Hasta La Gadget!

Tom Spina Designs makes custom, movie-inspired furniture, just like this Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite desk. What it doesn’t do is make officially licensed merchandise, so this is known only as a sci-fi themed desk, and the replica of Kirk’s chair from Star Trek is called the “Galactic Throne”.

But who cares when you could work, surf the web and play Desktop Tower Defense with your fingers mere inches from the face of a petrified smuggler? I’d be tempted to stay put and consume nothing but pizza and beer until I resembled a jiggly, gloating Jabba (I might pop out first to grab a gold bikini and some chains for the Lady — she lost the last ones I bought her).

The bounty on the head of this desk is unknown, as it was a one-off custom job. As a guide, though, the Galactic Throne can be beamed into your life for $5,500.

Galactic Throne [Tom Spina Designs]

Custom made furniture [Tom Spina Designs via Make]

The “Stop Thief” chair is a very simple crime-busting seat that formalizes something we all do anyway. The stacking chairs, presumably aimed at bars, cafes and restaurants, have a couple of slots in the seat so you can slip in the strap of your purse or man-bag, thus securing it between your legs, safe from the wandering hands of light-fingered street thieves.

The chair, from UK company Design Against Crime, is made from lacquered wood and steel and comes in 12 colors. The back of the chair is rounded, to stop the foolish from hanging bags there, and those slots are right under your thighs, so nobody could make a successful grab without you noticing.

I live in a city where petty street crime is at ridiculously high levels. While you might be safe, your bag most certainly isn’t. I have one issue with this otherwise excellent chair design, and that is that a bag hanging under your chair can be gotten into. The pickpocket may not get the whole bag, but they can still reach the good stuff inside, which is what they are after anyway.

You don’t think a thief could rummage around in the sack between your legs without you noticing? Think again. It’s happened to me twice, at crowded tables with the bag firmly on the floor amongst everyone’s feet (not my bag, but I was at the table). The bags just disappeared, and nobody saw a thing. Better to hook the straps through the slots in the chair and keep the bag on your lap.

£38, now shipping.

Product page [Design Against Crime via Core77]

You know you have a problem when your editor sends you an email like this:

I’m not saying you should write yet another post about power outlets. I’m just passing this along because I know of your obsession with the things.

Of course, doing something like that is as irresponsible as asking a recovering alcoholic to look after a bottle of scotch for you, so here is the outlet in question, a design so obviously full of utility that it should be a standard feature of hotel rooms worldwide.

The outlet appears to spin like a Vegas slot-machine, only instead of feeding it pennies from a paper cup, you feed it a plug from almost anywhere in the world. I say “appears to” as there is no information hinting at a manufacturer or supplier. The pictures came to us in an email with the subject line: ”iýsÈÅò¸ – ä«ßAäÙå¬çE. Spam, we suspect.

With nothing but a picture to go on, I am enlisting your help. If anyone knows where you can get these things, or (joy!) of a hotel that actually uses them, tell us in the comments, or e-mail me (the link is up there at the top of this post).

See Also:

• Five Dollar Wall Warts Add Individual Power Switches
• Outlet Wall: More Powerful Than You Could Possibly Imagine …
• Gallery Of The World's Power Sockets
• Art Lebedev's 3D Pop-Up Power Socket
• Sweet Revenge: Phone-Jack Powered Lamp Rips Off Telcos

Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale already stands out in your bathroom: sleek, smooth and fully functional, the very opposite of the sagging meat sack you drag into the shower every morning. Now it can beam your insecurities to your poor Twitter followers, automatically, before you have even thought about brewing a wake-up cup of coffee.

The Withings scale, you may remember, records body mass, fat levels and other paranoia-inducing statistics and compiles them for presentation on the web or on your iPhone. Now, the $160 scale adds Twittering to its list of “encouragements”.

Set up your account details and the scale will reveal your weight to the world every time you hop on. It can be configured to Tweet daily, weekly or monthly and will post the amount of lard you have to shed before you reach your goal. The upscale scale has support for up to eight people and their accounts, making it easy to organize an ongoing bulimia marathon amongst housemates.

The most amazing part about this story, though, is that it features a weighing scale that can receive software updates over the air. We’re clearly living in the future.

Product page [Withings. Thanks, Jessica!]

See Also:

• IPhone-Connected Weighing Scale for Your iDiet

First, this is not just a five-way power splitter in a wall socket — it is a new pop-out plug, the Rozetkus, from Art Lebedev. Second, I am aware that I post a lot of power-plug related gizmos. It is not a fetish, it is just because my office walls look like big flat bowls of black and white spaghetti, covered as they are with the snaking electrical vines of the modern jungle.

The genius in Lebedevs design is that it looks like any other single-plug socket until you pop out the central cube, whereupon it sprouts four more sockets for an electrical five-way. Minimal until you need it to be more — a very clean and thoughtful design.

The problems? You knew we’d find some problems, right? The first is that it comes from Art* Lebedev, maker of the $1,600 Optimus Maximus so it is likely to take an age to get to market and cost a fortune. The second, more serious problem is that the Rozetkus won’t fit in a standard socket hole, so you’d end up having to dig deeper into your walls to use it.

Finally, that blue strip is just that — a blue strip, made of blue plastic, and thankfully not a glowing LED blinkenlight.

Three Dee Power Socket [Yanko]

*That’s short for Artemy. Were you aware of it?