Pencils From Old Printouts

Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Here’s a terrific gadget which we’d love to see go into full production. The P&P Office Waste Paper Processor takes ordinary A4 printouts, combines them with lead and a bit of glue and spits out perfectly formed pencils in seconds.

[Via YankoDesign]

Grid – Awesome New ‘Visual’ Spreadsheet App

Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Grid is a spreadsheet app that’s better suited to lifestyle than regression analysis or loan amortization tables. It uses voice input, images, calendars and embedded social media tools to streamline the planning of activities, events or anything else that needs a bit of forward thinking.

Cardio – Heartbeat Detection for iPhone

Posted on Tuesday, August 14, 2012

You might be familiar with the Heart Rate app which can detect your pulse by pressing your finger against the iPhone’s camera. Well Cardio is a new app that takes such voodoo to a whole new level – it can detect your heart beat just by being pointed at your face. It works by  analysing the amount of light reflected off of your beautiful visage – you just hold your phone and look into the camera to see your BPM. It’s out now for $4.99.

Piano Apprentice – Keyboard and App for iPad

Posted on Tuesday, August 14, 2012

It’s great to encourage kids to try new things, but it can be costly testing them out and finding which ones they show an aptitude for. Ion’s Piano Apprentice is a great first step on the road to proper piano lessons for kids and adults – it enables them to test the water without great expense. The package comprises a 25-note lighted keyboard with touch-sensitive keys and a free piano teaching app. It’s also MIDI compliant so you can use it for creating your next dubstep opus too.

Outgrow.me – All the Successfully Funded KickStarter Projects in One Place

Posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Here’s a terrific website for KickStarter fans. As anyone who’s ever used the KickStarter website will tell you – it’s crap and painful to browse. Outgrow.me meets a great need – the ability to quickly view only those projects that got funded and taking orders or pre-orders.

Converge – Uber Cool Dock and Recharge Station

Posted on Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Here’s a slick dock for your digital accessories. Converge enables you to display and view your phone, tablet or other electronic device while it recharges discretely through one of the four USB outlets. It’s available now from Quirky for $39.

TriggerTrap Mobile – App and Cable Transform your iPhone into a Sophisticated Camera Controller

Posted on Monday, July 2, 2012

$10 (iPhone app) – $10 (Mobile Dongle) – $10 (Camera Cable) – TriggerTrap.com

Thanks to digital sensors and the high quality and affordable pricing of medium to high-end DSLR cameras, there has been a renaisance in the photography scene. Swing by a site like 500px and you can quickly see how much high quality imagery is being produced by hobbyists and pros alike. This renewed popularity has lead photographers to experiment with different techniques, such as timelapses, low light, astrophotography, tilt-shifts, HDR, macros and underwater photography. What we’re also starting to see are add-on hybrid products that bridge the gap between pro gear and consumer gear.

Casio GLX150X-7 – Stylish Watch with Tide and Moon Graphs

Posted on Wednesday, June 20, 2012

It’s available in any colour you like, as long as it’s white, and it comes with tide and moon graphs. Clearly designed to appeal to stylish surfer types (or people who live near Kilburn High Street in London, natch), the snappily named GLX150X-7 is the result of a colloboration with Hawaiian design studio In4mation. It’s good for 200M water resistance, has an illuminator LED with flash alert, world time (29TZ/48 cities), two multi-function alarms and one snooze alarm, 1/100th second stopwatch with auto-start, countdown timer, 12/24 hr formats, and mute function. It’s retail price is $110.

MilkMaid – Clever Jug that Let’s You Know When You’re Running Low on Milk

Posted on Monday, June 18, 2012

Few first world problems come close to that moment at breakfast where you fix yourself a bowl of cereal, only to discover that someone’s used all the milk. The MilkMaid is a high-tech jug that aims to solve this particular problem. Once you’ve transferred your milk into it (two US pints or one and a half European pints) it’ll let you know when it’s running low and if the milk’s starting to turn. It’s made out of glass and brushed metal and comes complete with an iPhone app that you can check when you’re in the supermarket.

AirTime – Free Radio Station Suite for Linux

Posted on Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Internet has changed the whole make-up of radio just as surely as it has disrupted the newspaper business and lowered the barriers of entry to practically zero. I’m no longer restricted to the same old lame top-40 pop stations that operate in my region – I can listen to pretty much any station anywhere at any time. It’s with this ethos in mind that the developers of AirTime have created a free and open source radio automation package which enables anyone with sufficient bandwidth to setup and run an online radio station via the web with simple playlist and scheduling facilities. At present AirTime is only available for GNU/Linux platforms, but once it’s up and running it can be operated by anyone with access to a web browser.

Automatic – Awesome RSS Media Downloader for Mac

Posted on Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Once you’ve got a sweet home media centre setup, the next step is to automate your downloads. We all have our favourite shows that we watch regularly and it makes sense to configure a system that will look for, download and post-process them. There are several ways of going about this (SABNZB, TV Shows etc) but few of them are as simple as Automatic. It’ll download torrents (magnet or otherwise) and pretty much any other video download at the end of an RSS feed.

ProxMate Removes Geo-IP blocks on YouTube, Grooveshark and Hulu and is Free

Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2012

While it’s not a complete solution to the geographic blocking of IP addresses by companies like Hulu, ProxMate is certainly a step in the right direction. It’s a proxy service that comes in Chrome or Firefox add-on or extension format and enables you to quickly circumvent annoying messages on YouTube about a video being blocked in your country and the USA-only service of Hulu.

Using ProxMate to view a Hulu video isn’t the slickest experience but it does work and it is free. To view a Hulu video you enable the service from your browser’s toolbar and then go to view the video in question on Hulu. When you get the region block message you click on the ‘Details’ link and click the Unblock button. It worked perfectly for me first time, though it’s hard to tell how the service will scale once thousands of people start using it at once.

Leap – Control a Computer in Three Dimensions With Your Natural Hand and Finger Movements

Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2012

While you were asleep, the future of computer control interfaces arrived and it only costs $69.99.

TV Premium – Watch UK TV Channels Live on iPhone and iPad

Posted on Monday, April 23, 2012

Well, I can’t see this one lasting very long at all, so enjoy it while it lasts. TV Premium is an app that broadcasts pretty much every single UK (and many US) TV channels live and in the clear to your iPhone or iPad. It costs one dollar and there is no subscription fee or further ‘in app’ purchase required. Even more amazingly, it actually works. So if you’re a UK expat missing your TV shows from the old country or just someone who fancies watching the quality output the BBC produces, then get all over it while you can. Let the countdown until removal for copyright infringement or until over-subscription causes the video feeds to become unwatchable, begin …

… and it’s gone and the feeds have stopped functioning in the app. Ah well, you know how it goes, if it sounds too good to be true …

Numi – An Ultra Toilet with a Foot Warmer and a Touch-Screen Remote

Posted on Friday, April 13, 2012

The Numi is a highly desirable crapper that incorporates a bidet (with dryer, natch) and a foot warmer. The advanced functionality is controlled from a touch-screen remote that (amongst other things) enables you to set the water delivery pattern for the bidet – if you’d rather your ring-piece was squirted with a wave, rather than a jet, then get tapping and swiping. I’d also like to point out that the hands-free opening/closing mechanism on this baby is slicker and smoother than the electric roof on an Aston Martin DB9 Volante.

[Via Springwise]