Latest Posts on Coolest Gadgets

Commercial Free DVR – How can it Survive?
The Festival Couch – with Motors and Speakers, Oh My!
Roachbot updated, works with iPhone and iPad now
iPieces iPad Air Hockey
Musical umbrella delivers 8-bit tones
Batteries of the future can be painted on

Commercial Free DVR – How can it Survive?

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 11:53 AM PDT

I watch a few less commercials on television these days. I just fast forward through them. In the old days commercials were when you went to get snacks or put the clothes in the dryer. I’m hard pressed to think of a television commercial that I have seen in the last 6 months that I was glad I watched. Maybe I just missed all the good ones, for all the things I really wanted… that would be my luck.

DVR’s have made it easy to just fast forward through those irritating blurbs about junk you don’t need, and they can condense your half hour shows into a quick 20 minutes, and now, The Dish Network is offering a brand new auto-skip feature on it’s DVR’s that actually lets viewers press a single button to eliminate all the major network commercials altogether, no fast forwarding required. Could this be the future of TV?

How will the TV networks stand for this? Another company, Replay TV offered a similar service and was promptly sued for offering a commercial skipping feature. The company has since filed for bankruptcy. As much as I LOVE the idea of skipping annoying commercials, it seems like services like these attack the very underpinnings that make TV a profitable business, after all, why else would TV networks be making all those intelligent and provocative programs for us?

I don’t know the future of Dish Network’s Hopper Feature, but television commercial viewership has to be way down already with the number of digital recording devices in most homes these days, does the fact that you can eliminate commercials altogether somehow make it worse than the fast forwarding that we’re already doing? I guess lawsuits will be inevitable. Could network television be in danger? I guess the real question is, how do you think they are going to make us pay?

[ Commercial Free DVR – How can it Survive? copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The Festival Couch – with Motors and Speakers, Oh My!

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 08:55 AM PDT

Ah the music festival… a rite of passage for every teenager, beer and bands, crazy dancing, tasteful (and maybe not so tasteful) full frontal nudity… fields littered with the young, and the young at heart, on lawn chairs, on blankets and towels, in varying states of consciousness. The music festival has been the same for decades.

Until now, what is that rolling down the field? Behold the Festival Couch, a solar charged, motorized, music infused sofa on wheels that can bring your personal “festival attendee” cool factor to the next level. Now you can enjoy the show in movable comfort and style, not to mention a mobile mini-bar.

Mardy Daniel, a 21 year old part time disc jockey came up with the idea for this living room on wheels while having a few cocktails with his friends (shocker) and has since launched the Festival Couch Company churning out mobile furniture, like couches and lounge chairs with motors, solar charged batteries and wheels.

The 1 to 3 seat couches are available for private functions, nightclub openings, charity events and festivals and they come in 5 different models, some with electric drives and fitted with DJ decks, Orion speakers or even a mini bar complete with 4 ice cold beers on tap. The Festival Couch Company will also entertain custom requests entailing special LED lighting features, massage cushions or a horn. I understand pricing to be the cost of the couch, plus around 2500 bucks to get her moving. yee-haw! Check them out at festival couch.com

[ The Festival Couch – with Motors and Speakers, Oh My! copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Roachbot updated, works with iPhone and iPad now

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT

The Roachbot is a cockroach robot that looks so realistic, released in Japan earlier this year, but it seems that the company behind this cute little toy has decided to up the ante and make a revision of the Roachbot all the more realistic. Japan Trust Technologies, the company behind the Roachbot, will now come with support for the iPhone and iPad. After installing this exclusive app on your iPhone or iPad, those devices end up as the Roachbot's controller.

New control features have been thrown into the mix, where you are now able to control a throttle which enables you to precisely adjust your Roachbot's cruising speed – eventually hitting a maximum velocity which could not be achieved before with the previous model. Not only that, the new controls also boast of a "Trim Correction Slider" that enables you to perform slight adjustments to the Roachbot's course, so that it looks all the more realistic instead of achieving the old school hard left/right turns that might just have given the game away.

The new Roachbot model will start from 2,980 yen (US$37) onwards.

