Hasta La Gadget!

In much the same way that your cat doesn’t understand mirrors and tries to fight its own reflection (silly kitty!), a bird just doesn’t see a big glass window. Thus, it tries to fly on through and smashes its little skull down into its bird-brain. Thunk.

Thankfully for our little feathered friends, there is a solution. Ornilux glass, from Arnold Glas, has a special UV coating which is invisible to us, but easy for birds to see due to eyes that see different wavelengths. A new version of this glass, called Ornilux Mikado, takes things a step further by printing a spider’s-web of UV stripes onto the panes.

Birds aren’t arachnophobes, but spiders apparently design their webs to warn off birds and stop them flying through and destroying the silky structures. The new Mikado pattern mimics the patterns used by spiders.

According to Treehugger, the glass reduces bird-collisions by 75%. Given that 250,000 a birds are killed by windows every day in Europe, and around 100 million per year in the States, that’s a lot of rescued birds.

My parents could have done with something like this when I was a cry-baby child back in the 1970s and the local birdies would take one look at our full-length living-room, glazed front and back, and think one word in their tiny heads: “Shortcut.” Thunk. They’d drop to the floor, dazed or dead, and I would start bawling once again.

Ornilux [Arnold Glas via Treehugger]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Quirky’s hive-mind has done it again. The design-by-community site will now sell you Petal Drops, a flower-shaped cap which screws onto any old plastic water-bottle, turning it instantly into a tiny water-barrel, ready to water the plants.

The floral funnel collects the rain and at the same time makes the old bottle good-looking enough to leave in the garden: you won’t end up looking like that terrible neighbor with the old car parts and construction materials in his now unsightly front yard.

By now, you know how Quirky works. The products go on pre-order, and are made when the minimum number of orders have been placed. Then, the profits are split, with a proportion going to the “influencers” who helped design the product. This time, the price is just $5.25, and the order threshold has already been crossed. Go get ‘em.

Petal Drops [Quirky]

See Also:

• Quirky Jointed Power-Strip Is 'A Creative Outlet'
• Quirky's iPad Case With Two-Way Kick-Stand
• Quirky Switch, A customizable Multi-Tool
• Weigh to Go: Luggage Tag and Scale Combo

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

If I’ve learned anything from the movies, it’s that a quick shot from a handgun at close range is all that’s needed to blow open any lock.

In real life, I’m not sure I’d want to be standing next to a chunk of hardened metal machinery as it gets hit with a bullet at high speed. And, as it turns out from real-life tests conducted by Popular Mechanics, some locks are extremely resistant to bullets.

The editors of Popular Mechanics decided to test various brands of padlocks by subjecting them to a series of tough tests: dropping them, trying to pry them open, going at them with bolt cutters, and even subjecting them to a week inside a chamber filled with sulfur dioxide salt fog, which simulates “years of acid rain and environmental exposure.”

But it’s the rifle test that got our attention. They hung Franklin, Medeco, Master and OnGuard brand padlocks in front of a piece of plywood and shot them with a rifle from 100 feet away.

Only the Medeco followed the action-movie script: A single centered shot sprung the lock and left a huge gaping hole. The OnGuard and Franklin locks survived shots through the center without opening, but off-center shots unlatched them.

But it was the Master that proved most bulletproof. According to the report, it was completely resistant to rounds from a .243 Winchester and a .25-06 Remington. “Not even a pair of bullets from a .300 Winchester Magnum could pass through or open this lock,” Popular Mechanics wrote.

We’re impressed, both with the Master lock’s toughness and with the brutality of this battery of tests.

Also, someone on the PopMech staff is an extremely good shot with a rifle.

Causing a bit of pre-weekend excitement in Gadget Lab’s European HQ, an email arrived in my inbox this morning telling me about a brand-new power extension cord. Not only that, but it came with the video below, showing it in action.

Action? Yes. The Designcord Autorewind Cable Reel has a rather neat trick which is certainly video-friendly. If you stomp down on it, the cable is reeled in on a spring, snicker-snack, coiling into the circular body like one of those pop-out peanut-can snakes, only in reverse.

The reel has another trick. When rewinding (or unwinding), the centre doesn’t spin, meaning you can pay out a little extra cord without getting your appliance cables in a twist. The reel, which comes in 10-meter and 7.5-meter flavors, also has a circuit-breaker function to stop surges, and four holes for plugging things in. It currently (sorry) comes only for euro-plugs, but the designer, Michael van der Jagt, tells me that a U.S. version is on the way. The price has not yet been set.

Autorewind [Designcord. Thanks, Michael!]

See Also:

• Darwin Award Nominee: The Waterproof Power Strip
• USB Power-Strip Controlled by PC
• Quirky Jointed Power-Strip Is 'A Creative Outlet'
• Clockwork Power-Strip Rations Juice

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Next to the refrigerator, the washer and dryer in your home are probably the most reliable gadgets you own. That hasn’t stopped LG coming up with a crazy new diagnostic scheme to help them troubleshoot these appliances from afar, and to take the stupid meat-sack owner (you) almost entirely out of the equation

No, this isn’t another internet-connected-appliance story. Instead, it is a product so odd that LG’s engineers must have been smoking something while inventing it. It works like this: When there is a problem, you call up LG. The person at the other end then gives you instructions, telling you to press some buttons in a certain order. Once you have put in the Konami cheat-code, a series of tones will chime from your washer or dryer like the spaceship in Close Encounters.

The trained LG technician will then diagnose these mysterious sounds and decide what to do. At no point are you, the owner, required to read a number out wrongly, or to second-guess the technician on the line. Once LG has the information it requires, it can decide whether or not it needs to send out a repairman, and that repairman will arrive equipped with just the right tools and parts.

The tech, called SmartDiagnosis, is pretty weird, but it is also very clever, and is already available on a few machines like the WM3885 pictured above ($1,900). I wonder when we’ll see this tech brought to more commonly failing gadgets, like PCs? Once we get used to these odd rituals, I imagine the IT guys having an amazing time pranking their callers: “First, I’d like you to hold the keyboard over your head. Now, sir, please whistle the national anthem.”

LG smart washing machines [LG. Thanks, Ralph!]