Well you’d have to be in first-class, but Emirates Airlines will offer showers on their London-Dubai trip in Dec for the mere price of $9,381 (well at today’s exchange rate anyway). The shower last for 5 minutes on EA’s new Airbus A380 planes. Oh, btw, other amenities include flat beds, massage-equipped suites with remote controlled doors, a work desk and a mini-bar. A freaking mini-bar. I wonder how mini it is…
via Born Rich
We’ve featured a number of sites that will either recycle or help you recycle your old electronics and gadgets, but here’s one with a twist. If it’s relatively recent (based on their database of items on their site), they (Gazelle) will pay you some cash to take it off your hands. They then either resell it or recycle it.
So far, they have a fair # of items in their database with prices attached, items like cell phones, GPS devices, cameras, game consoles and MP3 players. But don’t expect to get a lot of cash for your items. Unless it’s something hot like an iPhone, you’ll get some nominal return. The bright side is that if you’re a gadget junkie who is constantly replacing your stuff, then this is a great way to not completely lose your shirt every time you turn over your arsenal.
Taiwanese company, Carapelli Ltd., is selling what is currently being billed as the world’s cheapest laptop. The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop is a tiny guy in more than 1 respect – 7″ screen, 500Mhz CPU (brand?), 128MB RAM, 1GB flash storage. It naturally comes with Linux and a bunch of (probably open source) productivity software. Just one caveat – you need to buy at least 100 to get it at the $130 price.
Despite the fact that Linux can run pretty nicely (without a window manager) on 128MB of memory, running a GUI and a modern browser will probably result in a slow crawler of a machine. We recommend you look to spend north of $400 to get a decent machine that you wouldn’t want to toss out the window on day 2.
Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a brand new search engine that claims to have indexed over 121 billion Web pages, and also claims that that’s 3 times as much as any other search engine including Google. Interestingly, just a few days ago, Google laid claim to crawling (although not necessarily indexing) 1 trillion Web pages.
So will Cuil succeed in beating Google at their own game? Well, for starters their executive/technical staff are a bunch of Google expats, so it’s quite possible, but on the other hand, Google has quite an impressive foothold now in the search arena, including mindshare with the public. After all, “google” is now a commonly-used verb. I can’t recall other search engines ever having that claim to fame, even within the geek community. Read on for a mini review.
Although the music industry pretty much said goodbye to the audio cassette years ago, once CDs came along, the audio book folks stuck with audio cassettes because they proved a cost-effective alternative to CDs as well as having more than enough audio fidelity for the spoken word.
However, its time has come. Only 400k tapes were sold in 2007, and that number is expected to plummet this year. Audio books on cassettes may still live a few more years as libraries still demand them, but not too much more than that, even though most households still have at least 1 or more cassette players on hand; audio books are also going the way of digital downloads and streams. Many publishers have already completely abandoned cassettes, including some large ones like Random House and Macmillan.
RIP audio cassette – you had your place in history and in my audio collection.
In keeping with our love of all types of alarms (clocks mainly), here’s one to help keep you awake when you’re behind the wheel, manning an important station, studying, or perhaps in the middle of that very important gaming session! It’s a gadget that goes behind your ear and can tell when your head tilts forward more than 30 degrees at which point it will emit a high-pitched alarm that will surely bring you out of your slumber.
This is the type of thing that should almost be mandated for truckers, couriers or others who are on the road a lot, and it’s very reasonably priced after all.
Price: $14.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
I don’t know why, but I love hose nozzles, maybe not so much for the device itself, but b/c I get to play with water! Probably goes back to being a kid. After all, what kid do you know doesn’t like splashing around or squirting someone else, and it just gets better with a high-powered nozzle!
This nozzle has 5 spray settings, and a 2-way shut-off. It’s heavy-duty, and is guaranteed for life. It’s made with stainless steel, fiberglass, brass threads and has a comfort-grip of santoprene rubber.
Summer is here, and you need one of these to replace that leaking, clunky garden hose nozzle you have now.
Price: $29.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Google recently hit a milestone in the quantity of web pages that they process – 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000)! And that # is growing daily by the billions. One trillion isn’t the total # that they index b/c there’s a lot of duplicate content, but still… try to turn that number over in your head. And even more impressive is that they update the linkages several times per day.
Here’s another touch-free gadget to add to your touch-free arsenal, a touchless faucet adaptor. All you need to do is attach this infrared-based adaptor to your existing water faucet. Just place your hands near the gadget and the water comes on. Not much more to it. There is an override switch so you can turn on/off the faucet manually (but that’s so 2007).
No need to hire a plumber to have this installed either. But you will need to get a few AAA batteries.
Gimme!
Price: $38.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
This is exactly the type of product that you may have once seen at an EPCOT exhibit or a future-looking tech documentary, but the difference is this is real. NetLinc is an INSTEON Central Controller that allows you to schedule and control your INSTEON home automation network from the Internet, via a browser on a PC, your Web-accessible smartphone or PDA.
The main NetLinc controller simply plugs into your existing INSTEON network, and from there, you can configure it with your computer network to grant you control from outside your home via your broadband Internet connection. NetLinc even support IP-based cameras so you can view those cameras in real-time from wherever.
This is super-cool application for your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you want to see NetLinc in action, take a look at this video.
Price: $119.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
