Just yesterday a friend and I were mentioning how often we find ourselves without a reusable bag when shopping, leaving us little choice but to bring home more plastic bags from the grocery store. These new scruntch-up bags from Flip & Tumble can be stashed inside the integrated stretchy pouch, smooshing the whole thing into something only about 3-inches in diameter. Not quite pocketable, but if you already carry around a backpack or purse — don't say it; sometimes you need more carrying capacity — then these could do the trick.

Each bag is $12 plus shipping and are available in five colors.

What tricks do you use to stash bags? You could do something similar with a light bag and a sock. I've got several of those reusable Ikea bags, but they're too big, even folded, to carry around.

Product Page [Flip & Tumble]

Howie writes:

To go along with Wal Mart and Amazon's rebates, Best Buy is offering a $50 gift card to anyone who bought an HD-DVD player from them before February 23, 2008.

They're also offering a trade-in, but for an excellent quality player with manuals, remote, and two movies, they only offer $33 (?!)

I love that Best Buy is calling their program the "HD DVD Action Center." I wonder if that reflect a feeling of genuine crisis they've had at the store level. I bet those floor walkers have had to deal with some really irate customers.

HD DVD Action Center [Best Buy]

If I'm parsing this Spiegel article correctly, they're comparing this collection of 39 strange vehicles as things that look like they could have come out of Star Wars. Ironically, some of the featured retro vehicles are war machines, including some hard-edged German items, which undoubtedly affected the visual style of some of the original trilogy's design. Or maybe they're saying these things inspired Star Wars in the first place. I can suss out the meaning of words in German, but all the connective grammar is lost on me.

Die Ahnen von Star Wars [Spiegel.de] (Thanks, Monad!)

My friend Harry Sawyers is out at the Kitchen/Bath Industry Show and spotted this 'Balance' tub built by Estonian makers NeoQi. It's got everything but the bacta:

You've got both steam and infrared sauna heat, a couple dozen jets pulsing out the hydromassage, therapies both aroma- and chroma-, and an mp3 player to help you get into that Deep Purple groove that's so popular these days. The best feature of all is the DeLorean door than closes down on you, coffin-like, with a little hole for your head. This creates an "energy cocoon" to make you "feel good...fight stress, and loose (sic) your weight."

I love a good soak with a book, but I'd gladly toss out the book for a direct information beam to my skull.

THE TUB THAT'S BETTER THAN DRUGS [KBIS Live]

If your cat likes to sleep on your keyboard while you're trying to surf for porn, stick her in this box instead. You may have to line the little crib with a rat glue board to get her to stay, but that's a small price to pay for ensuring you won't be interrupted while abusing yourself. Link

What a clever idea: digitizing the common, canary-yellow Post-It note to help people with Alzheimer's.

The Ixp-Note, 1mm thick, enables the user to enter the time and date of a future event by touching the paper with their finger. Using a normal pen, the user can then write the event they need to remember on a glowing strip, which can be programmed to flash or beep at the chosen time.

The memo note uses thermo-chromic ink - like that used in thermometer strips - that changes colour in response to temperature.

Better yet, they're cheapish and reusable: a pack of ten costs £10.

Clever stick-on note could replace alarm clock [Telegraph] (via Gizmodo)

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at this entertaining, though wildly optimistic vision of a future where lazy Americans are coddled by robot slaves that do everything from parting their hair and catching rats around the house to melting snow by spraying cheap "atomic heat", whatever that means. This 1936 article titled "The World's Most Dangerous Job" documents what filmmakers had to go through to get movies of tigers in their native habitat. We also looked at a talking scare crow, a slide projector that is for some reason shaped like a pistol, an automatic trap-door for automobile roofs designed to prevent bashing one's head and a curt, stylish ad for Camel cigarettes.

This is a development that will surely strike the dispassionate rationalist like a cattle prod driven into the 'common sense' nerve cluster of the amygdala: it turns out that giving robots guns isn't a good idea.

Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.” In other words, the SWORDS swung around in the wrong direction, and the plug got pulled fast. No humans were hurt, but as Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.”

This isn't just bad news for the KillBot industry. It sets a bad precedent: human casualties are not acceptable. How will the nascent HugBot industry get off the ground if we can't accept the risk of a few early testers being accidentally hugged to death?

