Usb powered water bottle humidifier

Try to ignore the obvious/gratuitous mac in the background and see the beauty and awesome that is this tiny usb powered humidifier.


Via Lifehacker

Kitchen Workbench

Damn you gizmodo for sharing this one.  $300 is steep for a cutting board (regardless of how nice), but I might be inclined to try my hand at making something like this.  Talk about mise en place, rawr.

Image via Gadget Review

Turntable Art

I saw this article on Makeblog the other day, and really enjoyed the outcome.  The art generated by the two turntables spinning and playing their record out reminds me of those sand art sculptures that where popular in the 80's.

Image via Makeblog

Anybody else have one of these Sand drawing Pendulum's as a kid?

Image via Amazon[?]

BBQ pizza

Every now and again someone somewhere creates something genius.  Thanks to Gizmodo for sharing this

And now I need that.  Pizza in the house during the winter is a no brainer, but during the summer I'm loathe to turn on that damn oven if I don't need to and realistically you could use this for bread as well.  It might be harder to control the humidity portion (several bread recipes call for a pan of water to be placed in the oven as well.)

What do you think?  I feel like a reasonable approximation of this could be mad with a piece of steel and a welder.

Twine

I waffled for quite sometime, but finally decided that I want to have this.  I choose to fund this kickstarter project as an alternative to building a dual-temperature logger for my friends basement.  Should he choose, he is welcome to get the moisture sensor at his own digression.

I'm pretty excited that I will likely see this relatively close to my birthday in 2012.

1.5 mile wifi booster

This sounds a little like snake oil, but I'll bite Engadget posted a link to a Wi-fi range extender.  The claim is that is can boost the signal up to 1.5 miles!!!!  For the price of $180 I'm inclined to give it a whirl (Though from my understanding of wireless you would need one on both ends of the connection to make this work).  My parents have a few acres and the shop that is far enough from the house that it doesn't get signal from their access point in the house.  I had considered a number of solutions for this, but the one that was the least work was burying some fiber in a conduit and getting 2 fiber to copper adapters (I am actually qualified to terminate fiber so this is less insane than it might sound).  Wireless would be a hell of a lot less work, but something about this makes me not believe it will work.

What do you think?

Sob...So much potential

Rub salt in my wounds over the glorious would have been, could have been great product Cnet had to detail the demise of The Courier. I'm almost too broken up over this to speak, if you haven't seen the concept video I posted it previously, you should give it a look. It was amazing.



The trouble was apparently Bill freaked out because it didn't do email! Fucking Email! It was a companion piece to the windows universe, not a stand alone and Billy boy couldn't see past email to build a completely different product category.  It makes me sick, and sad.  Farewell sweet prince, we will never know you.

Freaking do want

Engadget posted pictures about this sweet little set of bluetooth headphones, and I do want.

Sadly there is no information on pricing or availability, as it was them trolling the FCC site for new releases.

The company that makes them is Novero so hopefully they will show up on that site sometime.

Wacom Bamboo Tablet

So in the continuing theme of touch enabled/inking enabled computing I give you the Wacom Bamboo Tablet and Touch.  I think this is a decent compromise for the desktop as I get to ink notes, but don't have to give up the mouse if I don't want to.  I would find it important to keep the mouse nearby as I am not a huge fan of using a laptop touchpad all day for my mousing, especially since your hands would not be in a similar position as you have them when you are using a laptop.
The other thing I would like to try with this is drawing.  I am a perpetual doodler, and hate "drawing" with my mouse.  The motions are very unnatural and uncomfortable so this might give me an option to draw without the strange wrist positioning I find myself using when I try to draw with the mouse.














[?]

Model Airplanes

I have a little bit of interest in model airplanes, but have always been a little turned off by the price point of most of these commercial models.  I would hate to spend several hundred dollars, and hours assembling something I am very likely to crash into the ground at high velocity.

Enter Build a Foamie.

The idea of this is sort of genius, someone builds and tests the designs and then sells plans and parts lists.  See a plane you want and then for less than $20 you have a tested set of build plans that you can assemble out of construction foam.  I am sure that everything he did can be figured out on your own, but for people that are just getting started in this hobby I think it is a low risk proposition that might yield a lot of fun.

Windows 7 toy

image via ehomeupgrade

I am sure the implementation of this will be crap, but why does everyone just come out with reference designs now. It seems like everyone wants someone else to license and manufacture the products that they develop, rather than developing and manufacturing. The idea of having a smart picture frame that supports DLNA and has a touch screen interface to browse through your media in any room seems like a no brainer, but as far as I know this product has yet to be released.

