Hasta La Gadget!

This late-night lamp takes your laziness and turns it into a virtue. When you are propped up in bed reading and you can no longer keep your eyes open, let alone fumble for a light switch, just drop your book on top of the bedside light. The wedge-shape of the Reading Lamp will let your book hang over it, keeping your place, and an infrared switch detects the book and kills the power. Too hot? Scared the book might hit Fahrenheit 451? The compact fluorescent inside keeps things cool-ish and the polycarbonate shade is tough enough to last.

The Reading Lamp is part of a group project by designers Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse, Vincent Vandenbrouck and Jun Yasumoto, and looks to us very much like the lights inside the railroad trains of childhood, when the windows had curtains, the seats had ashtrays and the conductors called you sir. Well, they called my father sir. I was always to busy throwing up my ice-cream lunch from the window (an opening window, at least).

This is a concept which should be snapped up right now. Muji and Ikea, I’m looking at you.

Product page [Jun Yasumoto via Core77]

There is more than one way to skin a clock: Our own soft-haired and sensitive Daniel Dumas prefers the indecipherable blipping LEDs of Tokyo Flash watches, I rock an old school Casio calculator watch, and Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney actually measures the hour using the shadows cast by the handsome crags on his perfect face (at least, that’s his excuse for the constant mirror-ward glances).

Designer Sander Mulder, though, has opted to link second to minutes to hours in a recursive chain of hands. The big one shows hours; the medium hand, which dangles from the end of the hour hand, shows minutes, and so on.

At first, the lightning-bolt beauty obscures functionality, and it all looks a little hard to read. But try it: What time is shown above? That’s right. 3:38 and 30 seconds. The video shows the clock in fast-forward action:

The whole thing reminds us of a cross between the Sketch-a-Graph, the hard-to-use toy for inaccurately enlarging, reducing or copying pictures, and one of those magic spiral-drawing toys. Imagine a pencil on the end of the second hand and you’ll see what we mean. Can you buy it? Amazingly, yes, but there will only be 20 of the brass and aluminum timepieces made, plus one artist’s proof. And that single word – artist – means that you’ll have to get in touch to find out the price.

Product page [Sandermulder via Core77]

For a product which lets obsessive compulsive neat freaks indulge their non-optional behaviour, the Cablox product pages offer strangely little in the way of real information. Seriously. Who decided that a cable-management device should be marketed by badly drawn superheroes?

Only when you click (methodically, of course) through the world map of dealers do you discover anything. The lone supplier is called AV Cables and lives in Denmark. Once there, you will discover the details.

The Cablox is a 4×4 inch square covered with plastic nodules. Peel the back and stick it to the desk or wall and you can thread cables through and have them kept firmly in place until you need to move them around. The Cablox ships in packs of two and from the pictures you can see that stretching cables between them gives the impression of a home made, cabled circuit.

What we like most is this easy-removal feature, something tricky with solutions which bundle cables together. Actually, scratch that. What we really like the most is the price. At 149 Danish Krone, these cost just $20 for two. All we need to do is wait for the super heroes at the factory to ship them overseas.

Product page [Cablox]

Actual product page [AV-Cables]

Laydeez and gennelmen! What you are about to see is something you have never known the likes of before, a challenge so extraordinary, nay, so spectacular, that you will go home tonight astonished. Yes, and this is a story of biblical proportions, of heroism, of nothing less, laydeez and gennelmen, than the fight for life itself.

Tonight, here on Gadget Lab, we present the David and Goliath of gadget battles, a rumble that makes Krakatoa sound like a Leica’s whispering shutter. Gather round, laydeez and gennelmen, for you are about to witness the iPod Nano (in the pink corner) against the all reigning, all spinning champion, Washing Masheeeeeeeeeen!

Dear reader. Last week we told you the tale of the poor pink Nano, which took a cycle through my washing machine and came out dead, like a kitten flopping lifeless from a sodden burlap sack. Non-urgent action was required to save it. My prescription, informed by our sympathetic Gadget Lab readers, was rest, and lots of it, preferably in a warm place. The iPod sat for almost a week on a warm and breezy window sill until the last remains of water had disappeared from behind its single gleaming eye. Yesterday, after a final few hours sat on my MacBook’s power brick (the only substance in my home as hot as the surface of the Sun) the patient was hooked up to the EEG (Mac) via USB.

A few tense seconds later and the Apple logo appeared. A cough, a splutter and then iTunes announced that the iPod was alive. Alive I tell you! Finally, the bright backlight blinked into glowing existence. Result? A success. The only oddity? All the curse-words seem to have disappeared from songs and podcasts alike, as if washed away by some divine censor.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com
See Also:

• IPod Nano vs. Washing Machine

If you visit Barcelona, Spain, don’t drink the tap water. Depending on which part of town you are in, water from the faucet either tastes of chlorine, gives you cancer, or both. This is why almost everyone buys giant eight-liter (541 tablespoons) bottles of water and drags them up the stairs of their seven-story, elevator-free apartment buildings.

Yes, yes, the environment would be better if only I used a water filter. The problem is that they are so frikkin’ ugly. And plastic. Here, though, is a glass and steel beauty, a jug so fine it doesn’t use boring old everyday charcoal cartridges but real lumps of Binchotan charcoal and louseki stones, all the way from the “mountains in Kanazawa, the capital city of Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast.”

This is, clearly, the home-made equivalent of Fiji bottled water.

The cost is a not unreasonable $85, fine for something used several times daily. The refills come in at $25 each, which – even if one lasts just half the promised six months – is a whole lot less than the money spent on water, plus the environmental costs of trasport and plastic bottle disposal.

The best part? The refill is called “Purifying Sticks and Stones”, with which you can also, presumably, break somebody’s bones.

Product page [Design Within Reach via Uncrate]