Best New Technology

The toilet isn’t exactly the best smelling place on earth, and this is where tools like the Breeza deodorizing toilet seat comes in. The Breeza features a 4-part deodorizing system that kicks into gear whenever someone sits down. The fan will get to work straight away, sucking up any potential offensive odor, while the carbon filter goes on to absorb whatever smell that comes through. Breeza’s fragrance vents will then deliver a subtle waft of natural extracts, making the place smell as though you’d want to stay in there forever. To prevent ice cold shocks to your respective butts during winter, Breeza can also warm up its seat with an adjustable temperature setting. Amazon is currently carrying it for $219.

Source: Popgadget

Posted Mar 11th 2008 8:22AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Handhelds

If you hadn’t heard, 9.7-inch e-ink displays are the new hotness, and now Netronix is getting in on the action with the EB-300. Netronix is part-owned by PVI, a major manufacturer of e-ink displays, and they seem to be putting them to good use here. The EB-300 has a 1200 x 825, 170 dpi, 4 grayscale screen, and measures a mere 14mm (0.55-inches) thick. There’s 4GB of NAND storage on board, along with 64MB of SDRAM and some SD card expansion. There’s also WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity for good measure. EB-300 runs Windows CE 5.0, while little brother EB-100 runs Linux and a 6-inch 800 x 600 screen — and loses most of the other connectivity and storage perks as well. No word on price or availability for either of these.

[Via MobileRead]

Not only can the macbook air inspire you to dig through your garbage, it can make you miss your flight. That was the experience of developer Michael Nygard, whose shiny new laptop earned him some extra TSA love on his last flight.  Seems the security screener became highly suspicious of his so-called "laptop" with no hard drive or ports in the back, obviously marking it as some clever Al Qaeda fauxbook bomb.

Sample dialog: "Instead of a spinning disc, it keeps everything in flash memory…Like the memory card in a digital camera."

Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight [Wide Awake Developers (via Engadget) ]

This PC case mod will definitely appeal to just a minority, although that won’t stop a whole bunch of people from ogling who try to supress their hidden, innermost desires to own one. If you have the dough to splash and not the time to build one yourself from scratch, I’m happy to announce that this French Maid Skirt PC Case is up for sale for a ridiculous $499. But hey - whatever it takes to bring your fantasy home, right?

LaCie has just launched a new range of external hard drives known as the Desktop Hard Disk. It supports USB 2.0 only and comes in a simplistic black design that makes one remember all those Model Ts from Ford’s factory many, many years ago. You will be able to choose from 250GB, 500GB and a whopping 1TB version for all your additional data storage needs. Just in case you have a job that requires you to travel all the time, the Mobile Disk range is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacities, and is small enough to fit into most pockets. The Desktop and Mobile drives retail from €80 upwards, depending on the capacity.

Check out this Wii case mod that will definitely send Mario fans over the moon (although he has already traversed the vast breadth and length in Super Mario Galaxy). The Mario figure has been sculpted out of clay and fixed to the Wii’s side panel, where painting the rest of the case helps the figure blend right into his environment. It looks good enough to it, and on the other side of the case lies a pipe that doubles up as a Wii remote charger. The front of the decorated base also features an additional USB port and an LED mushroom that lights up whenever it is in use.

This mp3 player definitely looks like a cell phone at first glance, but it is actually nothing but an ordinary MP3 player. Dubbed the Blade Runner MP3 player, you get the following hardware specifications in your palm :-

• 1.8″ TFT display
• 2GB of storage space
• Integrated FM radio
• Built-in speaker
• Voice recording capability
• Compatible with MP1/MP2/MP3/WMA/WMV/ASF/WAV formats

It costs $49 to bring this Blade Runner home…the naming convention department could make do with an overhaul.

Guess nothing is sacred when it comes to Hello Kitty. This mouthless, pasty-faced feline from Japan is now available in the form of a phone charger, and you can hook it up to a handset with exhausted batteries in order to let it do what it is supposed to do - juice up your cell phone. Unfortunately, it is sold with Japanese cell phone-type batteries only that caters only to folks in Japan. There is some light at the end of the tunnel though, since the manufacturers have graciously included a miniUSB plug that lets you juice up USB-based devices as well. No idea on how much this costs though.

Has Asus ruined its nice idea?

Mar 10, 2008
A very interesting idea was proposed by Asus. A useful device was worked out. But it has one disadvantage that makes it almost impossible to use. Let’s find out why.

The elaboration is the following: the company thought that it would be nice to combine portable wireless mouse with flash card. But they have made a huge mistake - the form of the mouse is not comfortable at all, it looks like a memory stick.

One end of the gadget is held by a magnet. You separate the small part and plug it into your laptop’s USB drive. In order to charge the device you have to snap it back together while the transmitter is still connected.

Actually, the idea is great. But who will have the desire to use such uncomfortable mouse? On the one hand, it is narrow, like a lipstick. But on the other hand it doesn’t fit your hand at all.

It was one point of view. But there is also another opinion. If the shape of the device looked like a usual mouse, it would be too bulky and took much place while plugged into your laptop. But let’s remind that the mice for notebooks are often smaller and more compact than usual mice. That’s why Asus tried to make mouse for a laptop prettier and more functional.

So, if the device is re-designed and the form is changed a little, made smoother, for example, then a lot of people will like to have it. The form of the mouse has almost ruined a nice idea.

Along with EA (Maxis) and Sega (Super Monkey Ball), Doom creator John Carmack has added his company id to the list of game developers for the iphone/ipod Touch platform. According to him, the distribution capabilities offered by iTunes is the key benefit of developing for the Apple platform: the ability to distribute larger applications than the regular cellular network limits imposed by the carriers, effectively market a title with more than a dozen character deck name and the reasonable revenue split offered by Apple.

As we already wrote it, once again, iTunes proves to be a formidable weapon for Apple’s business development.