Category: Gadgets

I’ve always liked playing with magnets. Sharon and I actually built a magnetic spice rack a few years back, and it still draws attention. We used a pretty weak sheet magnet to get the job done. United Nuclear doesn’t have those kind of magnets. Nope. These are the kind of magnets that will pick something up from a foot away. Here’s a couple choice quotes…

“Our larger magnets can easily bruise fingers and even break finger bones as they attempt to connect together.”
“Our normal packing & shipping personnel refuse to package these magnets – our engineers have to do it.”
“Two of the 3″ x 1″ disc magnets can very easily break your arm if they get out of control.”
“We can only ship these magnets by ground UPS – they cannot be shipped via air as it will interfere with the aircraft’s navigational equipment.”

After all these warnings, they must be fun! Just try to avoid TVs, pacemakers, computers, credit cards, you know, anything that would get destroyed by one of these things.

I have finally found the elusive Bluetooth headphones for my iPod. This, after waiting patiently announced it, but I guess it was just vapor.

The same site also had some headphones that you can plug an iPod nano directly into. I know that a nano is small, but would it really be comfortable with one on the side of your head?

So the iPod now plays videos. This, after I remember Steve Jobs saying he didn’t see much need for an iPod to play videos a year or two ago.

Don’t know about you, but I can’t say I would be a big fan of staring at a 2.5″ (320 x 240px) screen to watch videos. The battery life also makes watching movies iffy – it’s only rated for 2 hours. But there is an AV cable for hooking it up to a TV.

An alarm system has been created that takes a picture of a would-be car thief and send it to your cell phone. It also records it to an on-board hard drive.

Reminds me of the carjacking deterrents in South Africa. It was basically a flamethrower mounted to the bottom of the car. Someone tries to carjack you, hit the switch, and toast the would be thief. Crude, but pretty effective.

I already have an iPod, and it feels small enough. Sharon has an iPod mini, and I thought that was plenty small. But the iPod nano? Of course, the neat thing is that it’s flash based. Since the cheapest I could find 4GB of flash memory was about $212 (as of 9/7/05), this is one hell of a deal.

I would also imagine that as flash memory increases in size, the capacity of the iPod nano will rival that of my dear (not-so)-old iPod.

Now the case I have for my iPod definitely gets the job done, it doesn’t quite work for everyone. This armored iPod case looks really neat, but seems like it would take away from that whole portable music player bit. Although, the article it links to is in Japanese, it looks like the whole thing weighs only a pound. Still a bit heavy for me. But I’m not exactly rough on my iPod either.

A Pint Lock for protecting those easily stolen pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Of course, it would be an easily broken lock, by breaking through the top of it. Of you could just cut the top of the container off. It’s a neat idea anyway.