As of October, 2006, the US state department issued rules that dictate all US passports must have embedded RFID tags. The chips are designed to hold biometric data for passport holders, but are not designed to track your movements… Or so they say…

You don’t have to be a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid to be concerned about the implications to RFID tags built into your personal identification. From a distance, anyone with the right equipment can read the contents of that chip. He can tell your name, nationality, or any bit of info the gubmint decides to embed in your passport. For argument’s sake, you may trust the powers that be with that info, but anybody can get at that data. Do you trust everyone?

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It is early afternoon. The air conditioning blows a bittersweet breeze across the office. A silence blankets the building. Everyone has just returned or finished their lunches. They are full; they are tired. Your nemesis is even quiet for a change. It is the perfect time for revenge! You sneak up, remove a Sonic Grenade from your belt, pull the pin, and throw it into his cubicle. Twenty seconds later, his screams echo in every corner of the office, as do the unstoppable sounds of your Sonic Grenade.

The Sonic Grenade is a masterpiece of office mayhem. It is hard rubber and plastic, making it pretty easy and safe to toss. Set the grenade to one of three volume settings, pull the pin, and throw. The blinking red light will let you know the grenade is armed. Once the alarm goes off, your prey will only be able to adjust the settings (and trust us, low is even really annoying), he or she or they will not be able to permanently turn the unit off. The only way to permanently stop the alarm is to reinsert the pin, which you are now twirling around your finger. Remember, revenge is a dish best served LOUD!

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Do you ever have issues setting up or modifying your AV setup located in a built-in cabinet or entertainment center? There’s never enough room and my arms aren’t bendy like the Reed Richards character in Fantastic Four so I hate this job. I usually end up pulling the components out, plugging in, then sliding all the components into the cabinet praying that the connections don’t come undone and that I don’t scratch the cabinet. I tend to have a high failure rate with this process.

Using Middle Atlantic’s Slide-Out Rotating Shelf, you can mount the rack to the inside of an entertainment center or built-in cabinet and when you need to access the back of the components you can slide them out and rotate them up to 60 degrees for easy access to the rear connections.

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While other speakers have tweeters that can be angled for a more realistic sound, these motorized speakers can rotate 320-degrees to create the perfect sound stage for the ultimate home theater experience. Whether enjoying your favorite movie by yourself or cheering on your team with your buddies, the speakers will position themselves into the perfect preset sound scene so there will never be a bad seat in the house!

Now you can get the best of both worlds with the TIME (Theater In Motion Experience) series speakers from Speakercraft, an in-ceiling speaker system that works just like any standard speaker, but mounted inside the ceiling. Whenever activated, these fully automated speakers spring to life like something out of a sci-fi movie — automatically descending from the ceiling to preset angles of 15, 30, and 45 degrees and then disappearing back into the ceiling when you are done.

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You can electronically tint your skylights offering control of the amount of light and heat entering a room by using SageGlass’ electrochromic technology. The skylight panes are made by coating glass with multiple layers of a thin ceramic film that is less than 1/50th the thickness of a human hair. By applying a low DC voltage, the active electrochromic layers darken and reversing the voltage polarity causes the layers to lighten.

Add a little home automation ingenuity or hacking and you can automatically have the skylights darken when the temperature reaches a certain level outside or in the room with skylights. Be the envy of your technologists friends with this technology in your home.

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Mr. Alex recently wrote up a bit about the latest efforts to effectively and accurately tag images by making use of people’s desire to play games. Think of it as SETI @ Home, but instead you’re playing an online game head to head with some other random person on the Internet where you both try to guess the same word for a picture that you both see. There is a variant on this game as well that Carnegie Mellon runs. What I thought was most interesting though was Mr. Alex’s comparison of these online games to a real-life game played by kids in some countries in Africa on a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump. Brilliant. So play can be used as a means to a different ends as well.

Read the full story over at Geekfoolery.com.

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This Star Wars Darth Vader Helmet Stein is perfect for the Star Wars fan or to send the message to your boss that he’s joined the dark side. By simply flipping the top of the Vader bust, your refreshing and thirst quenching beverage is revealed for drinking.

What could be better than drinking out of a Darth Vader Helmet? Drinking out of two Vader Steins… one for each hand.

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I have a feeling that we could feature a new VoIP phone everyday of the year as these products are being put out by everyone. We chose to link to this phone because, well, it looks kinda cool.

This Skype-certified phone allows you to connect to your laptop via a USB port and make free PC-to-PC calls as well as cheap calls to landline phone using the Skype service.

So, how does it work? Well, there’s no need for microphones, speakers, or a mouse with this stylish, interactive handset. The Multi-Link TeleVoIP USB Phone acts as an extension of your PC to make Skype calling easier. Just pick up the handset from the cradle, and Skype pops up instantly on your monitor. Toggle through your Skype TAB windows (contacts, dial, history) to your buddy list and scroll to the right contact to call. When you’re through, just hang up, and Skype minimizes instantly. Inbound calls ring the phone and light the LED to make sure your calls get noticed.

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Flying within a 12′ x 16′ indoor room, this 3.6 gram remote control airplane has a beautifully constructed delicate airframe along with a carbon-fiber propeller, a Swiss-engineered gearbox and a itty bitty 4mm coreless motor.

This gorgeous remote control airplane includes a briefcase and flight simulator software just like the Butterfly Indoor Flyer we featured a year ago. You have to check out the video.

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You never know when a good knife will come in handy. Perhaps you’re caught in the middle of an unexpected zombie attack or you’re sitting down to dine on a tasty Porterhouse armed only with a Titanium spork. Either of these scenarios would be considerably improved with the presence of a trusty blade, and we think you should never be unprepared ever again.

This compact, ergonomically shaped knife with a built-in LED bulb is keychain friendly, so it can be with you at all times. The stainless steel blade folds in to create a knife that is only 2.5″ in length when closed. The LED light features an auto shut-off after 3 minutes and runs on two CR-1616 lithium batteries (included). Built-in lanyard hole for easy keychain attachment.

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