Non-Answer on Armed Robot Pullout From Iraq Reveals Fragile Bot Industry [Popular Mechanics]

Mike Masnick tears into Sprint's tragically weak security system that protects access to your account. Hope your neighbors don't know you very well!

The way it works is Sprint asks you a series of "security" questions that it thinks only you would know the answer to. Things like "what type of car has been registered at your address?" and "which of the following people has lived at your address?" It sounds like some data collection company probably convinced Sprint to purchase access to their data to set up these questions in the name of "security." The problem is that if you know just a little about certain people, you can easily guess the answers. Even worse, a former Sprint employee notes that, mostly to avoid "accidentally" having two right answers, it's usually quite easy to figure out the actual answers. For example, on the automobile question, the incorrect answers are usually expensive luxury vehicles.

Dumb Sprint 'Security' Questions Make It Easier To Hijack Accounts [Techdirt]

UPI reports:

The CPSC said the importer, Funtastic of Houston, initiated the recall because gray surface paint on the teeth was found to contain excessive levels of lead, violating the federal lead paint standard.

I am picking and frowning.

Chinese-made 'Hillbilly Teeth' recalled [UPI via J-Walk Blog]

These wooden cuffs from Bentwood are made from cast-off architectural veneer and are molded to double as a sleeve for hot coffee cups. They're lovely, as wood so often is, but at $70 CAD about $60 more expensive than they should be. I'm all for not wasting paper, but something about using an expensive zebrawood cuff in lieu of a nickel's worth of cardboard seems strange to me.

Product Page [Contexture.ca via Gadget Lab via Book of Joe]

• Custom Stickers – Buy two, get one free on custom sticker books from Moo.com. You can load images right out of Flickr. (Which is why much of Brooklyn is covered in tiny images of my dog.) [Dealhack]

• iPod Speakers – Logitech AudioStation iPod Speaker dock for $45, shipped, after a $50 mail-in rebate. [Dealnews]

• Batteries – 15% off coupon, no minimum, at Batteries.com. They sell rechargables. [Dealnews]

• Drill Set – Black & Decker 5-piece 18-volt drill set for $40, shipped. Comes with a driver, vacuum, flashlight, stud finder, screwdriver, and battery + charger. [Dealnews]

• Bluetooth Speaker – Today's Woot! is the Anycom Solar Bluetooth Cell-Phone Speaker System for $35, shipped.

Boy, I've been traveling. It's not likely to ease up this year. I've got the short trip down to an art, if I may be so bold: I'm regularly doing two-three night stays, with full-sized laptop and often cameras, in just a standard-sized backpack. (Protip: Always wearing jeans is your new fashion.)

As well as this nylon Gravis backpack has served me over the last three years, it's starting to have some problems. Small tears — my fault, mostly — and not quite enough capacity to really meet my needs for longer trips. I think I can do a full 7-day trip with a single carry-on bag — if it's the right one.

Buying a bag would be too easy, and my new philosphy when it comes to clothing and accessories is that I'd rather spend the money to get exactly what I want, something I'll treasure. That means bespoke. Fortunately, I am also a skinflint, so bespoke means "hope to heck I can find a talented crafter on Etsy." (If you know of a crafter who could do the job, though, I'd love a recommendation.)

Here are my tentative requirements for your criticism and elucidation:

• Solar power – It should probably be hard panels, which are more effecient. I may actually sacrifice my old Voltaic solar bag for parts. (it's a great bag, but mine was a pre-production prototype that use a cloth on the back that made it majorly sweaty, since fixed.) Provided the Voltaic's storage battery still holds a charge, I'll probably incorporate that, too, although something able to store slightly more power might be worth the encubrence penalty. If I use the Voltaic battery, output to whatever voltages I need is simple — and nearly everything I use now uses vanilla 5-volt USB.

• A separate laptop section – For the forseeable future, I'll be toting a full-sized laptop around on trips. (Although, damn it, the Air is starting to call to me.) Most backpacks put the computer next to the spine, using it as a way to add stability to the frame. I like this fine. I also spend a lot of time whipping it out — as well as removing my computer from my bag — so single-zipper access is a must.

