JakPak

A jacket that turns into a sleeping bag and tent.

I don't know about camping, but I could have used one on a couple of pub crawls back in the '80s.

Would a Lava Lamp work on Jupiter?

This man has too much time on his hands.

Impressive Meccano set, though.

Martin Jetpack

The Martin Aircraft Company announces that it will be selling its personal helicopter "jetpack" for $75,000 a unit.

It doesn't seem very practical for day to day use, but I think I might buy one to keep in the secret room behind my office in case that whole death ray project goes sour. It'll mean installing explosive bolts in the roof, but it's good insurance.

What the harm in that?

One quarter of Germans say they wouldn't mind having a microchip embedded in their flesh.

After the way they reacted to that little incident in 1933, I'm not surprised.

Hydrofloors

Nice, but if piranhas aren't involved, I'm not interested.

One day on the power line

If you think is something, you should see a pigeon stepping off a railway high-tension cable onto a steel support tower. POOF! Brown smoke and feathers.

Bloom Box

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Revolution or vapourware?

Aircruise

Aircruise is concept for a airship designed to carry 100 passengers in utter luxury on slow trans-oceanic cruises.

The designs look charming, but I fancy that if it ever goes into production the backers will very quickly discover that airships are airship-shaped for a reason. It generally involves not crashing into skyscrapers, mooring masts, mountains, and other very hard, pointy objects that are not healthy for airships and other flying things.

Cold Avenger

Arctic gear has certainly changed since my day. With all the fog-less wrap-round goggles, Goretex, chemical heating pads, and high-tech breathing masks, I could have saved myself a lot of numbed fingers and frost-bitten cheeks.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going out now. I may be some time.

Quooker

Is this the "kettle killer"?

Since it costs £800 and requires installation, I'm guessing no.

Solar Balls

Leslie Shapiro over at Dvice waxes lyrical over these solar-powered lamps, saying that they:

Light the way in a rainbow of green goodness.

Yes, high-tech votary lamps to praise Blessed Gaia. Pace the green credentials of the solar panels and the nicad batteries, we use solar lamps at Chez Szondy to keep the paths lit, but have found that a) the batteries fail with mind-numbing regularity and b) they only really work well in the middle of Summer when you need them least.

That's why I've gone over to LED motion detector lights instead. Not as "green", but at least I can use them under the trees so I can get to the wood shed in the winter without tripping over roots.

Virtual minefield

A clever little idea from the Metal Storm people: Instead of laying out minefields that tend to stay dangerous for decades afterwards, set up a multibarrelled robot mortar that peppers the area with sensors. When the sensors are tripped, the mortar fires a round (lethal or non-lethal) at it.

I'm currently soliciting bids to have one installed on my lawn.

Project 2000

Apple's 1988 look at the computers of the year 2000.

Nice, but give me a keyboard over those *&$%ing voice command systems any day.

CO2 corset

Lingerie designers apparently haven't heard about Climategate yet–which is the only explanation I can come up with for this corset that cinches tighter as it detects higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

Since CO₂ is a trace gas, let's hope that this thing has an overload switch or some poor woman is going to open a bottle of Perrier water and suffocate.

Eolic

I love wind turbines; so elegant, so monumentally disappointing. Take the Eolic folding turbine. It looks very nice and the little bundle it folds into just begs to be tucked under the arm. The only problem is this little equation

P = 0.5 x rho x A x V³

• P = power in watts
• rho = air density
• A = rotor swept area, exposed to the wind
• V = wind speed in meters/sec

That cube function means that for a turbine as small as this one (or any other size!) in any wind less than a Force 5 you'd get more power out of it if you just spun the thing by hand and anything more and the little bugger would tear itself to bits.

Pity. Nice colour scheme, though.

Power curve for a
one-meter diameter blade.

Mandometer

The Mandometer: A device that scolds you if you eat too fast.

Sorry, not for me; the habit is too ingrained. I went to a boarding school and if you didn't eat fast, you didn't eat at all.

The Thing

I've had one of these "things" on my mantle piece for years (though with Phillips heads for the larger drivers and it's probably the most worn tool in the house outside of the ones in my pocket.

Never underestimate the power of a gadget.

Bionic eyelid

While this may save thousands of peoples' eyesight, its crime-fighting potential is extremely limited.

Daily Shelter

A table that converts into a little house. It certainly seems a distinct improvement over my current method of stacking pillows around my desk when things get too much for me.

