Cool gadgets

Flat Light: Ceci N’est Pas Une Lampe | Gadget Lab. Finn Magee’s Flat Light is a visual gag in the spirit if not the style of René Magritte. The printed poster is both a lamp and not a lamp: the $195 wall hanging actually lights up when you flick the switch thanks to a bank of LEDs within. Magee made it after wondering whether a picture of a lamp would be as effective in lending “an atmosphere of productivity and efficiency to [a] room” as a real lamp. Apparently it is. I asked the Lady what she thought, and for such a gimmicky piece, I was amazed to find she likes it. Not that I’m allowed to buy one: she says it would be fine in a hotel, but I am forbidden from having one in the house.

The Flat Light is on sale now, in a limited edition of 50. Flat Light [Moss via Oh Gizmo!] Four-Slot SD Card-Reader Looks Like Miniature Toaster | Gadget Lab. This little SD card reader is like a tiny plastic toaster for your camera’s memory cards. The little cube has four slots, each of which can take its own SDHC card, and the box comes with a detachable USB cable – essential for traveling light where you don’t want every single gadget to come with its own tail. The blurb says that Elecom’ reader is compatible with all things SD: SD, microSD, and miniSD, but it really looks like the tiny pinky-sized microSD cards would need an adapter or get lost in the slot, just like the last runty slice of bread gets lost in the toaster and burns on the hot elements.

Why use this? Pros in the field will appreciate being able to drop a whole shoot’s worth of cars into one reader and then go grab a coffee. Four-slot SD reader product page [GeekStuff4U] See Also: Ntera Prints a Display on Almost Any Surface | Gadget Lab | Wire. Displays don’t always have to live encased in glass houses. Instead, a color screen can now be printed on almost any material — plastic, ceramic, paper or textiles — through a process similar to how ink is printed on paper, says Irish startup Ntera.

The new displays, called NanoChromics, use specially synthesized molecules that can produce images with a resolution equivalent to that of a conventional inkjet printer. The difference is that NanoChromics displays are screens that can be changed electronically, like an LCD, instead of being static images. “The molecules change color when they receive a charge so it can go from a colorless state to a colored state,” says Chris Giacoponello, vice president at Ntera. “We can manipulate that by putting it on almost any surface.” Ntera’s displays can be viewed from virtually any angle and under a wide range of lighting conditions, says the company.

“We can get a level of cost effectiveness that other displays can’t,” says Giacoponello. Video: Flexible Sony Screen Can Be Wrapped Around a Pencil | Gad. Forget the iPad, the HP Slate or pretty much any tablet. For true portable big-screen computing we want the roll-up screen that sci-fi has promised us since forever. That dream edges ever closer, and Sony is now helping it along with a flexible display that can be wrapped around a pencil.

The 4.1-inch OLED screen is thin. So thin that it is measured in micrometers. 80μm to be precise: A human hair is a comparatively hefty 100μm. Sony’s trick was to make the circuitry itself flexible. By marrying the OLED screen with OTFTs (organic thin-film transistors), and using organic, soft insulators therein, a display can be made that shows movies whilst being rolled and stretched. Pretty cool, huh? Sony Develops a Rollable OTFT-driven OLED Display that can wrap around a Pencil [Sony via Akihabara News] See Also: Sidewinder Portable Cell Phone Charger. Unlike a spare battery, the Sidewinder Portable Cell Phone Charger never runs out of power and never needs to be replaced. While turning the handle is not much fun, the Sidewinder is an ideal emergency standby power source, especially for survivalists wanting to have the lowest tech solution to powering their (ummm...) high tech cell phone!

What you Get The moderately priced Sidewinder comes complete with a full kit of goodies. You get the charging unit itself, and a connector cable to plug the charger into a Nokia type phone. Another four adapter tips are also supplied to enable it to plug into other phone models as well. Everything comes in a convenient zip up carrying pouch, making it easy for you to keep the various connectors together without fear of losing them. The charger itself measures about 2¼" x 1¼" x 1¾". The unit is very light. Simple instructions are printed on the display card on which the unit is mounted. How it Works and What it Does Using the Sidewinder Cost Summary. Vibration-Powered Batteries Charge Themselves | Gadget Lab. What’s the first application you think of when I say the phrase “vibration-powered self-generating battery”?

