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.

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

The internet is alive with speculation as to what Michelle Obama will wear for her husband’s inauguration.

For me, the most interesting ramification of this obsession has been the number of beautiful sketches it has spawned from the world’s top fashion designers. It would seem that the Obamas are inspirational far beyond the political realm…

I mean, who cares what kind of president he is as long as they always look this suave?

My favourite for Barack has to be this one:

And I hope Michelle goes for something like this:

Click on the images to see more sketches