Here are this week’s seven cool gadgets. Did you see last week’s edition of Gadget Monday?
Parans luminaires
A company called Parans has come up with a way to bottle sunlight and deliver it inside office spaces or homes as natural lighting.
The concept is remarkably simple yet works wonderfully. They have sunlight collectors sitting on the roof or exterior walls of a building. They look like this.
The light then gets concentrated and carried through special fiber optic cables created to preserve all of the light’s characteristics.
These cables are then connected to special light fixtures that diffuse the natural light indoors. They can be panel lights or floodlights.
With this new lighting method, employees or home owners get all of the benefits of natural sunlight in rooms where they normally can’t get it and don’t need to spend money on electricity or electric lighting appliances. I’m not sure what the cost is, but I’d love to see companies take up this new lighting method. Just think, all those employees sitting in tiny cubicles under fluorescent lighting, not seeing the light of day, all day long, all week long, could instead be bathed in natural light, which would cheer them up and boost their productivity.
Someone has come up with this world clock, built in Flash. It shows the time of day where you are in the world, but it also lists all sorts of important statistics, like world population, births, population grown, divorces, cancer incidence, forest lost, species extinct, and deaths. The death statistics are interesting because they’re broken down by reason, such as TB, AIDS, malaria, cancer and others. You can click on buttons that re-calculate the statistics per year, month, day or now. It’s definitely worth a look.
Altec Lansing expressionist CLASSIC speakers
These speakers would go great with an iMac or an all-in-one PC. They have a clear, square face that holds the cylindrical enclosure for the speakers. They connect to your computer through a regular 3.5mm audio cable, and they have an auxiliary input for iPods or other MP3 players as well. The output is 7.5 Watts per channel.
This little device, slightly bigger than a C battery, will turn any USB external drive into a network drive. You simply plug the USB cable into the Addonics NAS Adapter, and you connect the adapter to your router with a standard network cable. Its USB port is powered, which means you can even plug in a small portable USB drive, and you won’t need to worry about connecting it to a separate power supply.
The adapter is compatible with any version of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (2.6.x and higher). It supports the Samba protocol for up to 64 clients, has a built-in FTP server for up to 8 clients, and can be used as a print server or Bit Torrent client. You can manage it through its built-in web interface. The best part is that it retails for only $55. At that price, it’s a must-have.
This new turbine, created by Massachussetts-based FloDesign, uses jet engine aerodynamics to extract more energy from the wind. It is still a horizontal axis turbine, but its patent-pending design focuses air flow and speeds it up, which means its blades can rotate at lower wind speeds. Because it uses jet engine technology, which is an enclosed design, this means it can also rotate at much higher speeds, and is also safer to be around. The blades orient themselves to the wind automatically because the turbine is equipped with a fin that acts as a windvane. The product hasn’t launched yet, nor is the company taking orders yet, but I for one look forward to seeing this on the market.
There’s also a demo video on YouTube, which explains the technology in more detail.
This neat gadget has rechargeable batteries inside. You plug it into an outlet while you’re at home to recharge its batteries, then take it with you while you travel. If you run out of juice for your iPhone or iPod, you simply plug those devices into the musicPower Encore, and they recharge using the energy stored inside. It’s a neat way to transport the energy you need to keep your toys working. It sells for $20 at ThinkGeek.
The next-generation SD cards, called SDXC (Xtended Capacity), will have increased storage capacity, up to 2 TB, and will have increased read/write speeds as well, anywhere from 104-300 MB/sec. The official specs are due to be released by the SD Association in Q1 of this year, 2009.
A 2TB SDXC card will be able to store about 480 hours of full HD recording, or about 136,000 high-quality photos. Keep in mind the USB 3.0 spec has also been released recently, which means we’ll have USB 3.0 card readers. We’ll be able to store and transfer more data than ever before. I for one wonder if CF cards will continue to be the staple storage device for DSLRs, or whether SDXC cards will replace them altogether.
Here are this week’s seven cool gadgets. Did you see last week’s Gadget Monday?
Aptera 2e to begin deliveries in October
The Aptera 2e, the wonderfully designed electric car that gets over 100 mpg and has a 0.15 drag coefficient, will begin to deliver on its orders this October, in 2009. The car is lightweight, fast, strong and impact resistant, and will have all of the amenities we’ve become used to in our cars: AC, stereo, etc. It can charge overnight in your garage using a standard 120V socket, and the projected cost is $0.50 per charge, which will last up to 100 miles.
Samsung launched the first 10 megapixel camera phone in Korea, the SCH-B600. Guess when? I did a double-take when I saw the date of this press release: October 10th, 2006!
US mobile phone users, it’s time to feel ashamed of the pathetic specs of your cellphones! Seriously, the iPhone is still at 2 megapixels. As a matter of fact, most cellphones are still at 2-3 megapixels. My Nokia N95 is only at 5 megapixels, yet the Koreans have had a 10 megapixel cellphone with 3x optical zoom — not a crappy digital zoom — for over 2 years! Did I mention they can also watch satellite TV on it?
Don’t feel too bad, though. T-Mobile users in the US will soon get the Samsung Memoir (SGH-t929), an 8 megapixel cellphone with no optical zoom and a touch screen. It’ll run on T-Mobile’s 3G (EDGE in most areas) network.
Let me get this straight: US users get an 8 megapixel cellphone with no optical zoom and no TV, more than 2 years after the Koreans have had a 10 megapixel cellphone with 3x optical zoom. Yeah, that makes sense. Just wanted to make sure.
This upgraded version of the Fabre Photo microscope from Nikon, originally introduced in 2006, will launch on February 20th. It will let you connect any Nikon DSLR to it via a NAS-L1 digital SLR attachment. If you use a FSB-U1 compact digital camera bracket, you can attach any Coolpix series camera.
The optical system has 20x magnification, and field of view of 11mm in diameter. Shooting magnification varies with the camera, but it will range from 45x without extension tubes to 66x with two extension tubes and a DX-format camera.
(DX is Nikon’s cropped-sensor format; FX is their full sensor format, equivalent to the original 35mm film.)
Mission Motors, an SF-based company, has built an all-electric road bike. It’s designed to be the fastest all-electric motorcycle. It’ll go up to 150 mph. Its range is 150 miles on a single charge. Recharge time is under 2 hours at 240 V, or 8 hours at 120 V. It was engineered to have a constant 100 foot-pounds of torque anywhere between 0 and 60 mph. I tried to look up the spec 0-60 time, but couldn’t find it anywhere.
Someone took the time to assemble a full set of keyboard keys from wooden Scrabble playing bits, bevel their edges, and fit them to a keyboard enclosure that can connect to your computer via USB. I love the effort they put into this, and I love the idea of a wooden keyboard as well.
This new printer uses the pigment from used coffee grounds to print on regular paper. You simply pour the coffee grounds into the ink cartridge, print a document, then move the cartridge back and forth to print each line and advance the paper through the printer. This printer not only uses less electricity but also no expensive ink whatsoever. I don’t know what its print resolution is, but I imagine it’s decent enough for readable text.
Raoul Pop 