The Gadgets Page

This house holds a family of five, but its footprint is a mere 320 square feet. Ever since Mike and I moved from a 3500 square-foot house in the suburbs to a 820 square-foot house in a different suburb, I have been obsessed with making things work in a small space. Here is an article about how it is done in Japan:

• Japan: Micro-Homes in the Big City

Sadly, the article concentrates on how much the homes cost to build instead of how you can cram five people into such a small space and still make it work. Is it enforced simplicity? Is it ultra-efficiency? How do they do it? That’s what I want to know. I wanted to see floor plans and pictures of their storage areas, not their staircases.

This article is more helpful:

• Living in a Small Space by Maria Palma: The Sideroad

I still would like to see pictures and specific storage ideas.

Via: random($foo)

I have been playing Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS since October of 2006. I haven’t caught all the fish or insects, but I’m getting really close to having a complete catalog. Somehow, in my mind, I decided that to “win” this game, I needed a complete catalog. Checking my catalog with Nook is a real pain, so I have created an Animal Crossing complete catalog checklist for myself. I thought I would share it with you:

• Download the Animal Crossing Complete Catalog

This is an Excel spreadsheet listing all the items that are possible to own in Animal Crossing. I gathered this information from all over the web and I suspect that there are errors in it, but so far it has worked well for me. I use it during play every day to check the new items at Nooks, The Abel Sisters and Redd’s Tent.

This book also has helpful information about visitors to the town, how to get your hair cut by Harriet and what all the paintings look like. I find it extremely helpful and I thought you might like it as well.

With an open play game like Animal Crossing, you get to choose which objectives you want to achieve. Do you want to fill your museum? Do you want to design clothing? Do you want to own EVERYTHING? Do you want to be friends with everyone and proudly display their pictures in your home? Do you want to own the biggest home in town? You get to choose and there are as many ways to play as there are people.

What if I told you that this car can get 230 mpg, drive at freeway speeds AND only costs about $20K? I can’t believe it myself, actually, but those are the exact claims about this car from Aptera Motors:

* Aptera Motors

Everyone loves the story of the guy who tinkers in his garage and creates a prototype that will change the world. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did it with their Apple Computers. What about Steve Fambro? Can his car that looks like it belongs in a sci-fi movie change the way we think about cars? I hope so because he is promising me a lot:

* 0 to 60 in under 10 seconds
* Choice of hybrid or all electric (150 miles on a single charge)
* 230 mpg at the speed of 55 mph

It’s a two-seater, with not much room for anything but two people. The car itself only weighs 850 pounds, which helps improve the gas mileage substantially. By using a carbon composite frame, he reduced the weight of the car without compromising the safety. He based his models of design and safety on airplanes. Are you willing to sacrifice a backseat for that kind of fuel efficiency? I sure am. Where do I sign up?

For more information:

* Car creator has grand designs | The San Diego Union-Tribune

* Business Week

* The Race to 100 MPG – Popular Science

Via: Prototype Aptera Becomes Working Model | Gear Live

This is the perfect doormat to welcome or scare away your guests. It changes with your mood!

• SUCK UK – “Come in” / “Go away” Doormat

• SUCK UK – Do Not Disturb… with a twist.

It’s not available yet, but as soon as it is, bipolar sufferers every where will snatch them up!

Via: Popgadget: Come in, or is that Go Away?

A touching and endearing story detailing why you should have a backup of the music on your iPod.

• Shiny Shiny: The day the iPod music died

Just the other day, Mike and I were talking about this issue. I didn’t believe that anyone would have a bunch of music on their iPod that wasn’t backed up to their computer somehow, and then I found out that the Nike+ Drive soundtrack I downloaded from iTunes only existed on my Nano and nowhere else.

Somehow it had slipped through the cracks.

My copy of Nike+ Drive is safe now. Unfortunately, Susi is not so lucky. After leaving her iPod on the plane, she has lost over half of her collection. She has to painstakingly recreate her collection, but you can save yours right now. The best situation to be in is to never have to retrieve music off your iPod, but if you are in that situation right now, there is some software that can do that for you:

• CopyTrans backup iPod Music from iPod to computer, playlists
• Senuti – Download
• iPod Access for Windows
• Tune Transfer for iPod
• xTremSoft.com : xPort : Backup your iPod, copy, recover and transfer all iPod music on Mac or PC.

