If you love fiddling with your ring and have a bit of an engineer in you, then you should have a look at the Gear Ring. It’s a stainless steel ring with 6 micro-gears that turn in unison when the outer rings are moved.
Buy now!
Price: $165
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
UK designers Ben Perman and Murat Mutlu have come up with another tweeting appliance, this time a kettle. They have a pretty fun read of how they came up with the idea and although it started off as just a ‘crazy’ idea, the publicity it has generated has actually landed them the funding they need to make it a reality.
They’re pretty smart though and as they’ve noted in a follow-up post, the crux of this project isn’t about tea, a kettle or Twitter, but rather about WiFi module with an API that you can plug into just about anything. And they’re right, networking (active verb) stuff is the future; it’s what we’re all going to expect gadgets to have by default.
GE is continuing to push the technological envelope of light bulbs, announcing their next line of LED bulbs which have an even better eco-footprint than CFLs.
The GE Energy Smart LED bulb is a 40-watt (40w) replacement that will consumer 9 watts, produce just as much light as a 40W incandescent and last 17 years @ 4 hours per day (about 25 times as long).
The GE Energy Smart LEDs don’t contain any mercury and are cooler to the touch than either CFLs or incandescent bulbs.
These should be available in early 2011.
If you live in Portland, OR, and want to improve your carbon footprint while getting/staying in shape, then take a look at The Green Microgym. In a nutshell, Green Microgym (TGM) offers an environmentally-conscious gym experience.
The actual neat details include the fact that the exercise machines are hooked up to the building’s energy grid, and your workouts actually help to power the lights and other electricity needs. TGM estimates that their carbon footprint is less than half if they were run as a regular gym.
Another nice benefit is that for every hour you workout, you get a $1 credit towards their store. Workout for 10 hours and you get a 50% off coupon at a local adidas store.
They’re franchising, so you can grab your own TGM for your town.
Amazon.com has had yet another patent approved, this time for a way to send their customers images and video clips of their orders being packed up for shipping. Yes, you read that right.
The idea is that it assists customers as well as Amazon and their associated merchants. We’ll see how this pans out, and of course, it could end up being rife with issues, or it may actually be able to cut down the amount of unverifiable finger-pointing that occurs in online shopping and order fulfillment.
Post a comment the first time you notice a video/image in your Amazon order e-mail.
Love this one, the “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1” door/floor mat. In case you’re not a computer/network geek, 127.0.0.1 is the IP address for localhost, or another way to think of it, home! Get it now?
The mat itself is 2’x3′, made of polypropylene with a vinyl no-skid backing. You can even clean it by hosing it down.
Buy now!
Price: $39.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
After pranking you with the iCade for iPad, we figure we may as well lay some real gadgets from ThinkGeek on you.
Here is a super-geeky Epoch Alarm Clock, which can display the time in multiple different formats, including binary and hexadecimal. My favorite? Of course, it has to be why the clock was named: the time since the Unix epoch (Jan 1, 1970).
Yes, this also functions as a working alarm clock, with snooze, and has USB ports so you can charge up those gazillion USB gadgets you have. Now, if it only ran about the room like Clocky…
Buy now!
Price: $39.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
It’s always great to see more companies involved in recycling. In the past, we’ve featured electronics recycling sites like YouRenew, MyBoneYard and Gazelle (and even Costco/Gazelle) that pay you to take your old cell phones, computers, MP3 players, etc. off of your hands.
We’re pleased to tell you about another such site: BuyMyTronics.com (think of it as ‘buy-my-tronics’ or ‘buy-my-electronics’). BuyMyTronics.com touts their free shipping, will take electronics in any condition (excellent!), and get this: their facilities are 100% wind-powered.
How much you get for your electronics depends in large part on how much damage a gadget has. BuyMyTronics.com currently takes iPods, cell phones, game consoles, desktop computers, PDAs, eBook readers and more.
Clean up the air around you in your home and/or office by using a negative ion generator. Eliminate dust, pollen and smoke and other energy-draining items.
This particular model from Purely Products generates 2 million anions per cubic centimeter, plugs into a regular wall outlet, and has a yellow indicator light to let you know its working.
Buy now!
Price: $49.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
It’s pretty amazing that in the year 2010 when we all spend a significant part of our lives online, that we’re still surrounded by so much paper – books, magazines, bills, records. Lots of official records still exist with the local and federal authorities and with your doctor(s) and hospitals on paper.
Arctrieval is a startup that is taking a step towards changing that by allowing for electronic correspondence between you and your doctor/hospital/insurance company.
Arctrieval is a Web-based service that allows you to send communications to your health care provider via e-mail, fax or snail mail, and lets you monitor those comms. You can also manage all of your family’s communication as well. For electronic messages, Arctrieval uses the ubiquitous PDF file format. Arctrieval also facilitates transferring your medical records to other online repositories (such as Microsoft HealthVault).
Arctrieval is free for consumers – you can sign up here.
Incidentally, even if you don’t sign up, you can also make use of some forms that Arctrieval makes available for free.