Source

[ Roachbot updated, works with iPhone and iPad now copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

iPieces iPad Air Hockey

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Your precious iPad is used to being touched lovingly, with swipes happening from time to time as you turn the page on a digital book over and over. As for games, those gyroscopic and accelerometer-enhanced titles see you tilt your iPad all over the place, and perhaps might even involve a furious tapping on select areas of the display. However, how many of you actually scratch your iPad's screen? I guess the answer would be close to zero, but there is a possibility this might happen with the $12.99 iPieces iPad Air Hockey.

The iPieces iPad Air Hockey will do away with the need for traditional air hockey tables, and no air will pump out from your iPad's display, but through an app, you can have a mini air hockey session with your friends and family, complete with capacitive strikers. Better get a decent screen protector before you give this a go though.

[ iPieces iPad Air Hockey copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Musical umbrella delivers 8-bit tones

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 05:30 AM PDT

An umbrella is supposed to keep you dry from those rainy days, and it too, would be able to ensure your skin does not get sun burnt at all when it is scorching hot out there during the summer. At this year's Amsterdam-based Music Hack Day, a couple of intrepid hackers who hail from Berlin did figure out a way to create a musical umbrella which is capable of producing a random series of lo-fi 8-bit tones.

These tones are triggered the moment a raindrop strikes the outer surface of the umbrella’s canopy, and since the results are totally random and abstract, you will hear different tunes all the time, and chances are just like snowflakes, you will not find the same two tunes at any time. What your ears will hear would be something akin to what the first generation Nintendo Game Boy is capable of churning out. To know more about how this particular musical umbrella works, read on after the jump.

The gist of the umbrella works this way – whenever raindrops strike the outside surface of the umbrella canopy, they will be transformed to tones thanks to the presence of a dozen piezo pickup sensors which are taped to the underside of the umbrella. These piezo pickup sensors are fully capable of responding to vibration, where they are then sent over to an Arduino Uno, which is actually a cheap and open source micro-controller that is popular with hackers and hobbyists. Not only that, it will in turn be hooked to a couple of speakers.

The Music Hack Day event was originally held in the London offices of U.K. newspaper The Guardian three years ago, and the movement has since spread to Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, Stockholm, San Francisco, Barcelona, New York and Montreal, where over two thousand participants and sponsorship from notable music-tech companies are the attendees.

There is still no indication that this musical umbrella will be sold to the masses, but the umbrella's creators, Alice Zappe and Julia Lager, decided to come up with a new and improved version of their Music Hack Day prototype.

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[ Musical umbrella delivers 8-bit tones copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Batteries of the future can be painted on

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 05:00 AM PDT

With the number of gadgets and gizmos that are in our possession these days, it makes perfect sense that we always have one thing at the top of our minds at all times – that is, the battery life of our devices. This is even more glaring when we are talking about going traveling – the number of chargers that we need to pack, in addition to the right adapter (especially when one is heading off for a foreign country on a different continent altogether), could prove to be quite a headache. Not only that, newer devices come with better and faster functions, so much so that advancements made in battery technology keep up with just enough to last as long as its previous generation, as it caters to the new features.

How about the idea of spray painting your own batteries? This is where future batteries might be headed, as one is able to paint batteries onto standard bathroom tiles, steel, glass – and even a beer stein! This particular battery is made possible thanks to five separate layers, where each of them has its own recipe, and together they measure a mere 0.5mm thick – or should we say, thin?

In order to demonstrate this particular technique, the team behind the battery actually spayed the batteries onto steel, glass, ceramic tile and a beer stein. This breakthrough will definitely be of particular interest in industrial applications, since it is compatible with current spray-painting technology. Right now, the most common batteries comprise of negative and positive halves (the anode and the cathode), with a material in between to separate them, while “current collector” layers are located at the top and bottom to gather up the electric charges which move through.

Plenty of batteries are constructed in a geometry that is not too far off from that of a “Swiss roll” cross section, where layers are rolled up into a cylindrical or round-edged rectangular shape. Guess the spray on battery idea from Rice University in Texas, US, has paved open a new way to place batteries on just about any surface.

Source

[ Batteries of the future can be painted on copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]