Gadget Dose

Think of this as a portable screensaver with all sorts of extras. Something you’d put in a room to relax, soothe, or catch the eye of guests.

Featuring a backlit LCD screen (320×240) - and all sorts of digital sounds, from the ocean waves and underwater bubbles, to whale sounds and others.

It comes stocked with more than 100 kinds of marine animals!

Speaker in jack to connects the audio output to another device - Yep, its sound reactive. And as if that weren’t enough, it has a clock and calendar too.

Heres a neat feature - it will remind you of special days ( New Year’s day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, April Fool, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas )

Annnnnd — you can set your own special days as well. Expect the sea creatures to celebrate your special day too.

All in all a pretty neat little device - You can get one HERE for the mildly expensive price of $135.41

Want a little Christmas cheer by your home or office PC? Theres plenty of options available. This particular tree is one of the better ones. Sporting animated fiber optics and a nice little star on top.

Its fully USB powered and requires no drivers. Heck, what exactly you would need a driver for - except maybe to change the lights rotation speed is beyond me.

At any rate this is my personal favorite USB Tree and its only $17.00

Product Page

Howd you like to decorate outside with lights and not pay one penny for electricity? These nifty strings are one way to go. ( Running an extension cord to your neighbors house aside )

Decorate your home or lawn with a string of bright LEDs.They charge during the day using a solar panel and then shine all night long. A light sensitive switch turns the LEDs on only when it’s dark, so you never have to worry about turning the lights on or off. Includes rechargeable AA battery and a stake for ground mounting.

The strands are 102 lighs long and come in white,red,green and blue.

The initial investment is a bit pricey at $52.95 but if they last 5 or more years that more than pays for them with the electricity you can save.

Product Page

Wow - this has got to be the most incredible thing to get any time of the year - let alone for christmas. Touted as the worlds first video glasses with built in media player - these glasses make it seem like your watching a huge 50″ display. Imagine watching a huge screen while lying down in bed or taking a bath even. ( Just don’t drop ‘em in the water! )

Qingbar glasses features a sleek, light weight design with LCOS micro displays, which deliver crisp, vivid-color, QVGA video image simulates the image of a 50” display from a distance of 2M away. You just insert a mini SD card into the slot, and then you can entertain yourself with your favorite movie, MP3 music, lovely photos, or e-book text.

E book text? thats an idea I hadn’t thought about - now thats the way to read a book eh? a 50″ book!
You can also connect it up to a TV tuner to watch your favorite shows. Another well thought out feature is its user replaceable battery.

Sporting a digital signal processing video chip the Liquid Crystal displays have a resolution of WQVGA (432×240) - which is to say that they are not high def. Really though - who cares ? The cool factor of these things outweighs that by a good margin methinks.

Here is the Product page

The suggested price is $399 - but if you preorder now…. you get ‘em for $299.

Merry Christmas !

Rapidly climbing Amazons list of must have toys for the season is the Eye Clops….

* Bionic Eye hand-held device magnifies 200 times normal size on any TV screen
* Creates hours of play and exploration for the entire family
* Built-in LED lights illuminate any object
* Plugs into A/V jacks on any TV
* Includes observation dish and tube for exploring objects and liquids

Its a 200X magnifier for the kids! - If it werent to odd looking Id want one for myself…. course I suppose you could hack it into something more techhie.

But back to the kids - you can plug this into the front panel of most any tv than has video in and magnify stuff to your hearts content. Its also got a dish for liquids - just in case someone might want to magnify um, cereal in milk for example.

This ones a winner - at $40.94 its priced for the holidays.

Product page

I’ll be taking a long weekend - so your daily dose of everything from soup to nuts in gadgets is also taking a rest, but be assured that starting Monday we’ll be putting out tons of gadgets for the Christmas season.

Until then enjoy your holiday meal and drive safe !

Rob

Todays Gadget is one of those types of gadgets where simplicity is the dominating benefit.

