If you don’t fancy having your face caved in and your iPod nicked by some troglodyte Chav at the bus stop, you might want to think about a new coat. An iPod coat.
These are not the first iPod coats – or the smartest - I’ve seen, but this is certainly the broadest range.
The Kenpo Jacket for iPod has 15 different styles and colours to choose from, from faux fur-lined bubble jackets to windbreakers and snowboarding jackets.
The iPod sits in an inner padded pouch and using Elektek’s ‘smart fabric’, you get a five button strip on your sleeve that lets you access and control your desirable iPod without having to air it in public for the jackals.
No batteries required and fully machine washable. Prices range from £50 to £100. No UK dates yet but you can order online if you don’t mind some hefty shipping charges.-Martin Lynch
We all know that time and death are linked and with Halloween just around the corner, it’s fitting that I show you one of the scariest damn death watches I’ve seen.
This is the Memento Mori Death Watch from around 1810 and subtle, it is not. You can’t actually get a much more vivid message: “That’s right sucker, tick tock, you’re a dead man walking.”
To check the time you just open up that skull. This miniature skull pocket watch is made from enamel, 18k gold and diamonds. It sold for a cool £9,000. See it in all it’s gory glory after the jump.-Martin Lynch
You've got a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse and wireless speakers, so why are you still connecting to your monitor with a cable? What are you, some kind of luddite? You need a wireless monitor connector, like the new WID101 from Teq Gear. This device connects the DVI port on your PC to the one on your monitor over an encrypted 802.11 a. g or b network, squishing the video data down to fit. It'll run at resolutions up to WXGA (1366 by 768 pixels; good enough for a 17-inch LCD screen) and will set you back £500. – Richard Baguley
It must be the dream of every nerd to get into orbit, but one lucky bastiche is going to fly: Former Microsoftie Charles Simonyi is now training to be the next space tourist to the International Space Station. The self-described nerd (who lead the teams that developed Word and Excel, and is thus richer than the rest of us put together) will be taking off on the 9th of March 2007 from Russia and will spend 8 days in orbit. And like any self-respecting nerd, he already has a blog about the experience. – Richard Baguley
The folks at Camcorder Info have finished their lengthy thesis on Sony's HDR-SR1. For those who don't remember, the SR1 is Sony's hard drive-packing (30GB) HD camcorder. It has the same CMOS sensor found in Sony's HDR-UX1, so it suffered from the same noise problems users complained about on the UX1. It also couldn't top the Canon HV10, which held on to its best picture crown. The SR1 did provide sharper images with less fuzz than the UX1.
The SR1 also got pat on its chunky ass for having cool features like a mic input, headphone jack, its ability to shoot hi-res stills while recording, and for having a multifunction ring that lets you tweak manual settings. Their main gripe was with the Sony's clunky software which is required to edit AVCHD footage. Otherwise, indie filmmakers should be lining up as we speak. – Louis Ramirez
Well, if you're MacBook ain't mooing chances are it could be shutting down on you. Apple fessed up today saying that a small number of lazy ass MacBooks have been intermittently shutting down on their owners. A new firmware update should keep your sleepy Mac from quitting on you. Or you could give it the ol' German technique. – Louis Ramirez
MagSafe, schmagsafe. You don't have to have a next-gen Apple laptop to have a magnetic power adapter, just do it yourself like the folks at Instructables. It may not look like the prettiest do-it-yourself job on the planet, but by golly it gets the job done. Good job putting Apple in their place, and making sure they know who is boss. – Travis Hudson
The Cuboglass is a black box that will hide the TV and give people the impression that you have a taste for lame contemporary artwork. Turn the TV on and it works like normal, displaying your favorite cartoons and reality shows, therefore proving to the world that you aren't a hipster doofus and really just another lazy TV-watching bum.
I'm trying to decide what is worse: being ashamed of owning a TV, or paying $650 for a box that can make it look like you don't own a TV? – Travis Hudson
Convergence is the name of the game with this table from Gorenje. The table, which already looks futuristic as it is, has an automated refrigerator built in that will rise to the top with the push of a button. No longer will you have to make the painstaking trip from the dining room to the refrigerator for another brewsky. The table will be available next summer in a variety of materials such as glass, wood, stone and will likely cost a couple trillion. – Travis Hudson
Here's the next generation of convenience charging technology, the PowerMonkey, a good companion to have if you run out of juice. Charge it up first and its variety of compatible tips will give you 40 hours of fun on an iPod, six hours on a Sony PSP and even keep that digital camera going until that snap happy finger of yours gets sore.