Me too, but let’s keep this clean. The faux-batteries are from Brother Industries, and inside the AA and AAA-sized shells you’ll find a capacitor and an electromagnetic induction generator. Shaking them will charge the capacitor enough to juice low-power gadgets. The example given is remote control, which needs around 40 to 100mW of power. The battery can put out up to 180mW, so while you won’t be using these to power a camera-flash, a quick shake to get the TV remote going again would work just great. In fact, you could just build this in to a remote and forget the batteries altogether.

Ok, so I couldn’t stay clean for the entire post. Vibration-powered Generators Replace AA, AAA Batteries [Tech-On via Giz] See Also: YoGen - Mobile Charger for Life. Personal Solar Panel Twenty Time More Powerful Than Rivals | Gad. The Joos Orange is a solar panel that promises to make sun-power useful, rather than just a hippy’s dream. By using top-end components and some clever circuitry, the panel wrings around 20x the juice from the falling sun-rays than other chargers. Sound impressive? It is, and it manages to do it for just $100. With just an hour in the sun, the Joos Orange will generate (and store in its li-ion battery) enough power to keep you talking on the phone for two and a half hours.

This compares to 5-20 minutes for other chargers (according to the company’s figures). The Joos Orange comes from California-based Solar Components, and apart from the circuitry which optimizes the use of the charge, it uses a very efficient mono-crystalline solar cell instead of a poly-crystalline cell. The Joos Orange will ship in June, but Gadget Lab should be getting its hand on a test unit soon. Joos Orange [Solar Joos. Microsoft Instaload: Insert Batteries Any Way You Like | Gadget. Microsoft has come up with an amazingly obvious tweak to battery tech that should save us some headaches, as well as several trillion hours of head-scratching and peering into dark holes.

Named Instaload, the invention lets you stuff the batteries into a device any which-way you fancy, eliminating the need to read dark directional diagrams. The most impressive part is the low-tech way this is handled. Each contact in the battery compartment has both positive and negative terminals. If the fat, flat end of the battery is pressing against them, it touches the outside contact. If it is the pointy positive end then it makes contact with a slightly recessed inner contact. This, combined with some simple circuitry, makes sure the current is always running the right way. Unfortunately, this being Microsoft, it wants everybody to play by Microsoft’s rules, and to pay for the privilege.

A shame, really, as it’s the cheap gadgets that could benefit from this the most. Thought-Control Headset Reads Your Mind | Gadget Lab. The Emotiv EPOC headset is being marketed as both a gaming device and as an aid for the disabled. It has 14 EEG electrodes to monitor brain activity, a gyroscope so it knows where you noggin is in space and packs a li-ion battery for 12 hours of use. It is also wireless, and charges via USB. The headset reads brain activity related to facial movements, and uses this to infer your emotional state and intentions. This is then translated in software to control various applications, from games to photo viewers to an on-screen keyboard. And of course, any application or machine could be made to do anything with the input, from steering a wheelchair to, we guess, firing the weapons systems on a stolen, cold-war era Soviet fighter plane.

There are three kits, and all flavors come with the same telepathic hat. What is most striking, once you get over the idea of a thought-controlled computer, is just how cool the EPOC looks. EPOC Product page [Emotiv] Remote-Controlled Sports-Cam Clamps to Anything | Gadget Lab | W. Drift Innovation’s X170 sports-camera, or “Action Camera”, is a great looking, lightweight camcorder with a lot of very clever features. It is let down by just one thing: a mere hour of battery life. The X170 is a solid-state camcorder that records straight to SD (a half-hour will eat 1GB) and has a tiny 1.5-inch screen for playback (or more usefully, a quick check to see you got the shot).

Video is shot through a wide-angle lens with a 170-degree field-of-view, and is recorded in 720 x 480 pixels at 30fps. Stills can be grabbed at 5 megapixels. The camera comes boxed with a huge array of mounts: A helmet-grip, head-strap, goggle and handlebar mounts and a plain ol’ Velcro fastener for anything else. It also comes with an RF remote control with a five meter (16-foot) range. If you’re into any kind of sport and want to film it, you’re covered. Which makes that battery life all the more annoying.

