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USB Hub Does a Three-way as Clock, Letter Opener
Posted by Seamus Byrne at 11:46 PM on June 20, 2007
As the consolidation of USB devices continues, now here's a three-way: a USB hub with four ports, telling you what time it is and helpfully offering a letter opener up front. Now what's so hard about opening a letter that you have to have a USB device to do it? Well, dogs can hump on their own, but we have a USB device for that, so maybe this makes sense.
Anyway, there's also an alarm clock function included, perfect for waking you up after you've been sleeping it off at your desk. Maybe you need this USB letter opener clock. You may have to wait, because pricing and availability weren't announced yet.
Letter Opener USB Hub Clock [Red Ferret]
Last week we 
We're not entirely sure what you do on your camping trips, but we do know that this Spin Camping Light will get your disco jones into funky town no matter where you are. Tack this $15 sucka up in your tent and boogie the night away to its 60 LEDs. But be careful with that music selection—the bears may not have the Night Fever as badly as you do. 
I got very excited when my fabulous colleague Charlie White passed this thing from Duracell and Xantrex* on to me, saying that the write-up would need my touch. "Ah, it's a clunky, chunky boombox for hunky construction-worker types that plays CDs and never breaks, even when you drop something builder-y and heavy on it," I thought. (Yes, my idea of home decoration is painting my nails in front of re-runs of Dallas, although I'm good with the vacuum cleaner and spirit level when my man is drilling holes in walls.)
Got a fever? I have, and the only prescription is DOORBELL - namely, this USB one from ReBell. Connect it up to your laptop or PC and download whatever sound you want to hear when your bell is pressed. Then fix it to the wall and connect it to your existing low-voltage doorbell wiring system.
Quick question. What would you have to herald the arrival of The Fuzz/Your Mom/Repossessions-R-Us at your door? Would it be Ring My Bell by Anita Ward? Jack Nicholson doing "Heeeere's Johnny!" in The Shining? Something from Ringo Starr's solo oeuvre? Personally, I'd have another Jack - White Stripes' Jack White - doing My Doorbell if I bought this - but then again, I wouldn't shell out, because it's $100 and I'm a tight-fisted git. 
At the beginning of this month, Charlie touched on the 
Hospitals and germ freaks rejoice! English tech company Inov8 (sounds a bit ravey, doesn't it?) has come up with the Air Disinfection unit, or AD. It recreates fresh air, which is a key factor in killing microbes, without the need for opening a window in the operating theater. Any surgeons or hospital staff reading, that was a joke, by the way.
Although launched yesterday in London, the device, which is about the size of a flower vase, is currently being tested in 17 veterans' hospitals over here with a view to making it available in the US.
Within an hour of switching it on, the AD can reduce bacteria levels to zero as it creates reactive hydrogen radicals, then pumps them out into the atmosphere, purging the air of bacteria. Faced with the AD, even the tough superbug MRSA is apparently toast - and that can only be a good thing. 
Shaw Wu, Analyst from American Technology Research and Apple fortune cookie teller is predicting cheaper iPhones in the future. Specifically: "lower cost iPhone prototypes for release at unspecified future dates"
Obviously. This post isn't bout that. Let's talk about Shaw.
Bang, bang, my baby shot me down. With a foam dart. And this Nerf Maverick, which loads six into its barrel and fires them in rapid succession at 15 feet away. And yes, ironically, this thing lets you play Doom, as shown in the video after the jump.
The Graffiti Research Lab has been to Spain for its holidays. Packing their Mobile Broadcast Unit - nice, isn't it? - the crew headed off to Barcelona for OFFF, the International Festival for Post-Digital Creation Culture, and this is what they did, Art Terrorists that they are.
This is Chinese artist Ma Jun's telly, which I've been test-driving at Gizmodo Towers. There was a remote, but it got smashed after my man and I had fisticuffs about what we were going to watch last night (he wanted The Bridges of Madison County, I wanted Seed of Chucky.) and he threw a wobbly and stormed out of the house.
Luckily I'd hidden the keys to the ceramic car, otherwise I guess we'd be sweeping him off the freeway by now.
OK people, I'm done talking about Logitech. But you have to admit, a wireless number pad—for those of us who don't own those big honkin' unmovable mobiles—is a pretty cool idea. I don't have a fact sheet or anything, but I can tell you it will cost $40. Is it worth $40? You tell me. Or better yet, how do you input numbers speedily on your laptop? 
The night of Logitech laptop goodies continues, with two very different stands. One, the Alto Express, is sleek and ergonomic, and looks a little, um, analog for the $50 it's going to cost when it ships next month. Thankfully those Swiss engineers at Logitech furnished us with a rationale for coughing up dough, in the form of a diagram:
The more robust Alto Connect, on the other hand, looks well worth its $80 price tag, as a USB hub and cord wrangler, in addition to being your spine-straightening friend. Jump for fact sheets plus a gallery of sexy shots—if you look close, you can see every 
A blogger in the field is only as good as his (or her) backpack, so I'm keen on seeing how these freaky looking Logitech Kinetik bags turns out. I love ballistic nylon and a polyurethane "exo-shell" as much as the next geek, and the lumbar support on this baby looks nice and cushy, for those multi-meeting running-around-NYC days that I've been having too many of lately. Both will cost $100, shipping in September. Jump for details including, uh, "system requirements". Or just have a look at the pretty pics below. 
