The built-in speakers on the Nintendo DS Lite may not be spectacular, but they manage to get the point—and by point we mean the musical bleeps and bloops of the latest Zelda game—across quite well. GameTech disagrees, which is why they created this Sound Shell DLite addition that not only adds slightly stronger speakers on the back, but a stand to prop your DS up in case the whole thing becomes slightly too heavy for your underdeveloped arms to lift. US$30 gets you the entire contraption. [Impress via Technabob via DS Fanboy via Kotaku]
The Octopus Studios’ Silverfish Aquarium (see BBGadgets for bookworm joke that, I’ll be honest, took me a second) is one of those things you wish you had right up until the day you get it, then you spend a couple of years wondering what you were thinking. Sure, its six orbs of sturdy clear PMMA plastic are future funky in a retro-1980s Schwartzenegger-movie kind of way, and the advertised “easy installation” of this US$3,400 complete-kit aqua-sculpture is certainly believable. But the minute green filth starts to build up in the linking tunnels, or one of your gouramis goes belly up in a lower-quadrant globe, well, that’s it for fun with fish. [Octopus via BBGadgets]
At PMA 2008, it seemed like everyone is adding HD video recording to their digital point ‘n’ shoot lineup: Panasonic’s TZ5 and FX35, Samsung’s NV24HD, a few Kodak EasyShare cameras and even one Canon PowerShot, the TX-1. Though Sony, Nikon and Fujifilm are still notably missing from the bandwagon, and Canon doesn’t seem to be pushing hard just yet, we predict that 720p video recording is the next big upsell, now that image stabilisation, face recognition and in-camera editing are nearly ubiquitous. The question is:
Your job, it’s boring. You sit at a desk all day and do busywork at a computer to make some other guy rich. It isn’t what you dreamed about when you were a kid, but those are the cards you were dealt. You know what would help distract you from the inevitable drudging march towards death? Having a wacky office chair! OMG, this one is made out of an ejection seat from a real B-52 Stratofortress! Sure, it can’t actually eject you from your office and into the freedom of the skies, but at least when you die, before you’re forgotten by everybody, there’ll be a few minutes there when your co-workers will remember you as that guy with the silly chair. At this point, what more can you ask for? [Nexus 404 via NotCot]
The Rinspeed Splash is a peppy sports car, going from 0-100 in 5.9 seconds and hitting top speeds of a modest 201kph. However, getting to a destination is not just about the speed at which you travel, but the route you take getting there. And the natural gas powered Rinspeed Splash, with the touch of a button, uses hydraulics to transform the car into a boat.
Delkin’s ImageRouter is for photographers who are in need of some serious dumpage, and fast. The basic unit lets you unload four Compact Flash cards simultaneously. The thing takes up about as much room as the Xbox 360′s power brick, though fortunately it doesn’t weigh a metric tonne. If you want to get stupid ridiculous, you can daisy-chain two blocks together onto the powered USB port to handle a total of eight CF cards. Unfortunately the software doesn’t work for Macs yet, so if you plugged it into one you’d just see four separate drives, killing the convenience factor of dumping about a million photos at once. It’s US$149 w/o software, jumping to $249 with the Windows-only utility. [Product Page]
If only the scientific minds of 1969 could have ruled the world, we’d all have a lot more fun in the shower. Because United States patent 634629 was for an “Automated Bathing Facility”—that’s “human car wash” for those who can’t convert patentspeak to our bastardised tongue. Inventor G. Hallum saw the device for those with limited mobility, taking participants on a conveyor through a wetting station, soaping station, rinsing station and drying station. Clearly we were not picturing the infirmed when writing this article, slowly.
If you’re so into Sony’s a300 or a350 DSLRs you can’t wait to, um, preorder them, you’re in luck. Amazon has a couple of configs of each, with the a300 shipping May 25, a350 on April 25. [Amazon, Amazon via Photography Bay]
You may have heard that at 7pm EST on Feb. 4, NASA plans to blast The Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” into deep space in order to serenade otherworldly beings hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away with our very best pop music. I have several problems with this.
Sure, we all hate blister packs, but what’s it feel like from the other side of the plastic? Not good, my friends. You have this bright, blinding light, you’re being held down and there’s a guy in a hoodie having his way with you. Jason, I never want to see you in that sweatshirt again.