We all ( well, a lot of us) have gadgets that charge via a USB jack. Cell Phones, Headsets, Cameras, Mp3 Players, etc….

some times its wasteful to be running a 400 watt desktop PC to charge a low voltage device. Then again sometimes your just not near a pc - or you dread the 15 minute boot process.

Here ya go - simple and cheap ( I expect they will be as heck - how much could you charge for them really? ) - These are to be released on November 28th - and when they do I’ll update the post with price and availability.

Product Page with more details HERE

What kid wouldn’t want this bad boy mounted on the ceiling? And its made from recycled content so its cool in the eco friendly way too!

* Weight: 6 lbs.
* materials:
* Size Dimensions: 16″W x 10″H
* Warranty: Manufacturer provides item warranty against material defects and workmanship
* Bulbs Included: No
* Enlightened Benefit: Metal used features recycled content and is itself recyclable. Green Culture recommends the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs as an energy-saving alternative to the standard incandescent
* Finish: Chrome finish with multi-colored accents
* Quantity/type Of Bulbs Needed: 2 candelabra, 1 incandescent/ compact fluorescent, medium base
* Recommended Wattage Of Bulbs: 60 watt (all bulbs)
You can find it HERE at Eco Lights

Why settle for just any old ornament when you can have a digital one? This nifty little hanging ball of wonders plugs into your USB port and gets loaded up with 50 or so pictures.

Then pop a couple AAA batteries in and your ornament is ready to go. The pictures will rotate in slide show style - you can either hang it on the tree or use the enclosed stand.

The ornament is compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista, so you Linux/Unix fans out there will have to replenish the slideshow via the dreaded Windows.

A very nice twist on the plain old glass ornament.

Find ‘em HERE for $34.95

Todays post is more of a hey - look at this type of post - Buy.com has the Sandisk Sansa e250 2GB MP3 Player, FM tuner, FM on-the-fly Recording, Built-in microphone, Video, Expandable Memory - Refurbished

for $39 bucks! thats a heck of a price reduction off of the $199.99 price tag. IT sports a user replaceable battery - micro Sd expansion slot (max 8 gigs) - video playback - picture playback - voice recording - FM radio recording - all with a 1.8″ TFT screen.

the deal is HERE

And you better hurry as they have limited stock - tell me this isn’t a fantastic Christmas gift - and at this price you can afford to make it a stocking stuffer!

I remember back in the 80’s when I bought an electronic car compass, back then there were no gps models for cars- and heck in my teens I just wanted it because it lit up in blue. The accuracy of car compasses back then was awful. My blue compass picked up the coils in the engine and always pointed East.

Well, car based compasses have come a long long way since then. This model lights up in green. It still has the ability to impress however. It touts a precision digital compass with heading display.

As if that weren’t enough - it also has an atomic clock. So the unit will set itself to the atomic time server automatically. Just tell it what part of the USA you are in and the time is always accurate to the 1000′th of a second.

It has an altimeter to tell you just how far above or below sea level you are at, a barometer - so you can read the air pressure and figure out when your ears are about to do the dreaded pop.

Also included is a 12-24 weather forecast to give you the heads up on what the weather is about to do on your drive.

Very handily backlit in todays ultra cool green - the unit runs on a high powered Lithium battery so theres no need for wires going down to the lighter socket.

Suction cup mounting adheres the unit to the window - and with no wires this trumps my poor old Radio Shack compass of the 1980’s by a long shot. - Whats more is this unit wont always point East

You can find it at Skymall for $89.95
and might I add theres just about no man with a decent love for his car that wouldn’t love this for Christmas. If you want to go a bit further and get a GPS system for a gift - check out the Mio DigiWalker C320 GPS Receiver We spotlighted a while back - as its price is unbeatable.

Ok, I couldn’t resist. IF you’ve got a spare usb port just burning a hole in your pocket - why not fill it up with something totally useless that lights up, has cylon action, and articulated arms.

And since its getting closer to the holiday season - why not go with a snobot.

The eye that scans in the ever popular cylon raider fashion can turn blue or red on command, and it also has that evil cylon sound. You can also select the speed of the eye - for those days where a faster eye scan might just be necessary.

