Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

Somehow the idea of placing electrodes into a water-filled orb to seems like a bad idea. However, artist Scott J. Franklin has designed a series of glass lighting fixtures that do just that. The WET Lamp from NON Design is a glass orb with a 10-watt xenon light bulb in the center, then filled with water.

Looking for a portable radio with some real style? Check out the Dolmen Mini Radio by LEXON. The radio channels retro style but modernizes it with electronic tuning and an LED band indicator which changes color from red to green when you switch from AM to FM.

Looking for an exotic finish for your case mod or do you just want to pimp your ride? Look no further. The folks at ALSA have developed some amazing paint finishes including one that has the ability to change colors temporarily when heat is applied.

At this week’s CEATEC show in Japan, Toshiba showed off their TDP-ET20 front projector which is capable of projecting a 100-inch diagonal picture from about 4 feet away from the screen, or a 60-inch diagonal picture from just 2 feet away.

These 3D cubes by James Clar & Associates display 3-dimensional images across an array of 1000 LEDs arranged in a grid structure. Previously, the designs were only shown at galleries and exhibitions such as Wired’s NextFest.

In the future, you’ll be able to customize more and more products to your own liking, and why should beverages be any different? This new technology from Ipifini, called “Choice-Enabled Packaging,” provides bottles of soda with multiple flavor “buttons,” which can be pressed to create your own customized soft drink flavors.

While these LEGO salt and pepper shakers don’t necessarily belong on my tech blog, I just thought they were too cool to not feature them. Just $4.99 (USD) buys you this pair of shakers that resemble the classic LEGO heads.

If you’re the type of person who can’t go anywhere without their iPod, you can even lie down with it in your bed and cradle it softly. The MP3 Pillow, is a small pillow ( 9″ x 15″ x 6″) that looks like a giant music player.

Looking for speakers that really make a statement? Dutch designers Sander Mulder, Dave Keune from Buro Vormkrijgers have created these surreal speakers that are so wrong, they’re right. I’ll just let the picture do the talking (or woofing).

Gaming blog Aeropause asked players who got to play a demo of the highly-anticipated Xbox 360 exclusive Gears of War last night in Chicago to report on their individual experiences. With virtually no exception, the early reactions were extremely positive.

The new Nokia 5500 Sport XpressMusic is a GSM/GPRS mobile phone is designed for the active user in mind. The phone comes with a 512MB microSD card for storing up to 375 tunes, as well as a sports belt, armband, bicycle mount and sports headset with a special remote which lets you quicky switch tracks through a series of taps.

Looking for the geekiest way to show off your holiday spirit, or just looking for the next hackable gizmo? These new light strings, called Triklits let you accomplish either. The secret to these color changing lights is that each orb on the string contains a red-green-blue LED.

Microsoft has posted a demo for the new EA racer, Need For Speed Carbon for the Xbox 360. The demo lets you try out three cars, the Mitsubishi Lancer EVOLUTION IX, Lamborghini Gallardo or the Camaro Concept.

“Sir, these lights keep blinking out of sequence, what should we do?” “Get them to blink in sequence.” – William Shatner, Airplane II, the Sequel One of the premier makers of clean and elegant iPod accessories, Griffin Technologies, has decided to lose their minds and release a totally frivolous disco-inspired case for Apple’s ubiquitous media player.

Artists Jonathan den Breejen and Marenka Deenstra developed the interactive artwork, Ping Pong Pixel, a machine which will take in a digital image, then render a huge image using colored ping pong balls. The installation contains a 2-meter by 3-meter display board which is injected with 2700 ping pong balls from a dispensing cabinet which contains tubs of 6 differently colored balls.

Sony announced today that it has started shipping the latest in their SXRD (aka LCOS) line of rear projection televisions, the 70-inch KDS-R70XBR2 and 60-inch KDS-R60XBR2. Both models feature a native 1080p (1920×1080) resolution SXRD light engine, capable of displaying full 1080p content when devices are connected via one of the set’s three HDMI connections.