The Gadgets Page

When I was a kid, I watched a cartoon called Yogi Bear. Yogi and BooBoo spent every episode obsessing about stealing picnic baskets. Picnic baskets like the ones that Yogi stole are available even to this day, but as a child of the Seventies, I had never seen a picnic basket in real life. I always thought they must contain the BEST food in the world. As a starving kid, the picnic basket had been elevated to such a level of imagined delectability, that nothing in the real world could ever compare.

Of course, as a child of the Seventies, we never had a picnic basket. We owned a cooler. That’s where all the good food was when we went to Lagoon or up to the mountains. This blue Coleman cooler was lugged around to every park and outdoor activity in the Salt Lake Valley when I was a kid. Mom and Carol would make the best sandwiches with bologna, cheese and mayonnaise. Just the sight of a blue Coleman cooler makes my mouth water, even after all these years.

This Kelty Pop Duo bag gives the old Coleman cooler a run for its money, now. Just like the cooler, there is a work space where you can make sandwiches or cut fruit, but the Pop Duo isn’t a huge bulky box like the Coleman is. I could carry it alone without any help and the pockets look roomy enough to carry enough bologna sandwiches for the whole family (the soda, however, will have to be stored somewhere else).

The mystic of the picnic basket is alluring to me, mostly because of the imagination of Hanna-Barbera. If you have never seen a Yogi Bear cartoon, here is one that is pretty typical of the show.

Via: Camping Cooler Bag with Built in Prep Table » CraziestGadgets.com

For the paranoid, one of the most eagerly awaited benefits of the iPhone 3.0 operating system is the Find My iPhone feature. By logging into a web page, you can click on the Find My iPhone button and it will track down your phone and show it to you on a map. This is a fantastic feature for the absent-minded iPhone owners who can never find their beloved gadget.

For those of us who are paranoid, however, the Find My iPhone feature has the added benefit of being able to wipe all the data from the phone the second you realize that it has been stolen. Sure, you can see where the thieves are with Find My iPhone, but all of your bank account information sitting on your phone and your home address can be wiped from the iPhone’s memory before the cops show up at the thieves’ door. Once you wipe your iPhone, it will no longer be able to be tracked, so make sure the cops are on their way before clearing the data.

This is not just a feature for the paranoid like me. Here is the thrilling story from The Intermittent Kevin of Happy Waffle fame tracking down his phone that he lost during a Lego convention in Chicago.

• The Intermittent Kevin – Find My iPhone works, and it is awesome.

Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.

“THAT WAY!”

Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street.

This feature, however useful it is, is not automatic. You must have a MobileMe account with Apple in order for it to work AND you have to set it up on your iPhone.

• Apple – MobileMe – Your iPhone, Mac, and PC. In perfect sync $99/year

• Find my iPhone: How to set it up

I originally signed up for MobileMe when I bought a new iMac computer. I synced my bookmarks, contacts, and all other information on my MacBook to MobileMe and then when I booted up my new computer, had it download all that information from MobileMe. It was the easiest new computer switch over experience that I had EVER experienced. EVERYTHING matched, right down to my dock at the bottom of the screen. It was worth the yearly fee for that alone, but now that I can have the peace of mind of knowing that I can delete all the data on my iPhone if it falls into the wrong hands, I feel incredibly happy that I already had a MobileMe account set up.

Every time Apple updates the iPhone OS, they have added wonderful features that I wished for and even better ones that I had never dreamed of. Find My iPhone is one of those features. All of the telecom companies have had this ability for years, but not one of them have offered it to us until Apple strong-armed AT&T into acquiescence. Thanks, Apple! Glad to know you’ve got my back!

• Truly awesome lamp made from an Ikea watering can! http://bit.ly/Lr3d #
• Create 3D Stereograms with your iPhone. AWESOME! http://bit.ly/R1GZH #

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• Duplicate calendars and contacts in UR iPhone after you signed up for MobileMe? See the comments on this entry. http://tinyurl.com/n6pjzf #

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NakedJen and I made an incredible find at The DI last March. It was the Halliwell Rapid-Aire Hair Dryer!

The best part was that it was in FULL working order. If you look closely, you can see that the bottom part folds out like a Lazy-Z-Boy lounger (the handle for it is on the right).

I LOVE the font on this.

NakedJen ended up buying this hair dryer and we lugged it home in the Prius (it easily fit, but it was HEAVY to put in there). She wrote about it here:

• nakedjen: You Don’t Know How Hard It Is…: “You don’t know how hard it is to get your dog to pose for a picture in the most amazing and fabulous thrift shop score ever.”

You can see all my photos here:

• Retro Gadgets: Halliwell Rapid-Aire Hair Dryer – a set on Flickr

I love this little television set from Sharp. It looks so Space Age!

When I was a kid, we had a portable television. Sometimes Carol would take it with her in the car. I remember her picking me up from school when I had to stay late and she had the portable TV in the car, watching it while she waited for me to finish with my after school activities.

Now, we can watch a myriad of shows on our cell phones while we wait in line at the grocery store or take walks in the park. It all reminds me of this Benny Hill song so long ago:

I’d like to take her portable TV set and throw it in the deep blue sea.
Why I’m so jealous of her portable TV set because it takes her mind off me.

Being able to take technology with us wherever we go is very helpful. I no longer have to be at my computer in order to answer my email. I no longer have to be at the stereo to listen to music. And I no longer have to be in my living room in order to watch TV. With great power, comes great responsibility. Use your portable television set wisely.

• Gorgeous Philco Pedestal B&W TV http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr38/3643257386/ I want a brand new LCD version of this!! #

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Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone again? What if your phone was able to stay charged just by collecting the radio waves that are already flying around the air around you. That is the technology that Nokia is working on today.

• Technology Review: Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones

The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. “Even if you are only getting microwatts, you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala says.

This is one of those technologies that will eventually show up in our lives and years later, we’ll be saying to ourselves, “Remember when we had to charge our cell phones? We used to have cradles and car chargers and habits in our lives just to make sure our phones were charged and you little whipper snappers come in here with your fancy self-charging phones.” Of course, by then, I’ll sound like an old miner and wave around a cane like I’m going to hit you with it.

It will be cool when it shows up, though!

• Music from Apple’s Keynote Presentations over the years. Needs iTunes links, but there are too many Beatles tunes. http://tinyurl.com/nj457g #

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The science fiction blog, io9 had a great entry:

• io9 – My First Microchip

They listed the computer embedded toys of the early Eighties, including: Speak & Spell, Simon and Teddy Ruxpin. They forgot MY first microchip, however.

Merlin The Electronic Wizard

Merlin was a handheld game that had six different games:

1. Tic Tac Toe
2. Music Machine: A rudimentary synthesizer. The first electronic music I ever made was on a Merlin.
3. Echo, a game similar to Simon
4. Blackjack 13
5. Magic Square, a pattern game similar to Lights Out
6. Mindbender, a game similar to Mastermind

I played with Merlin for hours. Here is a family photo of my dad playing with my Merlin. He loved that toy as much as I did. That was actually a very geeky holiday year. My sister got a Raggedy Ann radio that allowed you to talk into a microphone and broadcast your voice. God, I loved that toy. You can see all of us playing with those toys here:

• Merlin The Electronic Wizard – a set on Flickr

In fact, Merlin was the dawn of the casual gaming market. I could pick up Merlin, play a couple games of Mindbender and then put it down. It predated the GameBoy by almost a decade.

I still have my old Merlin in a box in the basement. Amazingly, it still works with fresh batteries and I can play all my old games just as well as I could back on New Year’s Day in 1980.

Here is an old commercial showing how Merlin was played: