Hasta La Gadget!

Meet the FlyRad, which is either a terrifyingly dangerous way to drag yourself to your doom, or a fantastically fun way to speed around on roller-skates. The invention is pretty much a single wheel with a beefy electric motor and a handlebar. You strap on your skates, grab the FlyRad and let it drag you off down the street at up to 40 km/h (25 mph).

The contraption, invented by German Thomas Rank, can be “ridden” in one of several ways, as you can see in the cheesy video below. There’s the yanked-along-by-a-jackhammer stance already mentioned, as well as what I call the “reverse-cowgirl”, in which you put the metal shaft between your legs and let it push you from behind.

The third way is possibly the most interesting. There is a small seat near the wheel. You perch on this, with the wheel behind you, and the handlebars poking up between your knees. A pair of pads under the bars then rest on your thighs, so you are sitting down but taking your own weight on your upper legs. In this position you can even ride hands-free.

The FlyRad comes in three sizes, for kids, teens and adults. The biggest weighs in at 24 Kg, or around 53-pounds, and has a 500-Watt motor powered by a 36-volt battery. This is enough to keep it going for up to 50Km (31-miles), and a scary 1Kw version will also be available.

I want to have ago on this, but I don’t want to get stuck 30-miles from home and have to drag a machine the weight of a small child home with me. For the foolhardy and adventurous, the FlyRad will be available in early 2011.

FlyRad product page [FlyRad via GizMag]

See Also:

• Wheel Skates: Like Strapping A Bike to Each Foot
• Gas-Powered Skates Seized By European Customs
• Double Jeopardy: Home Made Powerskates
• Orbitwheel: Hubless Wheels for Your Feet

Magnestick will stop your child from slipping out of ski chairlifts and hurtling down the mountainside to certain rocky doom. It will do this even if the lazy lift attendant forgets to lower the safety bar because he’s goofing off and chatting up girls instead of doing his damn job.

Chairlifts at participating resorts are equipped with electromagnets in the seat-backs. These are activated throughout the whole journey, and stick to a lightweight 200-gram (0.44-pound) back-protector which has a metal plate on its surface. At the top of the ride, the magnets are deactivated and the kids can ski safely away.

I have been skiing precisely once, on a school ski trip when I was a kid. I was terrified on the chair-lifts, as the instructors would often leave the bars up, presumably to impress the 12-year-old girls in my class. I can also say that I’d love to sit down in the lift and feel a sharp tug and a “clunk” as the magnet clicked into place. That back protector has got to be a good idea, too.

There are a few resorts that currently use the Magnestick, spread across the world from Alpine Meadows in California to Arcalis in Andorra, which is just up the road from me. If you really want to try them out, your best bet right now is in France, where there are seven participating resorts. Also, great cheese.

Operation Magnestick [Magnestick]

See Also:

• Vail's EpicMix App Brings Location Tracking, Social Networking to …
• Bikeboard: Water Skiing Made Easy
• Now You're Cooking … With Magnets!

Having trouble justifying your grownup Farmville obsession to your friends, family, and co-workers? Don’t be ashamed, be proud–after all, you’re in good company. Battered by the stresses of post-season play, it seems that the Tampa Bay Rays have gotten themselves hooked on We Farm, a Farmville knockoff for the iPad.

The game infiltrated the team’s clubhouse by way of pitcher James Shields, whose seven-year-old daughter turned him on to the farm-simulating mobile app. Now players David Price, Chad Qualls, Kelly Shoppach, Matt Joyce, Matt Garza, and B.J. Upton are in on the fake crop-growing action.

“We definitely have the iPad addiction,” pitcher Jeff Niemann told Yahoo Sports. “All of us, in some way, shape or form.”

Niemann apparently doesn’t go in for the fake farming thing. He’s more of an Angry Birds guy. “You throw birds at things and break stuff,” he told the site. “We have fun. We can turn the brain off for a little bit.”

You may soon be able to watch live pro football on your tablet, but unless it’s on Verizon’s network, maybe not the tablet you might like.

NFL VP and media strategist Brian Rolapp told the Wall Street Journal that the league is currently in talks with Verizon about distributing live and rebroadcast games and other content to tablets. “The NFL will be on a tablet,” he said. “It’s a question of what shape or form.” Verizon declined to comment.

Why Verizon? The carrier already has a $720 million four-year exclusive deal to show games and other programming on phones with its NFL Mobile service that was just signed in March. Depending on the terms of that deal (and remember, in March, the iPad wasn’t even in stores yet), tablet computers are most likely not included, but the NFL may find it practically and legally difficult to partner with another wireless provider.

Why would you want to watch an NFL game on a teeny-weeny tablet? Besides being better than watching NFL on a phone, I have two words for you: VGA Adapter.

A Verizon spokesman told the WSJ that the company wants to secure the rights to rebroadcast every NFL game. Suppose you’re on the road, in a hotel, and the local channels aren’t showing your team’s game. Hook up your tablet to the television, and you’ve got it on your screen. You can even catch the Monday night game at the airport while your plane back home is delayed.

Regardless of how the deals eventually shake out, that scenario is definitely appealing to the NFL’s millions of hard-core fans, who are frequently both tech-savvy and constantly hungry for more content, and who have repeatedly demonstrated their devotion with dollars.

Image via NFL.com

See Also:

• NFL Teams, Still Worth Billions, See Slight Decline
• Verizon CEO Throws Wet Blanket on iPhone Rumors
• Big Chunk of Verizon Customers Would Switch to an iPhone
• NFL Films' Exhaustive Archive Is Rushing Into the Digital Age
• NFL Catches IPod Fever
• Hollywood, NFL Fight TiVo Sharing

You scoff, but it’s true. Do you honestly think Tiger Woods has the luxury of looking down as his golf glove while on the Masters’ greens and seeing if his grip is too tight? Indeed he doesn’t, nor will he ever if we understand anything about PGA regulations. Germany’s own Sensosolutions has just revealed what it’s calling the planet’s first “digital golf glove,” with the $89 SensoGlove boasting a handful of sensors that “continuously read the user’s grip pressure.” In real-time, users are shown that data on the sweat-proof 1.2-inch LED monitor, and it’s even capable of outputting information via aural commands. Put simply, it can give you a warning if you’re exceeding your target grip pressure level, and it can even show you exactly which fingers are squeezing too tightly. What it can’t show you, however, is just how closely your wife is monitoring your extracurricular phone activities — but hey, there’s always version 2.0, right?

Continue reading Sensor-laden SensoGlove helps you make smarter decisions than Tiger Woods

Sensor-laden SensoGlove helps you make smarter decisions than Tiger Woods originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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