Author: Gabrielle Taylor
Hotdoll: Real Doll for dogs
If, uh, your dog, has a habit of, uh, befouling, certain of your possessions, and you’re willing to pay anything (and you mean anything) to have it stop, the Hotdoll might start to sound like a really good idea. It is a pseudo-realistic sex doll for your dog. Whether or not your dog would legitimately mistake it for another dog and want to cuddle afterward remains to be seen, but if this incredibly weird-looking mess of latex means your sofa’s spared, it’s probably worth whatever FeelAddicted charges for it (and it is “whatever”; no price given). [GT]
Hotdoll: sex toy for your dog [via Gizmodo]
Drop speaker: water resistant iPod speaker
This ZumReed Drop Speaker lets you listen to your iPod while taking a shower in the bathroom, doing dishes in the kitchen, or lounging on a towel at the beach. The iPod is securely nestled inside but has external waterproof controls. It also looks cool as it comes in orange, white, and teal. The price is an unexpectedly cheerful ¥4988. [GT]
ZumReed Drop Speaker [via technabob]
Space shield to block radiation
Scientists at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Preston, UK are debating whether a Star-Trek-like deflector shield is feasible to protect astronauts from cancer-causing radiation from cosmic rays and solar flares. The shield would be magnetically generated and filled with ionised plasma gas. As the energy particles interact with the plasma they’d have the energy damped down to the point where they couldn’t damage the astronauts. “You don’t need much of a magnetic field to hold off the solar wind. You could produce the shield 20-30 kilometres away from the spacecraft,” explained Dr Ruth Bamford, from the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, UK, one of the scientists on the team. [GT]
Replace your iRiver H320 Or H340 battery yourself
The good people at iRiver have made the H320 and H340 in such a way that you can replace the battery yourself – provided you have the nice DIY video from videojug showing you how to do it. (Someone else over there will also show you how to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds). [GT]
RSS feeds via Steampunk Workshop telegraph sounder
The Steampunk Workshop telegraph takes an RSS feed (such as the one you might be reading this message on now) and converts it to Morse code, allowing it to, er, be translated back into text. It’s not for sale – Steampunk Workshop is something of an elaborate performance art colony – but they do provide instructions for how to DIY up your own, if you want an utterly cool but essentially utterly useless piece of retro-chic on your desk. [GT]
Steampunk Workshop telegraph [via Crave]
Subtitles on glasses opens up language barriers
Instead of printing subtitles directly onto the film print, meaning every time you add a new language you have to do a new print, why not just broadcast the subtitles right onto the lenses of a pair of glasses? This would also allow closed captions to go onto glasses for the deaf or hard-of-hearing, so disabled filmgoers could have a fuller experience. Developed by a team of researchers at the University Carlos III of Madrid, the glasses have a three-hour lifespan and a 50 meter range, which means if you have to go to the lav in the middle of the flick, you can still follow the dialogue. [GT]
Glasses for deaf, foreign movie goers
Loganberry Books: stump the bookseller!
Trying to remember a book you read as a child? Try Stump the Bookseller at Loganberry Books. For a quid you can post a description of the book cover, plot, characters, or any other details you think will finally allow you to get on with your life without that nagging sense of incompleteness. There are also extensive archives you can browse to try to escape your past for free. [GT]
Cheddar-vision: it's not just for breakfast
We have webcams for everything from Coke machines to coffee machines (spanning the whole spectrum of caffeine), from eagle nests to panda lairs (spanning the whole spectrum of interest in animal bedroom antics), so it was probably inevitable that…
A Boybot and His Dogbot
Strolling along a path of purest basswood and pine, A Boybot and His Dogbot is a wooden automaton showing the tyke flying his kite on a very windy day. This one-of-a-kind piece was created by Dug North of pre-made…
