Hasta La Gadget!

The Water Scale is ingenious in its simplicity, using little more than a piston and a tube to weigh your cooking ingredients. The scale, from designers Muzaffer Kocer and Ayca Guven, uses Archimedes’ Principle to measure weight.

The bowl of the scale is connected to a plunger that floats on top of water inside the scale’s body. When the bowl is pushed down, the water is displaced and flows up a tube. This tube – which also contains a floating plastic ball to make it easier to see – is graduated. You read it just like a thermometer.

Archimedes’ Principle says that – for a floating object – the amount if water displaced is equal to the mass of that object. Thus a potato weighing half a kilo (a big potato, to be sure) and dropped into a floating bowl will shove aside half a kilo of water. Thus a scale can be calibrated.

This design keeps the Water Scale incredibly simple, as you can see from the rendered images above, requiring no electronic or complex mechanical parts. I have one question though. The scale is designed to weigh objects of up to a kilogram (2.2-pounds). Doesn’t this mean that you’d have to have a kilo (liter) of water on board to do that?

Water Scale product page [Muzaffer Kocer via Yanko]

See Also:

• Weigh to Go: Luggage Tag and Scale Combo
• Wi-Fi Scale Tweets Your Weight
• IPhone-Connected Weighing Scale for Your iDiet
• Folding Digital Kitchen Scale is Easily Hidden
• Optical Mouse with Built in Weighing Scale: You Know What it's For …
• Weigh Your Bodybag With a Portable Scale

The egg-shaped chair was one of the coolest innovations to come out of the late 60s and early 70s — right up there with the Camaro, hot pants and the first five Black Sabbath albums.

Now that same “room within a room” stoner vibe has been updated for the Blu-ray set. The Sound Egg is a retro-cool egg chair fitted with a full surround sound system — complete with a subwoofer behind the seat — and coated on the inside with sound-isolating foam. Climb in, crank it up, and you’ve got your own personal capsule for watching movies, playing games or just plain spacing-out.

These chairs start at around $1,500, and you’ll pay extra for custom colors and for the optional mechanical arm mount for an LCD screen.

We first got a peek at these things about a year ago, but we had a chance to actually try one out at CES in Las Vegas. The sound inside is fantastic: clear, immediate and loud. Best of all, the foam does a great job of isolating the noise. When you’re inside, the outside world is effectively silenced. And since the sound system is considerably quieter on the outside than it is inside, it’s well-suited for any Dave Matthews fans or Call of Duty devotees you’re forced to share a living space with.

See also:

• Sound Egg Chair: A Cocoon for Your Crib
• Smart HD Speakers Bring the ‘Sweet Spot’ to You, Wherever You Are
• MIT Creates ‘Surround Vision’ for TVs
• Optimize Your Surround Sound System

Block soap is like dehydrated liquid soap, and has the same weight and concentration benefits as anything that has had the water removed (Yoda, for instance, was tall and wrinkle-free before he was desiccated by centuries of using the Force). The environmental benefits are clear – no water means less to transport around the world in trucks and on boats.

The problem, as anyone who has showered in prison will tell you, is that a bar of soap can be slippery, jumping from your fingers as you lather yourself and precipitating a rather hazardous bending-over maneuver to pick it back up.

Nathalie Stämpfli’s “Soap Flakes” dispensers fix this. They shave bars of soap into soap flakes, which are quick to foam, and the dispensers are hard to drop. One is fixed to a wall, operated by pushing on a lever at the front. The other is like a pepper-mill for soap: twist the top and the soap curls out of the grater on the bottom.

Best of all, they look great. In fact, the handheld mill has a dome that looks just like the plexiglass helmet of the brainiac aliens in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. How’s that for livening up a boring shower?

Soap Flakes: Soap Blocks instead of liquid Soaps [Nathalie Stämpfli via Twitter]

See Also:

• Smart Shower-Dongle Mixes Soap with Water
• Google Cleans Up With Gmail Soap
• Hand Powered Portable Washing Machine Misses the Point

LAS VEGAS — Minimalists who eschew carpets but still hate to clean their own hardwood floors now have a more minimalist robot option. The iRobot Scooba 230 is a a tiny new floor-washing robot that looks good enough to be shown off on top of the coffee-table, not just hidden underneath it.

The new Scooba, announced at CES 2011 along with a sleeker version of the carpet-cleaning Roomba, will actually clean floors better than you can. Instead of scrubbing the same dirty mop-water over the kitchen floor, the Scooba only lays down clean water. It drips it down, along with optional cleaning fluid, and scrubs smooth surfaces clean. A vacuum squeegee then sucks up this filthy liquid, storing it in space left by the used clean water. It detects walls and drops, so it’ll get the whole floor clean without falling down the stairs.

The only thing it doesn’t do is return to base and charge itself. You need to plug it in yourself, although you will be able to back and program it just like any other Roomba. The Scooba will be available soon for $300.

Scooba 230 [iRobot]

See Also:

• iRobot Out of Scooba Robotic Mops
• Roomba Maker iRobot Files Patent For Hospital Cleaning Robot …
• Mint, A Robot Mop for Civilized Homes
• Unloved and Overpriced, Consumer Robots Battle for Survival …

If Harry Potter had lived in a cyberpunk universe, this is the broomstick he would have ridden: The Dyson Digital Slim is scarcely bigger than the old sweeper it replaces, and has the added bonus that, when you remove the extension pipe in the middle, it looks like an awesome sci-fi gun.

The £200 ($310) vacumm-cleaner sucks for 15 minutes on one charge, and can be switched to a high-power mode where it will gobble down dirt like a whirling dervish for six frantic minutes, before rolling over and falling asleep on the living-room rug. Dyson boasts that the Digital Slim’s motor “spins five times faster than a Formula 1 car engine.”

Best of all is the color-scheme. It has a few primaries in there, but compared to the Fisher Price-style colorways of other Dyson gear, its decidedly elegant.

The heads can be swapped, with a motorized floor tool taking care of the carpets or tiles, using nylon brushes for rugs and carbon-fiber brushes for hard floors. The whole thing weighs 2.25-kg, or five pounds. Not as light as a broom, but in reality, you’re not really going to be flying this through Hogwarts anyway. Available now.

DC35 Multi Floor Dyson Digital Slim [Dyson via Daily Telegraph]

See Also:

• Dyson
• Review: Dyson DC-24 Vacuum Sucks Like No Other
• Dyson and Issey Miyake Team Up for Vacuum Cleaners, Clothing …
• Dyson Perfects the Clothesline?
• First Look: Dyson's Blade-Free Wonder Fan Blows Our Minds