Does it do anything else - well yes, you can pose the metal arms.

I’d personally set this up on top of my cubicle wall (30′ cord) and set the eye for my mood. If the eye is red don’t even think of bothering me - or the snowman just might take you down.

Available from the always cool ThinkGeek for the ultra low price of $12.99

Also a perfect secret santa gift for the alpha geek in your office.

Just in case you have a USB hub or still have extra usb jacks to fill don’t forget the interactive USB aquarium.

At first look this nifty little gadget looks like any other SD card on the market. Tiny, full of space for all your digital pictures, but it boasts a hefty advance in technology. This tiny little gem carried a full ethernet card with wireless capabilities. That means when you need to dump your pictures theres no need to find the card reader or grab that USB cable ( now where did I put that again? ).
Really all you need to get your pictures from the camera is a wireless connection. ANY wireless connection. So if your laptop is nearby - boom.. connect and dump with no hassle. If you have a home or office wireless network you could put the pictures on any pc connected to the network.

But it goes even farther than that. If you upload your pictures to a photo sharing service (any of these ) The pictures will be automatically uploaded to the web whenever you are within range of the wireless network.

That means as soon as you get home you just put the camera down and automagically the pictures go to the web. If you’d rather have your photos go to a network drive - you can do that too - or how about both?

It works with 802.11b 802.11g and 802.11n - so the only folks left out are the 802.11a folks and lets face it - its time to update if you are still running that.

So you say your Sony camera runs on memory stick (I or II) - or maybe you use Compact Flash or another format? No problem - they sell adapters for those too.

This functionality is worth its weight in gold - imagine the time saved doing it the wireless way vs. booting up your desktop - getting into the operating system, and downloading all pictures and then uploading all of them to the web.

The card itself stores 2 gigs of pictures and is fairly priced at $99.99 or $129.99 with adapter

Product can be found HERE

Some accesories you might want to go with this are the wireless range extender -(to take your wireless all the way to the back yard…

or the Wireless hotspot detector T-shirt to find public hotspots for your use.

oh - and thanks to DT at Turnthescrew for sending this in!

Another possible Christmas idea here - this little nicely priced beauty comes from Discovery.

Its remote controlled - and apparently the remotes are neatly sculptured little dragons. The dragon walks on command, his eyes light up in red. Tell me when you were a kid you didn’t go nuts for sparkly or light up eyes!

With fire breathing effects and of course it sports a big ‘ol dragon growl. You can also turn its head and make it roar. What dragon would be complete without the roar?

Touted as its last feature are its moving dorsal fins.

Just about any kid would love this - I dunno, maybe its more of a boys toy. I could imagine walking this thing into any lego / block city and having it reap terror amongst the lego people.

Yeah, Im still mostly a kid.

You can find this dragon at Amazon for the entirely reasonable price of $39.95

If you are like me and have either dogs or cats, (or I suppose any other pet that eats out of a food dish) you know that there are always some drawbacks with feeding. For one - when you are away at work theres no reliable way to feed your pet. Sure, you can just leave a big bowl heaped full of food around - but you know what happens. Usually, the food gets eaten all at once leaving Rover or Fluffy full and uncomfortable the entire day. This can lead of course to the dreaded accident.

Another situation (mine actually) is I have 2 dogs and one eats the others leftover food. Making one dog hungry and the other fatter.

So how (without babysitting the food bowls) do you handle this with technology? Enter the digital pet bowl. You can program this bowl to open at any time to dispense up to one cup of food and it also has a water compartment too.

An added bonus is the voice recorder - so you can record your voice and have it “call” your pet when the bowl opens.

This won’t work of course for Newfoundlands whom will probably eat the bowl too — but for most breeds it should be fine for a middle of the day snack. If you’ve got more than one like mine you can use two dishes to prevent the heaping bowl from being an irresistible treat all day.

If you want something a little more versatile - theres also a 6 day version available at Amazon.

This particular version retails for $89.95 and you can find it HERE

Isn’t it time your pet joined the digital revolution? - Just do me a favor and don’t get Rover an Ipod k?