chopsticks is apparently as satisfying as the splitting the membrane-like seal on a jar of instant coffee is to us. More, it signifies the start of a meal, even if that meal is the kind eaten with disposable, takeaway cutlery.

This has led to the slow uptake of a “‘my chopsticks’ movement”, which encourages people to reuse their own sticks, saving trees and so on. And this is why the Stickpecker exists – to bring that satisfying crack to regular chopsticks.

They manage it by putting a pair of magnets into the acrylic shafts. These require a good, hard yank to snap them apart, presumably an adequate placebo for the fulfilling fracture. The design – a stylized woodpecker and tree – is supposed to evoke the wood that these sticks aren’t made of.

I think they’re cool, and the magnet part definitely sounds like fun to play with. They can be had for ¥3570, or a jaw-dropping $44.

Stickpecker [Microworks via Book of Joe]

See Also:

• Lightsaber Chopsticks
• Chopsticks for Better Cloning
• The Cat That Eats Noodles With Chopsticks
• Chopsticks, Spoon United
• Folding Baskets Made From Chopsticks

Hertz is getting serious about its about-to-launch, by-the-hour plug in car rental service Connect by Hertz. Set to launch on December 15th in New York City, the company has plans to extend the service into San Francisco, Washington D.C, Texas and London by the end of 2011. The list of cars in the fleet which will be available to rent now includes the previously announced Nissan Leaf, the Volt, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the Tesla Roadster, the Smart ED, and the Coda Sedan. The program will start extremely small, with only 20 total vehicles available to rent to begin with, but with a plan for between 500 and 1,000 by the end of 2011. The Hertz EV rental program has a fee to join up, and the cars will be rented on a first come, first served basis, but you can sign up now if you’re ready to get behind the wheel of one of the aforementioned silent bad boys.

Hertz plug-in rental program to boast 1,000 vehicles, including the Tesla Roadster originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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