Image: Copyright Shane WIllis (Used with permission.)

This work by Shane Willis is an obvious tribute to M.C. Escher. This should be on the box of every RepRap machine, if you wanted to, you know, actually print out a box.

This looks surprisingly great. The animation on Slimer is very nice and the "Spirit Guide Updated" pop-up is very portentous.

I'm not exactly sure how this $350 "Laser Hidden Camera Finder Professional" works. For one, the "laser" doesn't seem to be a proper laser, but instead "dual high power laser frequency LEDs." (Emphasis added.) It seems to be able to detect hidden cameras but flashing the LEDs out and catching the light reflected from the camera lens, but that wouldn't seem to address false positives are thoroughly as they claim.

Anybody have a clue how this might work?

Catalog Page [BrickhouseSecurity.com] (Thanks, John B.!)

A full half-hour video from a show called "The Computer Chronicles" as they travel to Japan for the 1985 Computer Expo in Japan, full of dancing robot girls, an early version of the French Minitel, early text-to-speech, the first JumboTRON—pretty much all the stuff we're currently enjoying today, just in boxes much more beige and square.

I love the robot that plays the organ—such a wonderfully needless abstraction of MIDI.

Ghosts of Tokyo Tech Past - The Computer Chronicles Visits Japan For Expo ‘85 [TV In Japan]

ThinkGeek is now selling this Chewbacca Plush Backpack for $40. Please do not ever wear it out of the house.

Obviously it's too small to be the real Chewie, but it got me thinking. There's another thing we can hate Ewoks for: obviating the revelation of baby wookies. I bet baby wookies smell fantastic, like flowers just on the edge of rot.

Catalog Page [ThinkGeek.com via Gizmodo via Sci-Fi Tech]

While this ratcheted corkscrew still forces you to tug and yank and curse the cork out of the top of the bottle, at least you'll have a couple of calories more energy to do so than if you'd used a traditional twist-top corkscrew. Each ratcheted corkscrew is $100, the equivalent of 100 bottles of the finest ripple. A cheaper solution: smashing the neck of each bottle with a handy household ratchet wrench, then filtering out the glass chips with the hem of your oily hobo shirt.

Catalog Page [Solutions.com via Gadget Lab via Book of Joe]

Startup M2E ("Motion to Energy") has just received funding to develop its microgenerator solutions, which convert the movement of the human body into electricity. Even better, the prototypes—and likely the finished product—fit inside standard battery housings, making it possible to retrofit existing products.

From Earth2Tech:

Working in a lab at the U.S. Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Chief Scientist Eric Yarger used the principles of Faraday’s law of induction. The law states that moving a conductor through a magnetic field will induce a current in that conductor proportional to the speed of movement. The microgenerators actually fit inside existing batteries, can double the battery life, and can eliminate 30 to 40 percent of toxic heavy metals used in normal batteries, the company claims.

The initial market is actually not consumers, but the military, although it will surely trickle down if it is successful.

M2E’s Motion to Energy Nets $8M [Earth2Tech.com]

The idea behind the "Endo" fridge magnets is simple enough: put a powerful neodymium magnet inside a fulcrumed case. Rock the Endo back to unclip it; release to snap it back. Each clip can hold up to one pound of weight (varying by how wide the item held, I'm sure). And they're cheap, too, at just $10 for 3, available in a variety of colors.

Catalog Page [TheEndo.com via Gadget Lab]

I'm with This Old House: Anything named the "Turkey Cannon" should really launching poultry into the sky. But until someone else rectifies that oversight, the Cannon does look like an interesting way to cook a turkey, using an elevated metal tube filled with the liquid of your choice to cook a modestly-sized turkey in just a couple of hours—hopefully while keeping it moist inside. It's essentially Beer Butt chicken with a more freedom to jazz up the liquids.

The two reviews on Camp Chef are pretty positive, and the one offered recipe sounds delicious:

We cooked it on our gas grill. We filled the cannon with apple juice and Jack Daniel's. We soaked hickory chips and then placed them in an aluminum foil packet with holes punched in on top to give the turkey a smokey quality. Our 12.5 lb. turkey cooked in approximately 2 hours. It was moist and picture perfect.

The Turkey Cannon is $25. It's got me wondering if I should try to do a turkey on the grill this year.

Catalog Page [CampChef.com via HardwareAisle.ThisOldHouse.com]

"Toilet Tunes" is a simple light-detecting audio player designed to both cover up the symphony of gastrointestinal sounds that accompany your Opus Number Two and to remind you to put down the lid after your final note has rung true. A simple stick-on sensor takes three AAA batteries and attaches to the underside of the toilet lid, triggering the pre-recorded music (including Latin guitar!) or nature sounds from the tank-top speaker.

It's $30—but what price art?