Or not. I'm easy if there's a good reason to do something different.

• Durable materials – At first I was thinking leather. That limits the number of crafters who could actually make the bag, as well as greatly increasing the price, but as a "lifetime bag" it seemed like the most durable choice. Leather backpacks, on the other hand, are kind of corny, so it would have to be restrained in design.

But perhaps there are better materials to work with. Something less expensive to purchase (and regenerate). Something with a little more appeal visually. Something with some pink. Reclaimed materials would be hot.

Metal fasteners are prefered, I think, if there is a way to make them not squeak. I'm seeing lots of metal on this thing.

• A backpack with stowable shoulder strap – It has to be a backpack, because sometimes I wear my bag for hours at a time. Messenger bags just don't cut it, although a stowable, clip-on should strap option would be nice. Even more difficult, more desirable: a bag design small enough to be slipped under an airline seat, so I don't have to pack another bag with all my in-flight toys and books or keep my computer on the floor. (I'm also just a little bit paranoid about ever letting my bag out of my sight.)

• Special features – This is where you guys come in. I've had a few ideas, like a smart selection of quick-access pockets and fairly predictable stuff like that. But if you were making the perfect bag for you, what would you add? A small pocket with a viewport for a hidden camera, maybe? A place for a water bottle? A programmable display? Speakers? A telescoping antenna tuned for 3G?

Blockbuster is building a set-top, burped the web. I looked around my apartment at my three media consumption stations — or would have had I not been flying on an airplane — and considered where Blockbuster's box might go.

My laptop, a Mac, is full of a few video podcasts which I watch primarily on my phone. (Lala, call me!) I'll download the occasional torrent, although that is done primarily on my...

Desktop machine, a Windows Vista PC hooked up to a television-sized LCD monitor. I'll bring down television torrents from time to time, but as I have money to spend again (last year was a bear), I've been renting DVDs from Netflix. I watch those occasionally on my PS3, attached to the same display, instead of the PC. That's to pretend that I have a use for the PS3 besides a Blu-ray player.

In the living room is a projector connected to a DVR, or as it is increasingly known, "The American Idol Experience Box." If I wanted, I believe Time Warner has some on-demand options, but since I'm really only paying my cable bill as a way to assuage, in part, any ethical burden I feel for torrents I download, I've never used tried to use on-demand.

What I use many times a week is Netflix's web-based streaming service, available free at most subscription levels. And, to my surprise, Hulu. I pop open a browser, fire up an episode of 30 Rock or Arrested Development and watch an episode or two while I run on the elliptical. Or that's what I did at first. Now I find myself looking through the Netflix streaming listing for movies. Not just movies I've seen a million times, like Ghostbusters, but movies I keep putting at the back of my DVD queue because I'm just not quite sure I actually want to watch them. (Half of my queue is filled with movies I'm fairly sure I just have on there to impress myself. Oh, you're so well-rounded and worldly! But no one will mind if you just move Enchanted up to the top.*)

I never want to touch a piece of proprietary hardware to access content again. There's no need! We'll be able to stream HD content soon enough; in the interim, even these browser-based solutions could pre-fetch and cache it. The only reason companies like Blockbuster and Vudu want dedicated hardware is because it locks you into their service. They're recreating the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war for streaming digital media. How silly is that?

In Appledom, iTunes is the future, not AppleTV. AppleTV and other PC-based media centers only exist because no television manufacturer has figured out how to make a passable, low-priced solution to add a capable web browser to their TVs.

It would be simple and inexpensive to add a computer small enough to run a web browser to most televisions. (Even accounting for the relatively high performance cost of streaming video.) It might not even need a traditional hard drive, since data would only need to be cached, not stored. And while a custom interface to the web sites would be nice, it's not essential. (And could be done by the streaming media sites themselves by catching the browser type ID and passing back a custom CSS, like many sites now do for iPhone Safari.) A cursor and an on-screen keyboard would be enough to log-in to web pages, if slowly.

Or add a web browser to the game consoles. It doesn't matter. Just get a browser on these displays, connect them to the plain ol' web, and let them start showing content.