It seems crazy to me that this product even exists.  For the crazy laptop users, it would give you a way to get that content off your Laptop onto the DVI sporting TV without having to get off your ass.  Neat idea, ok implementation.  $240 doesn't seem too bad.

Toshiba Dynadock Wireless U Universal USB Docking Station [?]

Wireless video transmission

After watching the Engadget Show EP5 I was reminded of the Intel wireless display technology demoed at CES recently. This is using some custom drivers for the wifi chip in the laptop to switch quickly between the Wireless network for internet access and a PAN link to a television set/ or display device. There are have been some rumblings about the limitations of the 2.4ghz spectrum being saturated, but I think that this technology shows that there is still a ton of opportunity for innovation in how we use that spectrum. Saturated or not, the ability to sling the images from your laptop to your tv without having to purchase another STB ala The Boxee Box or a popcorn hour is a pretty neat feature, but it would make it hard to surf the while you are image slinging. So rather than getting a dedicated box to use while you surf the internet, you have to get another laptop. Oops, guess Intel forgot that people actually watch tv with a laptop on their lap now to distract them from their distraction.

Airstash external storage for wifi equiped devices

As someone that recently passed on the Palm Pre because it lacked the ability to expand it storage I can personally attest to the importance of ever growing storage options for your mobile experience. In my case it was a phone, but with the Airstash I think that we could see a day when you load your media, neigh your whole computer environment and run it from a device that can be connected to sans wires. I really dig this devices potential for other markets than the Cellphones, but think that the expanding iPhones and Pre's will be the first order of business for these devices. Breaking into that market would give them a lot of clout to pursue other markets with this class of device. If the experience can be as slick as the Zune wireless sync is (not the slow social, but the home syncing) this could easily be a hit.


Gizmodo via Engadget

Chumby One

via ehomeupgrade.com

The Chumby is a widget based smart object, and as much gadget lust as I generally tend to have this is one of those products I just cannot seem to get into. The replay on it seems relatively low for what it is, considering I can find iPod touches around that offer way more functionality for similar cost. The Chumby One is a little less offensive running at $120 rather than the $199 for the Chumby Classic. The Chumby Classic came wrapped in leather which made it more than a little weird, and I for one if very happy they dropped the leather for the Chumby One.

Professional quality video distribution

via Justaddpower.com

Other than crazy wealthy individuals there are few people that will appreciate the sheer awesomeness of this product, but some of my work projects of late have put me in proximity to video distribution and I appreciate this. I don't know that it supports multicast (one transmitter outputting to many displays simultaneously) like my dream for it would be, given that it appears Vlans on the network. I for some reason envision this allowing for the networked home to finally have the ip video and audio distribution rather than proprietary or custom cabled jobs.

via Engadget via CEpro

HP DreamScreen, Do want!

img via HP

I really like the idea of these screens. I think that they could be pushed a little farther in terms of functionality, but they are safe and decent info screens. If you where to add anything I would like to see background Music playing and the ability to browse recipes. If it had Allrecipes.com integration you could view your "recipe box" and still stay in the neat Internet portal niche HP appears to want this to stay in. This is another product that I think is ripe for a remake.



Via Engadget

Brilliant knife block

*via Yankodesigns.com

In the last several years I have taken to cooking, and find it a rather enjoyable pass time. Since I have really started to take cooking seriously I have noticed that so much of the cooking process really revolves around prep work, (odd given this is the first job you get when you start working at as a cook) and that your prep skills determine the texture of the food as much as the ingredients themselves. Particularly important to this process is knife skill, and there is absolutely no substitute for a damn sharp knife. Most people buy knifes in sets with a big and bulky block to hold them, I recently received a 7" Shun Sontoku that is the main knife I use for prep, but I do not have a block to keep it in. A product like this where the knife comes in a Modular block would be the perfect thing for your kitchen nerd.

USB MicroSD awesomeness

These microsd readers blow my mind. I have a Dell Mini9 and this would double the storage I have and would also add half the cost again, I think I would rather get one of these for $14 and get my own Micro SDHC card for much cheaper.

Random things to want

Ever see a product that you want, but have no reason for wanting it? I did yesterday and today, this Samson usb condenser Mic for some reason seems to have captured my feeble imagination. $60 more than I am willing to spend on a toy for sure, but interesting none the less.

via Gizmodo