Catalog Page [TaylorGifts.com via Random Good Stuff via Oh Gizmo!]

PUR is now selling water filters that can inject flavor into the water right at the tap (or right as you pour, should you choose to use the pitcher). As our needlessly anonymous tipster noted, "I bet this will lead to a lot of unintentional raspberry flavored hot dogs." Yum!

It's clever and everything, but I hate being beholden to a single company for replacements. Then again, I guess you already have to buy replacement filters from PUR, so...

It looks like replacement cartridges are about ten bucks for a two-pack on Amazon, but the reviews are certainly mixed, saying the flavor runs out pretty quickly, and what flavor there is tastes fairly "very artificial."

Product Page [PURWater.com]

SentrySafe has teamed up with Maxtor to create a line of fire resistant and waterproof USB hard drives, the better to protect your data in a disaster. The drives can withstand temperatures up to 1,550° Fahrenheit for 30 minutes and can be submerged in water for up to 24 hours.

They're maddeningly expensive for the capacity—$260 for an 80GB version—but have undeniable appeal to industrial strength data solution fetishists like myself.

Sentry is also selling a safe with slots of DVDs with a USB cable passthrough to a small drive inside. In fact, it looks like all these units may use 2.5-inch drives instead of full-sized 3.5-inch ones—that would explain the lack of capacity.

Product Page [SentrySafe.com via EverythingUSB.com]

There's not much this Cambridge SoundWorks i765 radio can't do. It's an iPod dock. It's a clock radio with alarm. Its slot-loading CD player also plays DVDs to an attached TV. It looks like a nice all-in-one solution for small apartments or dorms.

But here's the thing: it's $500. And that's before you buy a little LCD panel to go along with the DVD player. While I'm sure it sounds better than a laptop's speakers, it seems like it would be almost as cheap to buy a little laptop and some nice speakers. You'd only lose the AM/FM radio, but you'd gain, you know, a computer.

Ah well. It should get much cheaper in a year or so. These sorts of dock/radios always drop to more realistic prices surprisingly quickly.

Cambridge SoundWorks i765: The ultimate all-in-one tabletop AV system? [Crave.CNET.com]

This mushroom-shaped floor lamp from Australian designer Simon Duff is just great, especially the LED-lit gills and the off-kilter resting position. I can't quite tell if this is a concept only or will be sold, but I suspect the former.

Illuminated fungus on your living room floor [Core77.com]

Fantastic work by on "Eyeless Writer" has produced this video, compiled from 56 separate calls made to Verizon Wireless, in which the same two pricing questions were asked of the customer service representatives—93% of the phone reps got one or both answers wrong. Amazing.

While I hope Verizon gets more than egg on their faces about this one, it's surely not just they who have problems with underpaid, undertrained customer service staff. The entire phone industry has gutted the part of their companies which most directly affects their customers' satisfaction.

There's a maxim my old boss used to remind us of when I was a customer service rep for AT&T, back in the era when getting a phone support job meant going through several weeks* of training: Every mistake you make generates another call from an unhappy customer. Companies must start paying the higher costs to hire quality representatives and give them the training and infrastructure knowledge of the system they need. Having a good understanding of the way the phone and data networks work and keeping all the convoluted pricing schemes straight is very difficult work that takes months or years to really wrap one's head around.

How Bad Can a Cell Phone Company Get?: Verizon Misquotes Rates 93% of the Time [EyelessWriter.com]

* Training which was being quickly scaled back; just a few years before my tour, phone reps were trained for something like six months before ever taking live calls.

The "Three Hundred Mechanics" project by Sean Howard may not be the sweaty cross-country road race of sexual discovery I've always dreamed of taking*, but it's still quite eye-opening. Howard is attempting to come up with three hundred discrete game design ideas, each of which he writes up in a small dossier with a concept screenshot. He's only into the 60s so far, but has already shown amazing tenacity. He's going to be a walking encyclopedia of game design once he's done (if he isn't already).

Project Page [Squidi.net via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

* Sponsorship opportunities are still available. I'm looking at you, Valvoline.

While the poster at Paradoxoff is slagging this "Elektronika MK-152" programable calculator—and it is very humble, with only half a meg of memory, membrane keys, and no power supply—I find its sturdy Russian construction and no-fuss design appealing. Of course, I don't have to use it, only admire it from afar.

But as one commentor noted:

The programming language of this device is very easy. There are many problems for non-programmers that should be solved. How much does it spend for engeneer to write program that realize his new function, if he doesn’t programming languages? In C++ it spends more than half of day. In this device it spends less than 15 mins. And about memory for example: a program to calculate square root takes 24 bytes only.

Then again, this thing is going for over $150 in Russia, so expecting a few more modern features is not unreasonable.

