Hasta La Gadget!

As a dedicated lazy-bones, I think that the best thing about the Truck Farm is that, to make it, you don’t have to lug garden supplies back home. You just drive over to the store and load up on, say, topsoil, and you’re done.

The mobile allotment was built by “four-wheeled-farmers” Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, two Brooklynites with no garden, but a 1986 Dodge Ram with an empty load-bed. It uses technology proven in roof gardens, with custom drainage by rainwater management company Alive Structures, and even the soil itself is a special, gas-friendly lightweight hybrid, mixing up styrofoam, gels, clay and organic matter.

What’s the point? The Truck Farm is a business, and works a lot like the vegetable box schemes found around the world. You pay a monthly fee and the Truck Farm will pay a visit to your home, where you can pick produce fresh out of the dirt. The guys have even made a series of short movies (see part one, below) showing the history and making of Truck Farm, complete with their own music.

Project Page [Wicked Delicate via Inhabitat]

Ho ho ho! This little plastic iPod-shaped eggcup is called the eiPOTT. The Ei part means egg in German. The Pott part you can guess. It’s actually a rather appropriate shape for an eggcup: The clickwheel holds the egg and the recessed “screen” takes either a generous dose of salt or the cracked remains of the bashed-in shell.

What’s more, while this looks like yet another concept design, it’s actually a real, shipping product, and as even Apple can’t really claim that anyone would mistake this for a real media-player, it’s likely to remain on sale. At €7.50 ($10.60), it even carries a genuinely high, Apple-style price-tag.

A challenge: The first person to hack one of these into a real MP3 player wins a Gadget Lab Pat on the Back™.

Product page [QED Design via Core77]

Weighting scales are just so analog, right? Stand, squint, read weight, worry, eat breakfast. Where’s the 21st-century style connectivity? The networked, Wi-Fi scale that might even encourage a geek to get out of his chair and do some exercise?

Why, right here. The Connected Scale from Withings not only looks the part, somewhere between the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and an iPhone, but it performs futuristic functions, too. The scale has Wi-Fi and will beam its findings to the internet where they are recorded and viewable as graphs over time. The scale also trickles a little electricity through your feet and works out your fat percentage. All this while a little progress bar runs on the screen, which is to our mind the neatest part of all.

The companion iPhone app (you saw that one coming, right?) gives access to the stored readings, allowing you to track your weight or view a graph showing just how lardy your ass is now in comparison to, say, a month ago. It looks gimmicky from the outside, but this kind of long-term info is good for bringing health troubles to light.

The iPhone integration still fails to fix the age-old weighing-scale problem: To get an optimal reading, you need to remove your spectacles (ounces are ounces, after all). The iPhone app should offer a live readout so you can see the numbers while still standing. Of course, you won’t want to be holding the iPhone, either, but at least we know the weight of it for purposes of accuracy (4.8 ounces, or 135 grams). €130 ($180).

Product page [Withings] via Oh Gizmo!]
Application [iTunes]

Some concept designs are worth a look because they solve a problem at both a practical and and intellectual level. And some are ridiculously frustrating, simple, gorgeous product ideas which we would buy today if we could. Jack Bresnahan’s Tin Can Lids manage to be both.

The set of nine lids all snap onto the top of an old, used tin-can, itself rather a beautiful object with its shiny metal ribs. There’s a toothbrush holder, a soap dispenser, tea and coffee jar lids and a sugar dispenser, and a less useful pen-holder (you don’t really need a lid to do that).

This is the kind of thing that should be in every dime store, although by the time it gets there it’ll probably be available in a range of gaudy shades instead of the minimalist white we see here. On the other hand, you could stick the set in a fancy box and sell them in an upscale department store for $50. I’d buy them either way.

Tin Can Lids by Jack Bresnahan [Dezeen]

Does anyone actually use a shower radio? If you do, you could do worse than this imitation shampoo bottle from Muji, which houses a radio in a splash-proof PET housing. The volume and power are controlled by twiddling the lid, and AM/FM selection and tuning take place underneath. There’s even a little suction-cup to stick the antenna to the cubicle wall.

For the ultimate in disguise, though, you should pick up some of Muji’s refillable soap dispensers which perfectly match the radio. Only available in Japan, ¥3,500 ($37).

Product page [Muji via Yanko]