This projector is for the videophile who lives in a glass house near the equator and is to cheep to buy blackout shades.
The Sanyo PLC-XF47 (Who comes up with these names?) is boasting a ridiculously high 15,000 lumen's. We can barley fathom how bright that must be, although what were they thinking keeping it at 1024x768? If we're going to spend 30-grand on a projector it better at least be 1920x1080. Although they did add wireless HD streaming. Look for it in October if you've got 30-grand lying around, or a bunch of credit cards taunting you.
The Panasonic Pocket Power fully charges itself in four hours. But then what? Now hook it up to any of your devices that charge through USB, and share some of that good old energy lovin with them. And if that isn't good enough for you, you can even take it's batteries out and use them in other devices as well.
No word on price or what type of batteries are inside, but it goes on sale in Japan on July 1st.
EMI let out the first bits on 
Is there anything that Google doesn't have it's grubby little hands on these days? Up until today we thought that cars were off of their radar, but we were wrong. Their philanthropic division, Google.org, is moving into the plug-in hybrid market. What is that you ask? Basically they are full on electric cars that you plug into an outlet, but they also have a gas tank.
Google said they are prepared to spend over $10 million dollars in grants to accelerate the plug-In hybrid adoption rate. And that the plug-in hybrid version (Is that a hybrid hybrid?) of the Toyota Prius gets 73.6 mpg, a full 32.7 mpg more.
Wow, just think how smug these plug-in hybrid owners will be, when regular hybrid owners already love the smell of their own farts. Maybe the people in this video will be a good indicator?
While we prefer keyboards like the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000, the nostalgic types who learned to type on old Commodore 64s may want to be able to use that keyboard to punch out blog posts. Now that's possible.
This French-designed chair, called "Wear Your Seat," is a semi-rigid foam cushion that molds to your back. You might dismiss it as a wacky design prototype, but have a little vision: Hot Pink Backspins, dude.
Up close photo:
The University of Washington posted an overview of what went on at a WWDC conference about the iPhone's browsing capabilities and how to design for them. Many of the details we already knew, but there are some new bits about how far iPhone's Safari will go.
Condolences to you if your company is too cheap to afford a real forklift and forces you to use this human powered one. As if pedaling the thing bike style wasn't insulting enough, you have to actually use your arms to lift up to 30kg—and then start pedaling to wherever the hell it is you're moving the thing to.
A definite workout, yes, but it's definitely not cool when your manager switches your pay over into the maintenance budget. Oh, you crazy Japanese! 
Airbus just got permission from the EASA (the Eurotrash FAA) 
Blockbuster's decision to support Blu-ray in all of its 1,450 stores is having a bigger impact than it seems. A tipster at an unnamed retailer tells us they've had more HD DVD player orders canceled over the last few days than they've seen over the entire life cycle. The kicker? All of them were canceled because of the Blockbuster announcement.
The talk of the town down in CommunicAsia in lovely Singapore is the rumor that Samsung is going to release 53 phones this week. Fifty-three. We'll sift through the rubble and pick out the good ones for you. 
When Apple's iPhone made the jump 
If you've always wanted those Aliens-shaped Alienware cases but never had a high-paying enough job for one, this P2 Chassis is a good compromise. You pay $399 for the shell, which comes with a 700-watt power supply, blue LEDs and the quality construction Alienware PCs are known for.
Still, $399 is pretty steep for a case, even if it is Alienware. You can get a pretty decent- looking one, plus a good power supply for $200-ish. 
Wired just set up a look back at some of the greatest gadgets the universe has ever known, and they're accepting votes. There can be only one. That image to the right is the Zenith Space Command remote, designed in 1956, before IR, and before Zenith slipped quietly into the history without so much as a whimper..wait, they're still in business? 
Chalk one up for Samsung in the hard disc derby, catching up to rivals Hitachi and Seagate with the Samsung F1 series hard drive with a vast 1TB of storage space. Just look at that beauty, boys. The big news is its simplicity, packing the world's highest recording density on a 3.5-inch hard disk, using just three platters to get to that gargantuan 1TB capacity. Yeah, less is more. It's fast, spinning at 7200rpm and has a 32MB cache. It'll be going for a relatively cheap price, too, at $399.
Okay, fellow supernerds, look at this drive porn gallery, and then peruse the deets on Samsung's couple of other drives also rolled out today:
Fumbling around for the alarm clock in the morning is second place only to getting elbowed in the ribs because we can't find the alarm clock when it comes to things we don't look forward to when we wake up. That's why this alarm clock mat design by Sofie Collin & Gustav Lanberg is so great.
Not only does it display the time in the middle, you turn off the alarm by firmly planting both feet onto its carpety exterior. There's little chance of misplacing this alarm, unless of course you've got a dog that really enjoys rugs. 
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