Elektronika MK-152 programmable calculator from the year 2007 [Paradoxoff.com]

Not much needs be said about the Matias Folding Keyboard: it folds. It is not wireless, but USB. It will cost $60 when released next month. It weighs just under a pound.

It actually seems like a good time for another folding keyboard to show up, although it's funny that folding full-sized keyboards are now being sold as accessories for tiny laptops, which have taken the role once filled by PDAs.

Product Page [Matias.ca via Crave.CNET.com]

I saw this commercial for the Ford Sync in-car computer system last night and thought it was pretty humorous. The way the actors so confidently command their environment really sells it. It's like one of those paleo-future "Imagine the Future" pieces from ten years back, only gone all pear shaped.

The folks at Yumsugar tested the "Jennie-O Over-Ready Turkeys," whole birds which are sealed in a fancy plastic bag, allowing them to be tossed directly into a waiting oven with no thawing. It sounds like a good way for someone who hasn't cooked much before to make a turkey, although the lack of a gibblets/innards/neck pack makes me weep for the stuffing and gravies that won't be made.

The experience is absolutely effortless, but not totally flawless. I didn't wait for the popup button to pop up — I find that by that time, the birds are usually overcooked — so I went with the thermometer method instead. Unfortunately, due to the plastic bag that the turkey is roasting — or is it steaming? — in, it was really difficult to see exactly where you were sticking the thermometer. I also found that gravy made from the drippings was too salty with a hint of artificial flavor to it.

The Jennie-O turkeys are said to be found in stores for around $25. If you like to cook at all, though, and are as cheap as I am, I really suggest learning how to cook a proper turkey. After Thanksgiving the prices drop precipitously and it's worth buying a couple. The meat freezes well and the bones makes wonderful stock, perfect for risottos and soups.

Is the Jennie-O Oven-Ready Turkey Really Worth It? [YumSugar.com]

Japanese LEGO craftsman Jun Brick is recreating the famous Japanese battleship Yamato in LEGO (the real WWII-era one, not the space battleship). He's documented his build-in-progress on his site, which in some ways may be more interesting in the final product, as you can see how much work must go into the superstructure infrastructure necessary to support such a large scale model. (It's basically a mini-fig scale replica, which must make it 15-20 feet long, at least.)

The Yamato was a nearly legendary bit of engineering and remains an important cultural artifact to the Japanese, something like the way Americans revere the USS Enterprise, our first nuclear carrier. Construction on the Yamato began seventy years ago; design work had begun three years earlier.

Artist's page [Geocities.jp via Hobby Blog]

Toys 'R' Us Chairman and CEO Gerald L. Storch sent out an email this morning detailing the company's increased commitment to product safety, including the hiring of a third-party toy safety testing lab and a new "no quibbles" return policy:

We believe that when a product is recalled, the most important thing is to get that product out of children’s hands. To that end, we have instituted a "no quibble" policy when it comes to toy recalls. This means Toys"R"Us will take back recalled product whether it was purchased at Toys"R"Us or not - with or without a receipt.

I'm presuming that "take back" means a refund, as well, but they do not say so directly.

Full letter after the jump.

• Craftsman 0.5 Amp 3D Sander for $10, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• Amazon's "Customers Vote" promotion is back. Vote on which product deals you'd like to see to qualify for those deals when they come around. [Amazon]

• Logitech Wireless Music System for PCs for $40, Shipped [Dealhack]

• Various marshmallow-themed products, including a marshmallow shooter, on sale. [Dealnews]

• Today's Woot!: It's a Woot-off!

Sorry about the poor posting the last couple days, especially today. I was on a business trip that ended up being very slim on internet. But I'll be back in action very soon!

Holy smokes:

Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd are getting back together and revisiting their roles to make a sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2 – in video-game form, and we’ve got the first details. Both Aykroyd and Ramis are teaming up for scriptwriting duties and are going far beyond just the typical licensed add-your-voice-to-the-game-you-had-nothing-to-do-with formula. And no, this has nothing to do with the Ghostbusters Zootfly video demonstration that floated around the internet in January.

I wonder if this will have anything to do with Aykroyd's infamous Ghostbusters go to hell script? Actually, who cares—more Ghostbusters!

Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic excitement I have about a videogame...

Game Informer's December Cover Revealed! [GameInformer.com]

Just to prove that the gadgets industry never met a product it couldn't clutter up with a needless LCD screen, the Kamenstein SmartSpice Rack includes a digital cookbook of over 200 recipes and a timer! "All in one!"

Also includes spices.

Here are ways this $65 orbital space turd could have been improved: sensors that note what spice has been removed, displaying cooking suggestions on screen; a giant red button on the top labeled "Pepper," which periodically discharges aerosolized capsaicin into the air whether or not the button has actually been pressed; some spices are actually spray-painted iron filings, while others are not spray-painted; it could have been made of wood and cost $10.