It's £40, costing about the same as an iGo charger with all the necessary accessories, but giving you more power for your money. Plus, it looks like a dildo. What more could you ask for? – Charlie White
Halloween is just a few days away, but that still leaves time to build yourself a geek costume or buy yourself an animatronic scary cat. If you're looking for inspiration, the Monsterlist of Halloween projects has links to hundreds of Halloween related props and projects that you can build, ranging from a £15 fog chiller to an animatronic Zombie. On the right we have the disturbingly realistic looking human BBQ. – Richard Baguley
The Mac pros are already ecstatic over the Mac Pro, that tower of a Mac with the dual-core Xeons inside, but now they're getting even more worked up over the rumors of a dual quad-core Mac in the works. So that would mean—count 'em—eight cores in all, sending those content creators straight into MacHeaven. What will they call it? OctoMac? Yaweh?
It's no surprise that this is the next step for the top-line Mac Pro. Those quad-core Xeon 5300 series "Clovertown" chips are being readied for lots of workstations we can't tell you about yet. The best news is that pricing of the base config of Apple's eight-way machine may closely match that of its four-way incumbent.
Who says we're Mac fanboys? Bile-spitting skepticism, after the jump.
Okay folks, it's polarization time. Since we hang around, drinking beers and monkeying with gadgets all day and spontaneously erupt into typeage from time to time, it's our job to keep our fingers on the pulse of what's sizzlin' and what's fizzlin'.
While you're working away at your worthwhile jobs, we'll continue sorting out the coolness from the lukewarm for you. Of course, the following list is full of half-baked opinions, but they're probably right. Read along, get angry or applaud, but here it is, in honor of Picasso's birthday yesterday (10/25/06): The Old In/Out.
So I can understand the simple mistake that was made when Sean received his shrink-wrapped iPod from Smalldog.com, and opened it to find a couple bars of soap and some cheap batteries.
After a quick call to the Smalldog customer service, and a laughing at by the representative, Sean had a replacement on the way. Check out the entire story over at the Consumerist. – Travis Hudson
Apple dropped another bomb today by unveiling a new patent application appropriately titled "Electronic Device Having Display and Surrounding Touch Sensitive Bezel for User Interface and Control." At least they are specific with the title.
The focus of the patent is the incorporation of a touch-sensitive bezel (edge of screen) that can adapt to the screen contents to provide an input method for the user. Hrmpf suggests that the use of this non-screen area would eliminate many of the "smudge" and "scratch" concerns for a full-screen touch iPod.
The only downside to this finding is the possibility that the full-screen touch iPod could get delayed even longer. – Travis Hudson
Silly me, thinking that 720p projectors were big, expensive things that only people with a paycheck more frequent than us freelance writers could afford; The Optoma HD70 DLP projector costs under a thousand bucks. Sure, it only does 720p when the really fancy ones do 1080p, but it's cheap, and according to Audioholics, pretty damn good:
There are certainly better projectors out there, but you probably won't find them at this price point - and definitely not with 720p DLP technology. If you're looking to get "into" a front projection system but haven't been able to justify the costs - you no longer have an excuse.
Allright, so 720p ain't exactly 4K, but 720p for under £600? Nice. – Richard Baguley
How can you say these earbuds aren't sexy? Just look at the profile view—those curves drive me wild! The three earbuds released are the SE-CL22-TJ, SE-CL22DN and SE-CD25DN. The first two have 10mm speakers and pump out up to 102dB with a frequency range of 7Hz to 23kHz. The latter mentioned earbud has a 13.5 diameter speaker with up to 106dB with a frequency range of 18Hz to 22kHz. Audiogasm, anyone? – Travis Hudson
While LED taillights have become commonplace, we haven't seen them in the front of vehicles until now. The first production cars to use LED headlights will be the Audi R8 and Lexus LS, with more on the way. LEDs last longer and use less power, but by far the most appealing aspect of these tiny lights: the styling possibilities, where they take up much less room and can be distributed on the front of the car in unusual ways.
It's not easy engineering these LEDs for headlight use, because they get hotter than a two-dollar pistol, plus that heat from the engine compartment doesn't help, either. We're glad they sorted that out, though, because check out how way-cool these rides look. Not long from now, vehicles with old-skool conventional headlights will be about as appealing as grandma's mustache. – Charlie White
Philips's gave us a tour of their amBX gaming system last night running on Far Cry. It's comprised of some LED driven lights that bathe your room in lights similar to on screen colors, fans that blast you with air when your avatar is sprinting or getting knocked around, rumble pads and a 2.1 audio system that's pretty loud. Here they've got got two kits daisy chained together for more...ambience.