Be forewarned that Apple could break this software at any time and make it unable to backup the music on your iPod. I haven’t had to use any of these programs, so I can’t recommend any of them. I just thought you might want to know they exist. If you have had experience with any of them, please leave a comment on this entry telling us if they suck or not.

The best thing to do is to make a double copy of your music: one on your computer’s hard drive and one on a backup drive such as a different hard drive or even an online backup system. That will ensure that you will never have to try to get music off your iPod onto a new computer after a drive crash. Sync your iPod regularly and take extra precautions when you get a new computer so that all your music is transferred correctly.

This is an old entry from back in November, but it’s still very useful. More and more, I see people using their cameraphones in situations where my mom would have used the 110 camera when I was a child. Just the other day, I saw a mother at a restaurant snap photos of her children at the table. The cameraphone is creating photo albums of the lives of many families. Here’s how to make those memories better using that dime-sized lens:

• Geek to Live: Take better cameraphone photos – Lifehacker

Here is the quick and dirty list of their ways to make your cameraphone photos better:

• Get close and personal.
• Keep it steady.
• It’s all about the light.
• Use night mode.
• Turn off the fake shutter sound.
• Keep your lens clean.

Of all of these, the clean lens has been the biggest issue for me. Since my phone is bobbing around in my purse with its lens unprotected, mine is usually covered with lint. If you are going to snap a photo, take a moment to wipe off the lens first.

Via: Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog » links for 2006-11-21

Sony has opened up Home, which is a 3D world with avatars. You can wander around the world, talk to people and spend money on imaginary furniture. It looks like a pretty version of Second Life, but seems so crippled that I wonder how fun it would be to spend time there.

I have no intention of buying a PS3 until they bring down the price. Sony told me that if I wasn’t willing to buy a PS3 at 600 bucks, then I wasn’t a serious gamer. I found that pretty offensive. No matter how “cool” their little virtual world is, I’m not willing to shell out that much money to a company that hates me.

Via: mutednoise » Sony Launches Virtual World

It doesn’t look like it would exercise more than one arm at a time, but I can imagine playing on this thing for hours as a kid. Just imagine… a fair ride that’s free!

• Wurlybird Flyer – funfair style action toy for boys and girls

I have a couple of questions about this action toy, though:

Can you play with it all by yourself?

As a child, there were lots of playground toys that were useless to me. The teeter totter was one example. It’s impossible to play alone. It’s impossible to play with your sister who is five years younger. You have to find a kid who is about the same weight as you to play. Is that how this thing would work?

Does it only exercise your left arm?

It doesn’t look like you can switch arms, so you would end up with one sore arm after a day’s play with it. If you can’t switch arms, that’s a major design flaw.

This looks like a fun idea, but not quite up to exergaming standards. Heck, even the Wii exercises BOTH of your arms…

Via: Boing Boing: Hand-cranked home fun-fair ride

Sure, robotic parking structures are cool, but this device allows for parking sixty-seven cars in a space that would usually only hold twenty-four. In cities where land is the limited resource, the cost of a robotic parking structure actually makes sense. In Salt Lake City, we just knock down an unused old building and put a new parking structure in its place. They have these in Europe and Japan, but the U.S. finally has one in where? New York, of course. If you would like to know more, Popular Mechanics has the full story here:

• Robotic Parking Garage: No Tip Necessary – Popular Mechanics

Watching this video sparks an innate fear of technology that comes from watching too many 1950’s sci-fi movies and 1980’s action flicks. This could be the scene of science gone terribly wrong or a horribly gory fight sequence.

Via: Robotic parking garage in action – Engadget

I’ve known about the Hipster PDA for a while. It’s just bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. It’s light, you can write using an object you are already familiar with (a pen), and there is no plasticy keyboards or stylii (yuck!). The only problem with the Hipster PDA is that there is no music capabilities.

Until now…

THIS is what the iPod Shuffle was made for!

Via: Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog » links for 2007-03-03