Catalog Page [Amazon via LuxuryHousingTrends.com]

While Complex is too high-falutin' for these some-assembly-required speakers from JVC-Victor, I think the presumably modest effort it would take to build your own set of wood cone speakers would be fun. It's not like you're winding your own wire or filling each sub-tweeter with quartz sand or anything*.

The kit's almost 400 bucks, though, so hopefully they sound nice after you've put them together.

JVC-Victor SX-WD1KT Wood Cone Speaker Kit [AcquireMag.com]

* I don't actually know how speakers work.

The "Eco Shoes Dryer" from Life in Detail are plastic shoe trees filled with silica gel which absorbs the moisture from your shoes after they've been worn. When full of your foot juice, the Dryer can then be plugged into the wall to accelerate the evaporative process, presumably with a small fan. (Sci-fi tech says they use a battery inside to power themselves during the drying phase, but that doesn't make sense to me. Silica absorbs moisture just fine without any electrical assistance.)

Getting moisture out of shoes helps prevent bacteria growth and subsequent bad smells, but is also good for keeping leather from cracking.

Product Page (Japanese) [BE-S.co.jp via Sci-Fi Tech]

Popular Science's Green "Grand Award Winner" this year is the super-thin "PowerSheet" solar panels from Nanosolar, which are both thin and inexpensive to produce. PowerSheet is printed on "sheets as thin as aluminum foil."

Nanosolar's cells use no silicon, and the company's manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. "You're talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it," says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. "It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar."

Now they need to mold this stuff directly into the plastic housings of gadgets to help keep the battery topped off.

THE NEW DAWN OF SOLAR [PopSci.com]

NifNaks.com is the home of Nifer Fahrion, an artist who makes these adorable USB flash drives (among other things). "Maggie," on the right, is probably the only 4GB maggot available for sale online, but I'd love to be wrong about that. We need more maggots in our lives.

Each hand-made drive cozy is around $67. She also makes Cthulhu-themed Christmas tree ornaments, sure to make your Yule tidings unspeakably cheerful.

Catalog Page [NifNaks.com] (Thanks, Jacapplebaum!)

The Livescribe digital pen and paper system, which we discussed a bit before, has shown what is probably the production model of their pen. It's hefty, but still pocketable. If they make a nice little Moleskine-like notebook with their special paper, I might even give it a shot.

Livescribe is taking pre-orders for the system now, although it won't be ready until early next year.

Livescribe Smartpen Gets Realer [OhGizmo]

This "Magnetic Field Paper" is simple enough, reacting to the mysterious power of the lodestone. I am unsure if baby's blood is necessary to activate its fell power, but I figure it always pays to play it safe.

From the product page:

Developed back in the 1970s, with ideas that it might become a replacement for paper, this paper makes magnetic fields visible. Any other magnet can be used, and the paper will allow to to make the magnetic field visible.

It consists of a thin plastic sheet containing tiny cells containing liquid. Each little cell contains colloidal iron. Hold a magnet near, and the iron in each of the cells will align, and form a pattern on the paper.

That would imply to me that it is reusable, sort of like a cross between an Etch-A-Sketch and those iron filling-filled mustache man magnet kits. It's $11 for a three-by-three-inch square.

Catalog Page [Grand-Illusions.com via Coolest Gadgets]

Previously: Lancome "Le Magnetique": Magnetic Nail Polish [BBG]

More details are out about the Gibson Powertune line of self-tuning guitars—for one, they're now being peculiarly branded as "Robot" guitars. Whatever the name, I think we can all agree the new paint job is quite attractive. I'll never have a reason to own one (at least until the point in the future when the self-tuning technology is standard issue stuff) but for pros it's a neat trick.

If nothing else, it gives Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn a chance to slag guitarists:

My favorite line was this, from the press release: "Since the dawn of the instrument, musicians have come to accept the guitar's imperfections and lack of tonal precision as necessary evils. Onstage and off, guitarists have fought to stay in tune. Every music lover and performer has had to suffer through the show—halting, mood-killing atonal droning of a loudly amped guitar being brought into tune."

Or, erm, not brought into tune, as the case may be. (Jump!)

I read that initially as "every music lover … had to suffer through the show," and the whole passage makes it sound like pretty much everybody just has to suffer guitars. Boy, am I ever a Keyboard player.

The Robot guitar will be available December 9th. I'm on real crap internet right now so I'm having trouble discovering if they actually announced a MSRP yet. I'm sure, being Gibson, it'll be a few thousand dollars for the whole rig.

Gibson to Launch Self-Tuning "Robot" Guitar [CreateDigitalMusic.com]

Previously: Gibson Powertune Self-Tuning Guitars [BBG]

Consumerist