Of course there is one snag: DRM. And it's not even the standard DRM problem — you know, how it's a complete waste of culture's time — but that the DRM powering Netflix is Windows-based. But there's a fix for even that (besides adding the same DRM to Linux or other OSes and browsers): just use a different DRM. Hulu works just fine on my Mac. I don't know how or if they're trying to lock down the stream through Flash, but it seems to be working cross-platform without issue.

Unlike an ISP-level tax to preemptively pay for all media consumption as some have proposed, the browser-based system still empowers me as a consumer to make decisions within the framework of the market. If I like what I'm getting, I pay. If I don't, I stop paying. And there's no dead box under my television, waiting to be ground into splinters and smelted for heavy metals. There's just bored me looking wistfully at a login form, secure that all that entertainment is ready to be beamed to me again to any browser on any screen in the world.

* Loved it.

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at a 1929 round up of nutty patents including these somewhat impractical parachute pants, a bicycle built to be ridden by eleven blind men, an air purifier that looks like it would cause deafness, an aerial camera that can take pictures covering over 200 miles, a bizarre ad that has a family of four literally riding the RCA research building across the sky and the origin of windshield wiper fluid sprayers. We also learned all about the birth of Technicolor in a 1930 Modern Mechanix article which makes color film processing look like quite a pain in the ass.

Just a reminder, guys: we'll be hosting our first IRC event in #boingboing in 30 minutes, at 1pm EST. The game is a variant of the popular Mafia/Werewolf social game called Pre-Cogs versus Replicants.

If you want to come and observe, jump on an IRC Freenode server and join #boingboing, or just click this link to use a Java IRC client. If you want to play, check out the description and rules in our official announcement thread, then join the channel, register your nick (/msg NickServ register [choose password]) and then message John Brownlee that you want to play (/msg Brownlee I want to play!)

Hope to see you there!

Although at first blush the limited-edition Di Grisogono Meccanica DG watch looks just like a garish, glow-in-the-dark LED favored by some spaced-out raver, the whizzygig's horological guts reveal it to be something far more elegant: a mechanical watch that looks and acts like a digital one, thanks to the stupendous complexity of the 651 interlocking gears tightly compacted within.

Just 177 of these amazing timepieces are going to be made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Geneva-based horloger. Billed as the most complicated digital-analog timepiece in the world, the digital display is actually mechanical, with rolling tubes forming the digital segments.

Needless to say, a limited edition of this sort of craftsmanship is going to cost more than your average airport Swatch. I love it, though. Oxidized, made of copper and attached to a band made out of elephant leather, it would make the perfect steampunk watch: a time piece that simulates a device of the 21st century with the technology of the 19th. Someone needs to show Jake von Slatt how to make an LCD monitor like this.

First Watch with All-Mechanical "Digital" Display (Verdict: Absolutely Amazing) [Gizmodo]

• UGLY BOX — Dell's XP2 720 "gaming-optimized" tower of glower gets $200 chopped thanks to a coupon code. [Dealhacks]

• GAMING MOUSE — Logitech's M.O.R. G3 mouse is here at a lovely low $15 after rebates; you'll have to pony up $40 up front. [Amazon]

• FREE STUFF — VistaPrint will slap your upload on branded white T-Shirts for $2.50, or with plain custom text free of charge. Also: stationary galore. [Dealnews]

A few months ago, a Sony executive, asked what he thought of the success of the Asus Eee bargain sub-notebook, leaned back in his chair, sucked on his cigar and smugly denounced the pursuit of cute, tiny, low-cost laptops as "a race to the bottom." Then, turning dangerous, he leapt like a panther across the desk, tackled his inquisitor and plunged the smoldering ember of his cigar through the vitreous of his interviewer's eye.

The message was clear: go to hell, bargain seekers. Sony will not be pandering to the nascent low-cost UMPC market. The very term is an oxymoron, Sony snorts. UMPCs should be sleek, slim and paralyzed with crapware. They should be marketed to individuals with smooth, cylindrical drainage shunts installed in their brainpans to match every digit of their post-six-figure income. They should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.

