Gadgets posts

Remember the iCade, ThinkGeek’s April Fool’s joke? Techi’s own James Mowery brought it to our attention yesterday. James expressed sadness upon revealing it didn’t exist. But James may not have to be sad forever! The buzz around the iCade is beginning to grow. Quite frankly, the iCade is a very necessary call to attention to a very untapped market. Currently, there does exist a gaming peripheral for the iPhone – well, sort of. A group of hackers in the UK developed the iControlPad in 2008 to work with jailbroken iPhones. But that’s a little less than legit. However it proves, if anything,…

All of us tech geeks recall Minority Report, right? Well, for those of you who do, you’ll love what the geniuses over at MIT have come up with: it’s a pointing device. But this one is different, and, unlike a traditional mouse, this pointer is controlled by your hands. MIT students Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez decided to work on this project in 2009, and, impressively, they managed to acquire all the necessary parts for under $100. Similar to the iPhone/iPod Touch, the gloves allow interactions like pinching, grabbing, zooming, and other familiar interactions you have with touchscreen devices….

That iPhone, it’s a beast. A tiger within a kraken wrapped in a minotaur made of exploding gargoyles. Sometimes you wish you had a means of caging this unruly powerhouse. Tie it down. Chain it up out in the back yard, that sort of thing. Kee Utility has got a device for you. Coming straight outta the Retro Revival which began with videogames a few years ago and has since spread to all product sectors, this has got to be one of the sexier designs I’ve seen. I don’t think I need to explain it, but I will add it’s not only a corded phone/charging dock combo, but also can sync with iTunes via a built-in USB…

Everyone knows that your average rock star has to dedicate his or her time equally to two main things: the music; and their legions of adoring and slightly easy fans. Well, with the new Gigway pen, they’ll have more time to dedicate to the latter. The ‘pen’ is actually not for writing at all, but rather scans and reads sheets music and then plays it back to you so that you know how its meant to be heard. No more wondering how that suspended ninth is supposed to sound! Just run the Gigway pen over the music and let it do its magic. On top of this, the Gigway can play back sound through headphones or its set of included…

For all the talk of being environmentally-friendly, a lot of people are hopping on fixed-gear bikes and scooters because they look cool. Well, this concept seems to roll with that vibe – and succeeds admirably. Designed by Daneil Dayag, this Urban Scooter concept boasts a very slick design and, instead of the usual spoke-hub model, seems to run by moving the wheel by its rim, giving it a futuristic look that’s much more ‘urban hispter’ than the usual ‘person who’s really too old to be riding a freaking scooter’. The electric vehicle is aimed at those who are not only looking for an easy, low-pollution…

If you’re familiar with a thing called the Internet, doubtlessly you’ve recently bore witness to indie darlings OK GO and they’re latest insanely-choreographed music video. Y’know, the one with the Rube Goldberg Machine? If you haven’t yet, go watch it. Here, I linked it for you. No, really, go ahead. I’ll wait.   Cool (read: head-explodingly badass), right? Well, even cooler is that the band have now posted an interactive floorplan of the machine’s design on their website, and inquiring minds can take an interactive tour of the product of no doubt thousands of manhours….

Meow! What’s better than a cute kitty? A cute kitty with a webcam, of course! Pet Vision. A new concept by TOOUT Industrial Design hints at a future where pet owners can check up on their pets at anytime by logging into a computer and tapping into the webcam attached to your pet’s collar. In essence, it will give you a first-person perspective of your pet at anytime. Now, we know how popular videos of cute cats and kittens are on YouTube, but could you imagine a world with live webcam feeds of cute kittens? Could you imagine how much time and productivity will be lost throughout the day if this happened?…

Who amongst us, the cognoscenti and intelligentsia of the world, hasn’t dreamed of doing something as incredible, sweeping and artful as melting a door with a lightsaber? Fine, maybe that’s a dream limited to a few basement-dwelling nerds. But at least we now have bookends for our dreams! (Ooh, unintentional puns FTW!) New to the Star Wars shop is a pair of bookends that display what it might look like to have a lightsaber piercing through your collection of books, comics or DVDs. Dedicated fans will note, of course, that the lightsaber blade (which lights up) is red, meaning that it probably belongs…

Chiptunes – that genre of music that takes classic tracks and then covers them using 8-bit video game sounds – has always been a bit controversial. Some geeks love the retro-tech aesthetic, while others find it sacrilege to take the treasured music of their youth and turn into bleeps and blips. Well, if you’ve never heard of it before, now’s your time to judege, as someone named ‘rainwarrior’ has created an 8-bit cover of Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a discombobulating experience, but if you too grew up playing Nintendo, Sega Master System – maybe even Turbografx 16 – you might find the use…

Have you ever been suckered into buying a high-end digital cable? Don’t be ashamed – we’re geeks, right? We want only the best. But, you now have no reason – like no reason at all – to ever consider spending more than $10 on a cable to connect your Blu-Ray player, cable box or PS3 or Xbox 360 to your TV. The helpful folks over at Wallstats.com have created a handy little graphic flowchart that lets you know not only why never to buy the fancy HDMI cables certain companies sell (*cough* Monster *cough*) but also why doing so robs starving children of food. Sorta’. The basic gist of the argument is that digital…