AirMule

Israel's AirMule completes hover testing.

What a difference a 43 years makes.

Harmonica kazoo

The harmonica kazoo: Two musical annoyances in one!

Going Dutch

This could take dodging the bill to a whole new level.

Amatoya

It's intended for fighting forest fires, but if they replaced those water cannons with a couple of Hellfire missile launchers, then they'd have something.

Countdown stoplight

I notice that it has a status bar for the red signal, but not the green.

Okay, amber would be just silly.

Hitting softly

Dvice has a rundown on anti-piracy measures that share the common theme of not wanting to hurt the poor little dears.

Might I suggest something with more of a deterrent effect?

Necessity, meet invention

CVMV-J19

The perfect gift for the paranoid on your Christmas list: A device for detecting hidden cameras.

For real fun, give him one of these and then intimate that there's another device on the market that looks just like this one, but has a hidden camera inside of it. Hilarity ensues.

Let's try this again

It's an incredible breakthrough; a plastic bag that dissolves in water. Like this one that's used to protect a magazine in case it rains while you're carrying it home. Then it... In case... Rain...

Next up: Flammable oven mitts.

Emilio Largo, call your service

Scubacraft: A 43 knot speedboat that converts into a submarine capable of reaches depths of up to 100 feet.

We're currently in negotiations with the makers to see if the extra passenger seats can be replaced with a pair of carrying racks that could hold, for example, a pair of NATO thermonuclear devices that we might have come across somewhere.

The future isn't what it was

Remember when the future was where we could look forward to technological wonders that would be servants and helpers to ease the burden of mankind? Not anymore. Why help people when you can nag and scold them through technology? Behold the glorious future; where park benches will dump you on the ground, rubbish bins will spit bottles back at you, and cars will slam on the brakes whether you want them to or not.

Welcome to the Age of the Busybody.

EmoBraclet.

You know, whenever I get stressed, I always say what I really need is a big, gaudy bracelet that makes a bowl light up.

MTV-1 Micro

This takes me back. I used to have one of these in my rucksack as I wandered from archaeological dig to dig in the early '80s. Typical Sinclair design: Brilliant in concept, complete rubbish in execution, a pain to operate, and a dismal commercial failure.

Well done, Sir Clive.

Power Loader

Looks like someone has dusted off the old Hardiman plans.

Eye chip

The good news, Mr Smith, is that we can restore your sight. The bad news is that we have to staple this load of electronics to your eyeball.

That's not a problem, is it?

Ringtone ruminations

The fascinating thing about progress is that it's so uneven. Get a better engine and the electrics lag behind. Get a better processor and the memory is still clunky. And then there's the cases where one step forward is six billion steps back.

Take telephones. The development of the cell phone has revolutionised communications. Not only has it allowed people to remain in touch pretty much anywhere that's in sight of a cell tower, but it's allowed parts of the world that would have taken decades to wire together to be hooked into the global network in a matter of days, if not quicker. Whole stretches of Africa and Asia can leap from the 19th to the 21st century with the erection of a few towers or even just having a blimp show up. Furthermore, the handsets have in less than a decade become so sophisticated and complex that "phone" has become an historical anachronism that hardly describes what is essentially a handheld computer that lets you place a call almost as an afterthought.

You'd think that with all that capability the cell phone would have the field all to itself. Then a call comes in and the old GPO models just walk away with the prize.

When I was a lad, the standard issue phones where rubbish. They were either hard, black Bakelite blocks or over-engineered plastic with heavy flexes, often wired straight into the wall, and had all the audio quality of a porridge container and a bit of string. They did, however, have one redeeming quality: When a call came in the bells were so loud that you jumped screaming out of the chair. It was crude, but it did the job. Then for forty or so years, the boffins studied the characteristics of the human ear, how people determine the direction of sound, how they react to this or that tone, and how to create the perfect alert signal so that a precise message could be communicated with the minimum of effort.

Then they came up with the Select Your Own Ringtone for the cell phone and a half century of progress went right out the window. At first, it seems like a brilliant idea. Why put up with the tyranny of bells and beeps when you can have your favourite tunes to alert you to calls? That's what I thought when I had the clever idea of programming my phone with custom ringtones so that I knew who was calling before I picked up. So, I downloaded a couple of tunes to do the job. Since I'm fond of James Bond films, I used the Bond theme for general calls and the Mars movement from Holst's Planets suite for family calls. Then I relearned something that was already known for half a century: Low notes are harder to hear than high notes and both my selections were full of bass and minor keys.

