New Year’s Resolution #42: blog more. Major changes coming, but in the meantime:

I have previously written about some pretty amazing-looking lightbulbs. But imagine if you could have lightbulbs that do more than light your room, look great and save the environment. Imagine if you could wirelessly stream your music through them too.

You can, and there’s more than one way to do it.

The Klipsch LightSpeaker System does just that. It includes recessed spotlights that you screw into your ceiling, a transmitter, and a remote that you can control your invisible sound system with. However, the bulbs themselves are disappointingly standard in appearance, and there’s this ominous sentence in the description: “Not intended to replace home theater speakers.” Sounds to me like the sound quality could be a bit poor. Shame.

But don’t despair. You could get this version, designed by Castiglione Morelli (great name). They look absolutely stunning, and come with a handy attachment to transmit directly from your iPod. Bad news if you’re not an Apple junkie, though.

Finally, for those who don’t like lightbulbs, or love ceiling fans, or something, there’s the Hunter Concert Breeze Ceiling Fan. It’s a ceiling fan that can integrate into your existing sound system. There’s also an attachment for a lightbulb as well. It even works outdoors, apparently, although I’m not sure what you’d attach it to. Bad news is, you can’t buy one yet.

Still, these ideas add a whole new dimension to the idea of surround sound.

I promised to post on the winners of the Greener Gadgets Design Competition, and I completely forgot.

You may like to remind yourself of my tips – I went for Recompute (the recyclable cardboard computer) and the RITI printer, which converted coffee and tea dregs into ink for printouts.

Both of these made it to the top 13, but not to the final shortlist of 4. The final winner was Tweet-a-Watt, pictured below.

Have you ever seen anything less inspiring in your life? The purpose of this nondescript little gadget is to measure the daily power consumption of a household, and then automatically ‘tweet’ it for all to see. I can see that knowing how much you consume, and setting yourself targets to reduce the total is a good idea, but the main point of this gadget is the element that allows the Twitter updates.

Why would you want to do that? If it was supposed to create a culture of shame around over-consumption, I could maybe get behind the idea, but there’s no mention of anything like that. It just seems designed to tap into the morbid curiosity about other people’s dull existences that Twitter engenders already. (I’m not a fan. Can you tell?)

The only aspect of this that impresses me is that they have made the hardward opensource – ie you can download the design, the instructions and the scripts you need to make your own for no charge. Now that’s a good idea. Shame their product is so pointless.

Terrafugia have successfully tested a flying car!

Admittedly, it only stayed up for 37 seconds, but that’s still really exciting. Along with hover boots and time travel, flying cars are everyone’s dream for the future.

It’s going to cost around $200, 000, and will be on sale by next year. For the moment, let’s forget about the fact that you’ll have to have light aircraft licence to drive it, or what it would cost in fuel, both financially and ecologically. Just revel in a moment of excited discovery.

According to its inventors, it’s not a flying car. It’s a ‘roadable aircraft’. I disagree. It’s clearly a flying car with wings that fold up.

Impressionism for the digital age, using an iPhone and an application you can download for £2.99 ($4.99). The results have, predictably enough, been christened the ‘iSketch’.

Jorge Columbo, illustrator, photgrapher and graphic designer in New York, roams the city capturing its bustle and life on his iPhone.

The Brushes application he uses takes the culture of instant gratification a gadget like the iPhone provides that one step futher: now, not only can you capture an image as a photography, now you can capture it in a way that includes something of your own impressions as well.  Not only that, but the application also registers every finger-stoke you make, and enables you to upload it as a video, which means that the viewer of your sketch can also view the process that created it. You can see how the sketch above came to be here.

I quite like some of his earlier, non-New York efforts as well, like this one:

Have a look at some more of Jorge’s New York iSketches.

Read The Guardian’s take on this new phenomenon.

To see more art created with iPhones, have a look at this gallery.

Today, I came across a picture of this watch:

In these pictures, the time shown is (from left to right) 1:37, 1:43, and 10:13. In case you wanted to know what each of the tiny LEDs signifiy, here’s the official explanation from Japanese manufacturers Tokyoflash:

Hours are presented on the upper screen. The hours three, six, nine and twelve in the same positions as on a clock face. Hours one and two are in between, a combination of lit LEDs show the hour.

Minutes are presented on the center and lower screens. The lower screen shows zero, fifteen, thirty and forty-five minutes in the same position as on a clock face, the LEDs in between show five minutes each. The central screen presents four single minutes, a combination of lit LEDs show the minutes.

The date can be read in a similar way with a second touch of the upper button.

Makes almost no sense to me. This is the Hekowatch, and I can only think that fashion-conscious cryptologists and people who want everyone to know how obtuse their brains are will be buying these.

Anyway, it set me thinking about the innovative ways people have come up with to tell the time in an effort to avoid the tediously conventional analogue face. There’s the straightforward counter-clockwise idea:

Read the rest of this entry »

On the 27th of February, the Greener Gadgets Design Conference will take place in New York. Here, they will announce the winner of the Greener Gadgets Design competition, although it seems a shame to pick between such brilliant concepts.

Stand-out among the nominees is Bulb 2.0, which attempts to combine a modern, attractive aesthetic with an efficient energy saving bulb.

And the RITI printer, which uses coffee or tea dregs instead of ink.

You pour the dregs into the funnel at the top, insert your paper and then it functions just like a traditional printer. Clever, although I’m not entirely convinced it won’t make your print-outs smell funny…

But my absolute favourite, and the one I not only think should win but that I would like to buy in the near future, is  Recompute.

It isn’t just a computer housed in a cardboard box – designer Brenden Macaluso intends to make it a fully sustainable desktop computer by creating a design that has fewer parts, takes less time and labour to produce, and will ultimately be easier to dispose of.

I think it looks fantastic, but my initial concern was with cooling, because I assumed cardboard would heat too quickly and be more likely to catch fire. But apparently it is much more heat resistant than the plastic used at the moment, with with a much higher fire and ignition point — 258°C and 427°C — whereas plastic will start to melt at 120°C.

I can’t wait until they put this into production.

You can see all 50 nominees, and vote for your favourites here. I’ll be updating later in the month on the outcome of the competition.

HT – Laura June at Engadget

I want one of these.

Don’t you think it’s beautiful?