Gizmos for Geeks

Edison is a freeware application for your Windows XP or Vista machine that regulates its energy use, mainly by doing things like turning off your monitor, spinning down your hard drive and/or putting your computer into standby or hibernation.

Assuming you haven’t been a good boy/girl and already turned on some of those power-saving features, then you expect to save a good $20 to $35 per year per computer. Edison will also calculate your savings. Ok, so it doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re a poweruser who has a monster machine with more than 1 or 2 hard drives, a souped up graphics card and more, then you may well save a lot more. And of course, let’s not forget the significant benefit to the planet.

via Wired.com

Trendhunter magazine has a nice article with a collection of cool creations either based on Legos or with Legos at its core. My favorites: Lego cufflinks, Lego Las Vegas, and ice trays that make ice Lego bricks.

If your an iPhone owner with a surfing/e-mail ‘habit’, then you may need some more juice (aka battery life). mophie has a product for the iPhone (and one for the iPod Touch too) called the Juice Pack that increases Standby Time to 250 hours, Talk Time to 8 hours, Video playback to 7 hours and Audio playback to 24 hours.

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For the geek that has to do presentations, iSpring Free is a neat little tool that converts your PowerPoint presentations into Adobe Flash slideshows. So no more sticking this slides up on the Web, and needing your visitors to download then open up on their computer (and they need to have Powerpoint Viewer at a minimum too).

iSpring runs on Windows supports PowerPoint 2000/XP/2003/2007.

You may love your gadgets, but hate the mess of cables that it typically involves. If you’ve got a bit of extra cash to spend on the ‘problem’, then you should take a look at FlatWire Technologies which is a company that makes FlatWire, ultra-thin, surface mounted wiring for audio, video, data and even low-voltage lighting.

FlatWire boasts the ability to be applied flat against walls and other surfaces non-invasively, then covered up with the same coloring, make 90 degree turns and run all types of signaling over it. Depending on the type of connection you need, there are specific interconnects that you need to buy.

While FlatWire by itself is more expensive than traditional cylindrical wires, the company touts total installation costs as being competitive. Of course, if you put a high value on aesthetics, then FlatWire will definitely win out.

No, it’s not a predictor of impending quakes, but the GraGraph will sound an alert and tell you how large the earthquake is on the Richter scale (anywhere from 3 to 10).

Hopefully, you’ll never have to use it, so for that reason, it has a built-in LCD clock, alarm and night-light! The GraGraph will also record prior seismic activity. It runs on 4 AA batteries.

This is a Japanese product, but you can snag one from an importer of Japanese products.

Gimme!

Price: $185
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

PricePirates is a piece of Windows freeware that lets you compare prices in eBay auctions ( you can select what country), Amazon.com and Shopping.com. Each of those product sources show up in different tabs in the software and automatically populated once you switch to a tab. There is also a tab with a Web search (although I don’t know why you would bother with this when there are much better search engines out there).

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It may be a bit amusing to think of, but the competition amongst shaving companies is fierce. Consider this - it’s well known that Gillette spent over $750 million on the R&D costs for the Mach3 razor. But I’m here to discuss the latest from Schick which as far as I know is a first. It’s a safety razor with replaceable blades and a powered trimmer on the other end (at the far end of the stylized marketing photo).

The Quattro Titanium with Trimmer (there’s also a model without the trimmer) sports a 4-blade razor with a 5th blade on the back of those main 4 for edging. These blades are titanium coated for reducing nicks and cuts. I still maintain that cuts still happen, despite the added lotion strips, etc., but I’ll certainly take anything that vendors throw in to mitigate the possibility.
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I love these things. Another example of “why didn’t I think of that?” These pizza scissors cut through pizza without scratching the pan underneath it, and also serve as a serving spatula to get the pizza slice onto plates without spilling. The parts separate for easy dishwashing (in the dishwasher is fine). I don’t want traditional roller pizza cutters any more!

Gimme!

Price: $9.95
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

If you’re looking to access all of that TV and video content you have ‘trapped’ at home, and you were thinking Slingbox, think again, because they’re not the only game in town. Enter Hava. The Hava Platinum HD arguably has more features than the Slingbox Pro. Connect any of your HiDef video sources to the Hava and then access it over your home network on your computers, or over the Internet, plus compatibility with Windows Media Center to let you create a virtual TV tuner.

Hava Platinum functions as a DVR so you can pause, rewind and fast-forward in DVD quality using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format. You can connect it via the Ethernet (802.3) 10/100 NIC to your network, and can even view it on your mobile phone. The PC client even allows you to burn your TV shows to DVD.

If you’re interested in wireless access, Hava also has a version with wireless connectivity, the Titanium HD WiFi.

Gimme!

More info from the manufacturer

Price: $114
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)