Playing Far Cry in this particular setup reveals that you really do see flashes of white light before you die. –Brian Lam
If you thought blasting your iPod was bad for your ears, you ain't seen nothing. The sonic bed is a king-size bed with 12-channel surround sound. It may look like a wooden tank from the outside, but inside its got enough speakers to dwarf any home theater set up. Created by Kaffe Matthews as a museum exhibit (no plans for retail as of yet), the bed requires 220 volts of electricity and covers every inch of your body in sound. Throw in a flat-panel TV and we'll never leave bed again. Click on for some pics of how the bed was made.
Using a Wacom isn't reserved for the professionals, anymore. After using this tablet nobody would take you seriously or professionally. This small Wacom tablet is covered in pink Hello-Kittyness ruining all of your credibility as a digital designer. Oh well, at least it is cute! This is a limited edition release of 10,000 and it will be available in Japan only for £50 or so. Check out all of the other companies that have released Hello Kitty crap, therefore losing our respect, here. – Travis Hudson
Why limit yourself to knowing only one language when you pretend to know many more? That's what a bunch of U.S. scientists figured when they set about to create a "Tower Of Babel" translator. A series of electrodes connect to the user's neck and face to detect movements that are made when users mouth words. That is, by simply mouthing the word you want translated, rather than outright speaking them, the device can translate. There's two working prototypes right now, one that translates Chinese into English and one that translates from English into Spanish or German. Using a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words, scientists says they've attained an accuracy of 80 percent.
But think of the bigger picture: if scientists successfully made a device that translates all the world's languages, we'd be left without terrible Brad Pitt movies. And that, dear friends, would be a tragedy of unfathomable size and scope. – Nicholas Deleon
Rejoice, diabetics! No, you still can't have any delicious donuts, but you can more closely monitor your glucose levels without the need for finger pricks. Digital Angel (the company name sounds like a myspace username or something) was awarded a patent for their embedded bio-sensor system.
The system works by implanting a glucose-sensing RFID microchip into the patient. The chip can more accurately measure glucose levels and report it back to a digital scanner that also powers the device. Digital Angel just received their patent this week, so expect it to still be years before this product is actually available, until then—keep on prickin'. Thanks, Anthony– Travis Hudson
Looking remarkably similar to the earlier announced LG KB6100, the LG KE820. (They look the same because they are, the difference being that the Korean version is able to tune into DMB TV broadcasts. But this one is slightly "speed bumped," to put in into Apple parlance.) Billed as the successor to the KG320, the new guy has a similar form factor (only 9.9mm thick) but improves the feature set. Rather than a 1.3-megapixel camera, the KE630 sports a 2.0-megapixel camera but still moves along with only 128MB of internal memory. Of course, microSD makes that pretty irrelevant. There's another pic after the jump to tickle your fancy.
We weren't aware that Indians had iPods back in ancient times, but then we weren't aware that prehistoric Egyptians flew helicopters, either. It's a constant learning process. But check out this location in Google Maps or enter 50° 0'38.20"N 110° 6'48.32"W in Google Earth and you'll see a distinct Indian head, complete with white iPod earphones inserted. Wonder what song he's listening to?
It's a remarkable image, and a tribute to the human brain which is acutely attuned to the shape of faces. Let's face it, we see them everywhere—in clouds, pieces of toast, on the sides of water tanks, on Mars, and indeed, in satellite images. – Charlie White
Pioneer says enough of that noise, releasing its SP-MJ7NS noise cancellation headsets that go one step further, adding a simulated surround system. The company says these cans can cancel up to 80% of that cacophonous din going on outside your head, and its batteries can keep going for 20 hours while it's at it.
Pioneer meets with some tough competition, the two standouts being the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 and the Outside the Box Solitude headphones. We've heard both, and while neither comes close to reducing 80% of ambient noise, they both do a decent job of reducing constant racket such as wind and engine noise on an airplane.
Microsoft made some bold promises for the Xbox 360 over the past year, not least of which was Chairman Billy’s boast that Microsoft would have a 10-million head start over the PS3. Oops.
Yesterday, in its financial results statement, it revealed said that it has sold just 6 million so far. The breakdown: 3.6m to the US, 1.7m in Europe and around 700,000 elsewhere. And, the best bit: it remains ‘confident’ that it will hit the 10 million mark before the end of the year.
Hmm, 4 million in around 9 weeks. Even with Christmas, who thinks that’s realistic?-Martin Lynch
If you don’t fancy having your face caved in and your iPod nicked by some troglodyte Chav at the bus stop, you might want to think about a new coat. An iPod coat. 
We all know that time and death are linked and with Halloween just around the corner, it’s fitting that I show you one of the scariest damn death watches I’ve seen. 
Microsoft made some bold promises for the Xbox 360 over the past year, not least of which was Chairman Billy’s boast that Microsoft would have a 10-million head start over the PS3. Oops. 
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