Luckily, not every laptop maker is following suit. In fact, most aren't. They see money in paperback-sized laptops that are cheap enough to sell to anyone. Hot on the heels of HP's Mini-Note 2133 comes Dell, announcing their intent to release their own low cost, ultraportable notebook to the masses as early as June, lining up nicely with the release of Intel's Atom processor. The price should fall in line with the rest of the Eee-clones.

Time to stay ahead of the pack, Asus. Where's the Fff?

Compal Electronics Official: Dell To Launch Low-Cost Laptops [CNN Money]

Tokyo — for all its wonder and surreality — is a throbbing biomass of tightly compacted flesh. Minds strain at the perpetual crush of human and soul and personality. Perhaps this goes far in explaining Japan's intricately formalized rules of social decorum: perhaps the culture has reacted explosively to the lack of personal space by building up psychological breathing room in every transaction, constructing as many obstacles as possible between two human beings actually interacting.

I suspect this same theory goes a long way towards explaining Japan's fascination with robots. Yes, robots are unequivocally awesome, but when you live in a city with a ten-to-one ratio of meat to oxygen, a man made of metal is a particularly wonderful thing. No wonder the birth rate is declining: why birth a mewling, meconium-spurting sprog when you can just have protected sex and buy yourself a cute robot puppy that flips as it yips?

But the drawback is declining birth rates and a collapsing social infrastructure. 40% of Japan's population will be over 65 in less than fifty years. And according to the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation—a robotics think tank—it is possible that up to 3.5 million jobs in Japan will be filled by robots by 2025.

In fifty years, Japan will be a curious island of anime-obsessed geriatrics, cared for by an armada of cybertronic care givers. And fifty years after that? Robo-Japan officially applies for membership in the United Nations, an event which—as all men know—eventually predicates the creation of the Matrix.

Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million in Japan [Reuters]

Tomorrow, John Brownlee will be hosting "Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants," a version of the popular "Mafia" (a.k.a. "Werewolf") social game in the #boingboing IRC channel. Remember, he who lies best lies last.

Game: Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants (a variation of the Mafia party game.)

Time: April 10th at 1pm EST

Place: #boingboing on FreeNode IRC

Setting: The sinuous, slithering bowels of Grope-Kant University: a festering intestinal track four years long in which the turgid philosophical constructs of pimpled undergrads are broken down into a semantic slurry suitable for the suckling of tenured flatworms. Within this excretionary system exists a small nodule of scientific inquiry: Grope-Kant U's Department of Bio-Chemical Engineering, comprised of twenty two researchers tinkering with the building blocks of life.

For most of these free-thinkers, the goals are modest, albeit perverse: mongrel dogs that can be milked by obnoxious assistants into ejaculating ambergris. Supple, disembodied female breasts, suitable for playing bocce on the Quadrangle. Xenuvian tomatoes that scream when they are sliced. And, of course, a wide variety of mutagenic nostrums that, slathered appropriately, allow for a variety of surprising genital enhancements especially aimed at Caligulan jousters and pole-vaulters.

But lurking amongst this constabulary of perverted old men, three academics toil on works of quiet yet resplendent genius.

Two — eager to improve their French kissing with first-person clinical analysis — have secretly grown genetic replicants of themselves, pleasure models to be sure.

The third, quite by accident, has pricked himself with a roux of chemicals with the interesting side effect of psychic pre-cognition.

And although, at first, this accidental pre-cog's aims for his new mental powers are limited entirely to trying to figure out if girls really like him, the surprise discovery of two brainless corpses crammed into a mail chute — their faces ripped off; their formulae for genetic cloning inserted into clammy, puckered orifices — will quickly transform this nebbish professor into a warrior of destiny.

Rules and how to get on IRC after the jump.

From an email I, a lucky Xbox 360 HD DVD drive owner, received:

As someone who purchased an HD DVD player from us before February 23, 2008,* you might like to hear about a special offer available from Amazon.com.

New technologies don't always work out as planned. We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything and would like to support customers who purchased these players by offering a credit good for $50 off any products sold by Amazon.com.** Just use promotional code [redacted] when checking out. The code is valid through April 9, 2009, so you have plenty of time to use your credit. Purchases from third-party merchants on our site are not eligible

I'll take it. I'd already made my peace with my stupid purchase, so this is just free money.

