Hasta La Gadget!

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, in pixels

Ixxi is like pixel-art for your walls. The wall-hangings are made up of 20 x 20cm (eight-inch) cards which clip together to make a mural. You can pick from designs already on the site, or you can upload your own.

Once you have picked a picture, you need to put the thing up on the wall. Ixxi consists of plastic-coated “tiles” that are joined together with snap-on x-section clips (with simple i-shaped clips for the edges). These clips then stick in turn to “powerstrips,” essentially double-sided tape that sticks to the wall.

Ixxi uses x-shaped clips to hold it together

The best designs are clearly the pixellated versions of old masters. I like the Van Gogh self portrait, and Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Necklace. Right now you can’t pixelate your own images, but as anything you upload is split amongst your chosen number of tiles, you could use a pre-pixelated picture to get a similar effect.

The Ixxi kits are available now, from €25 ($35) for a 4×3 to €85 for an 8×8 mural. I’m totally going to make a giant space invader for my living room.

Ixxi product page [Ixxi via Yanko]

See Also:

• Pixel-art Retro Tie
• Rubik's Cube Pixel Art
• Pixel-Tastic eBoy Skins for iPods

The Citrocasa Fantastic can juice up to 30 oranges per minute

If you are the head of a family of very thirsty Oompa-Loompas, a race of people who — unknown to many — require several gallons of fresh orange juice a day, along with pounds of carrots and even the odd pumpkin, to keep their orange color*, then you might want to take a look at the Citrocasa Fantastic. It’s a trimmed-down version of the orange-squeezer familiar from a million airports, malls and cafes.

It works like this: A reservoir of fresh fruit runs through a tubular cage and into the maw of the machine. There each orange is split with a blade and fed into a series of rollers which force the sharp, acidic juice from its fleshy home. As each orange is fed to its fate, a digital counter marks its passing. Tick, tick, tick.

While the Citrocasa Fantastic could certainly be used in the home, the real destination of this cut-down version is the smaller bar or coffee shop, where its 55-kilo (121-pound) bulk will be seen as blessedly slim, not unfathomably large. Even so, it is easy to use. To get a glass of juice, just press the tap and the everything purrs into action. Even cleaning is simple. The quick-release squeezing assembly pulls out and drops straight into the dishwasher.

The price is the exact same price as any piece of catering equipment — whatever your local vendor thinks he can get away with. To this end, you might want to consider an old-fashioned reamer to do the job instead.

Citrocasa Fantastic product page [Citrocasa via Oh Gizmo!]

* Of course, the Oompa-Loompas don’t really need juice to stay orange. It’s a little-known fact that the actors were hired from Florida, and their skin was colored orange by the dangerous and curiously fade-resistant fake tan popular there in the 1930s. Despite an estimated budget of almost $3 million, producing studio MGM decided against using more makeup to reverse the effects.

See Also:

• Oranges Make Tires Green(er)
• Review: Sharp LCD TV Produces More Oranges Than Florida
• Fruit Ninja: how big is that fruit?
• Funky Worms Cause Ants to Mimic Fruit

Daddy’s little helper, now in a more civilized, collapsible form

This 3-ounce collapsible shot “glass” will hold 1.7 ounces of liquid, allowing you to take a hit of espresso in the morning, a sip of wine with lunch and a shot of Scotch any damn time you like. The stainless steel rings collapse down and fit into a small metal keychain-able case, and should you really want to hide the cup from prying, teetotal partners, it comes with its own faux-leather zip-shut case.

I want one. As a tech blogger, I come under the professional category of “journalist.” This title brings with it some important responsibilities, one of which is an alcoholic habit. This is easy to stick to at home, but in these days of iPads and 3G connections, I often find myself working far from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and its liquid delights.

The traditional answer is a hip flask filled with whisky, but feeding my monkey will be so much more civilized with this tiny cup. And at just $16, I can afford to buy a replacement when I lose the first one in a drunken stupor.

Collapsible Shot Glass [Magellan’s via the Giz]

See Also:

• Knuckleduster Shot Glass
• Gallery: Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based …
• Booze Bra Hides Full Bottle of Wine
• Prototype Scanner Gives Middle Finger To Drunk Driving
• The Apocalypse is Coming: What You Need to Pack

At last, you can get rid of those last few dirty, dusty paper books

Picture this. You have wholly converted to e-books. The very thought of buying another bundle of paper fills you with revulsion, and all your reading is done on an e-reader or a tablet. But one problem remains. You have a stack of old, out-of-print books which you still love, but which are taking up space. Worse, you can’t even buy digital versions as it would seem that their publishers hate money. What can you do?

The answer is to scan them yourself. You can do this with cameras and home-brewed software, or you could use the new Plustek OpticBook 3800. It’s a flatbed scanner specifically designed for scanning books. The scanning bed has a very thin bezel so you can scan almost all the way to the spine, and a thick foam lid liner combined with correction software eliminates the curved, distorted text and shadows you’d normally get.

The OpticBook also comes with a slew of software packages designed to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and turn your scanned pages into searchable PDFs.

Specs-wise, the scanner can go up to 1,200dpi, but if you let it run at a more-than-adequate-for-the-screen 300dpi, it’ll scan an A4 page in seven seconds.

You probably won’t want to go through entire novels, but for cookbooks and other reference materials, a searchable archive is ideal. And if you have books that are literally falling apart through use and cannot be replaced, you should probably do something about that. Windows only, available now for $300.

OpticBook 3800 [Plustek. Thanks, Betsy!]

See Also:

• The $20 DIY Book Scanner
• DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes
• Japanese Book-Scanning Services Fueled by iPad, E-Readers
• Swift, canny book scanner bodes publishing mischief a-plenty …
• High-Speed Camera Scans Books in Seconds
• Pocket Fold-Out Scanner Makes Book-Copying a Snap
• 500 Pages–Per-Hour Book Scanner From Atiz Released

The Folding Plug is both ingenious and good looking. What a shame it’s not real

Does the name of today end in a “y”? Then it must be time for me to write about yet another concept design for a power plug. This time it is neither an overly-safe paranoia-plug from the UK, nor a cheap and bendy-pronged piece of junk from the U.S. No, today we have a handsome Euro-style plug, which not only folds flat but features a built-in on/off switch.

Designed by Huang Guanglei, Wei Min and Jiang Zhongbiao, the Folding Plug has two sturdy cylindrical prongs which slot into a wall socket, and a body that pivots behind them. When in-line, the current is cut, and no power is supplied to a connected device. When swung down through ninety degrees so it is flush with the wall, the juice flows and a red label is revealed to remind you it is all live.

It’s ingenious on several levels. First, the power is only on when the body of the plug is tucked safely away. Second, yanking the cord will cut the power. Third, you can easily see if the plug is switched on and fourth, it’s dead easy to switch individual appliances on and off with the tip of your shoe.

I have lost count of the amount of concept plugs we have featured in the pages of Gadget Lab, but this one is probably my favorite so far. It’s just a shame I can’t actually buy one.

Folding for Power [Yanko]

See Also:

• Double USB-Plug Concept Slots in Both Ways
• Fold-Flat Concept Fixes Bulky British Power Plug
• MP3 Player Plugs Directly Into the Mains
• Glowing Tron Plug Glows