X170 Action Camera [Drift Innovation] Phone-Controlled Robot Ball, Like Marble Madness in Meatspace | Gadget Lab. That plastic ball up there might look like a simple plastic ball, but it is in fact a simple plastic ball packed with tech. Inside the Orbotix, as it’s known, are robot guts that let you control the ø74mm (2.9-inch) sphere with an Android or iOS device. It works via Bluetooth (along with some secret-sauce robotics and motors), and charges via induction, so you don’t need any plugs. We first saw the Sphero, then nameless, back in August when it was just a prototype. Now the cute rolling toy is almost ready for production, and will be shown off in Las Vegas at CES next month.

The ball isn’t just for rolling. Well, actually, rolling is all it will do, but the programming hooks into the ball’s control systems have been given to developers so that they can write games. So we lay down a challenge: Gizmodo guys – we’ll meet you at the ShowStoppers event on the night before CES begins and kick your asses. The Ball Revealed – Sphero [Orbotix. See Also: Smart Faucet Saves Water, Teeth | Gadget Lab. If you’re anything like me, the sight of somebody turning on the faucet to wet their toothbrush and then just letting the water run and run while they scrub their stupid teeth will drive you crazy. You should just save up $40 and buy them the Smart Faucet, an add-on for any existing water-tap.

The device is simple. It screws into the end of the faucet and blocks the water. To start the flow, you just push back in the lever. The site claims that the Smart Faucet can save up to 5,000 gallons of water a year. Smart Faucet [Gaiam via Dvice] Scissors Redesigned: Less Bouncy, More Comfy | Gadget Lab | Wire. When Spencer Nugent cuts something with scissors, he likes to be in control. For him, a bouncing bottom blade is waste of time and just plain uncomfortable, while the double-handled design of conventional scissors twists your wrist to an awkward angle. Nugent decided to fix this, and came up with the Comfort Grip Scissors. These keep the lower blade still, flat down on the table top, while the upper blade snicker-snacks and does the the cutting. The handles, too, have moved, one inside the other: you simply squeeze them together to close the blades. Especially good in this concept redesign is the choice of materials.

The metal blades and orange loop-handles are so familiar that when you see them morphed like this there is a momentary mental disconnect, like walking into a neighbors apartment, identical in layout to your own, only furnished differently. Get these off the drawing board and into stores, Spencer, and I’ll buy a pair right away. Comfort Grip Scissors [Coroflot via Core77] Neither Pen Nor Pencil: Write Endlessly In Metal | Gadget Lab. One of the pleasures of writing in pencil is the friction of two solid materials in contact. One of the delights of writing in pen is that you can write continuously without having to stop to sharpen your stylus.

Writing in metal, while expensive, provides some of the benefits of both while exhibiting its own unique beauty. These two (that’s right, two) different metal pen manufacturers come to us by way of champ design blog Dornob. Both models work on the same principle: A tiny amount of metal alloy transfers from the pen to the page. Each company takes a slightly different approach. Grand Illusions goes a little more highbrow with their Metal Pens (£13.99/$21.54). Grand Illusions also appends a short history on writing in silverpoint: “In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. The alloy in the Vat19 pen (at least) has trace amounts of lead, so it’s not so good for kids. See Also: Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver, Now Screws Screws | Gadget Lab. Doctor Who’s Sonic Screwdriver is second only to MacGyver’s paperclip and duct-tape in terms of usefulness: There’s almost nothing it can’t do.

Almost. Have you ever actually seen the Doctor screwing a screw with his screwdriver? Neither have I. If everyone’s favorite Time Lord had this screwdriver, though, then he’d even be equal to putting together IKEA furniture, something that has eluded both human and alien intellects for aeons. It requires batteries, although sadly not to do the driving. The Doctor Who’s 11th Doctor Sonic Screwdriver (Actual Screwdriver) as it is called is available now. Doctor Who Doctor Sonic Screwdriver [Neatoshop] See Also: Bookmate, The Multi-Tasking Book-Holder | Gadget Lab. Kodak Bantam Special, an Art-Deco Masterpiece | Gadget Lab | Wir. Victorian All-in-One PC. Giant Vintage Steamer Trunk: A Gorgeous Portable Office | Gadget. USB Typewriter Turns iPad into Paper | Gadget Lab. Gaming Vest Makes Virtual Fights Real and Painful | Gadget Lab |