By "relearn" I mean that I found out after I missed half a dozen calls and cheesed off the wife to no end. So I started looking for what tones were on offer for my phone and among all the hideous pop tunes and lame jokes I found (hurrah) some 1960s British telephone tones. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bells, but the little Brrp Brrp that you hear on the handset that, for obvious reasons, were designed not to blast your eardrums out. You'd have thought they'd have realised that it's a bit self defeating.

This raises an interesting point. On the one hand, you've got a device carried around in everyone's pocket that is the greatest boom to communication and the greatest invasion of privacy in human history. True, you can stay in touch with the entire world, but you also can't get away from the world. There's no point leaving the office or popping down to the pub for a quiet pint because you little electronic tattletale will be right with you. On the other hand, thanks to a pointless choice, at least you have an excuse when you say "Sorry, I didn't get your call."

Even aggravation has a silver lining.

Coffee mug work station

Objective proof that your boss hates you personally.

Lunar reactor

Not bad, but 2.3 kilowatts is hardly going to be enough to power the death ray that will hold the world for ransom, will it?

Needs more work.

Phantom Werks

Not bad, but I'd rather use the bar as my desk and keep this for meetings. One bad report and it's "hello, Martin Baker" time.

Now, where's my white cat?

Artificial Tongue

From Wired:

A new artificial tongue is better than the real thing.

I'm not touching this with a barge pole.

Wile E Coyote, call your service

I love this idea; use sheets of cloth to detonate anti-tank rounds before they reach the armour. Brilliant.

I'm certain that the inventor was a bird-obsessed carnivore who tried to stop a train from hitting him by pulling down a window blind.

ChefStack

Good lord, it's like a heroin vending machine.

Where can I get one?

FIRE

For an affordable €3000 you can not only have this stunning minimalist coffee table with built-in foreplace, but the certainty of a massive lawsuit as well.

TASER Shockwave

A dozen taser shots at one go? Now it's getting interesting.

ZIPit

And now, a gadget for opening those horrid plastic packages.

Why do I have the feeling that it comes in a horrid plastic package?

Daredevil: the autumn years

It's just not the same.

Solar cloth

An American firm, Konarka, has developed a photovoltaic fabric that turns your jacket into an solar power station.

Great, as if rail travel wasn't enough of a pain, now I have to deal with stepping over the bodies of trainspotters electrocuted by their anoraks.

Port-Pizza Oven

If this pizza oven designed to be used in your car strikes you as just the ticket, then you need to step back and reassess you life.

Mr Tumnus, call your service

This is a rather neat idea if you're putting on a production of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe or an adaptation of the Circus of Dr Lao, but you'd think that the chaps at Popular Science and elsewhere on the Internet would keep their mythological creatures straight. This is a fawn, I say again, a fawn, not a centaur.

Count the legs, for Zeus's sake!

N2Wine

An oxygen-free wine globe that holds the equivalent of 70 bottle of cheap chardy is all well and good, but it looks a bit heavy to keep on the desk and walking any distance ruins the point of the thing, so I think I'll pass.

Arthur Dent, call your service

The Concordia Coffee's new $40,000 self-serve espresso machine grinds and brews coffee, steams milk and adds flavored syrups for a superior espresso drink, as per the customer’s preferences.

However, why it does so is a mystery, as it invariably dispenses a cup of something that tastes almost, but no quite, unlike tea.

Anti-stab knife

Industrial designer John Cornock introduces the "anti-stab" knife to Britain to combat the threat of criminals getting a bit stabby. It's a bit like dealing with riots by paving the roads with Nerf cobbles.

If you look up "Holding the wrong end of the stick," this is the illustration.

Galloway Gallagher, call your service

Beer in a pouch. Yes, no more tedious cans!

And if you get the title reference, you're a bigger geek than I.

Future dining table

The table... of the FUTURE! Complete with mini-frdge, mini-drawers, mini coffee-maker, mini-microwave, mini-dishwasher, and mini-toaster for making mini meals. And, apparently, you can't remove the chairs because that would be too bourgeois.

But, for some bizarre reason, it connects to the Internet, so that's all right then.

The Ur Teasmade

Why the Victorians were objectively more civilised.

Waterworld

I don't know if this works or not or if it's remotely cost effective, but it certainly does take the prize for the most visually stunning desalination plant I've ever seen.