Previously • Wal-Mart Refunding HD DVD Player Purchased Made After Nov. 1 [BBG]

Who would spend $7 to buy an egg-cracking gadget (other than people with a disability that prevented them from cracking eggs by hand)?

However, when combined with the much-more-awesome but equally-useless Ronco Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler ($19.95), making breakfast could become as fun as a game of Mousetrap. Link

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at an article from a 1966 issue of Look magazine about the new craze among college kids for computer dating and the students at Yale and MIT making tons of money from it. Also a guaranteed way for a diner to alienate customers who are at all sensitive about their weight, a giant telephone dial designed to help unravel the "mysteries" of dialing, a see-saw bed that is supposed to help increase blood circulation, an automatic glove fitting device and a first hand account of a novice blimp driver titled "Anyone can fly a blimp".

Amazon is still having a hard time meeting the at-the-moment-nebulous demand for the Kindle. A pal of mine ordered his on March 24th, but as of today it still hasn't shipped. Digitimes reported in January that PVI, the company that makes the Kindle's ePaper display, is having trouble meeting demand. I suspect that is still the snag.

Keep in mind this doesn't necessarily mean the Kindle is doing huge numbers overall. I requested sales about the device from Amazon several weeks ago and was met with silence (from a contact that had otherwise been happy to talk), so at this point it's possible that the overall unit sales could be low. (Or high! But usually when they're high you get some sort of response.) And they'll remain low if Amazon can't start getting Kindles into the hands of the unknown number of customers who want one.

Update: That same pal just got this email: "We now have estimated delivery dates for the Kindle order you placed on 3/24/08, #[redacted]. We are now estimating that your Kindle will arrive between 4/20/2008 and 4/27/2008."

Dok's Emporium sells these fully functional 1/12th-scale model televisions for use in doll houses. They take a standard composite input to display reruns of Jem and the Holograms (or whatever you like provided it is truly outrageous) on the 2-inch screen.

You can buy one yourself for £99, provided you live in England.

Product Page [DollhouseTVs.co.uk via Newslite.tv]

This demo "Segway RMP" packbot—yes, that Segway—uses Mecanum wheels to move in any direction. Mecanum wheels were concived by Bengt Ilon in 1973, but this is the first time I've seen them in action.

Thank goodness PT was around to snap a video. He notes, "Very creepy. You know it's a good robot when it's creepy. All the good ones are creepy." I don't think the lovebot I'm building in the likeness of PT in my bedroom is creepy.*

Segway's new RMP! [Blog.Makezine.com]

* :(

Cole Ranze hand-painted these Chuck Taylors with a selection of the most popular Nintendo characters. He's auctioning them off on eBay. They're up to $250 so far, which is a lot of scratch for shoes too eminently radical to ever actually wear.

Hand Painted Nintendo Kicks [Deviant Art via Kotaku]

Lower consumer spending, pressure from all-in-one phones from Nokia and company, and plain ol' competition are cutting heavily into the profits of GPS navigation devices from TomTom and Garmin, reports BusinessWeek:

Consumers bought more than 22 million PNDs in 2007 and are expected to buy more than 32 million this year, says Richard Robinson, an analyst at market research firm iSuppli. But the average selling price on a PND in 2007 was $249, less than half the 2004 average of $505. Margins are slipping, too. "These companies got used to making profit margins of 45% to 60% during the 2004 to 2005 time frame," Robinson says. "Now they're having to contend with margins that are closer to 18% to 20%. That's not ringing well with the financial guys. The problem is you can only make so much on each unit you sell."

This is why Garvin is making its own phone. Eventually the only gadgets will be communication lumps produced by a variety of vendors, capable of navigation, MP3, video, photos, internet, and—oh yeah—voice. But that "eventually" will still take another decade or so to sort out, especially if some company comes up with some new feature that takes more than just a chip and a little software to add.

TomTom and Garmin Lose Their Way [BusinessWeek.com]

The "Speedy Pedalofit"—a name which rolls off the tongue in a satisfying way that makes me think of an exercise routine for pedophiles only slightly*—is clip-on wheel and handlebar that coverts most wheelchairs into pedal-powered chopper trikes. And it's not just for paraplegics who want to be sent careening down mountain trails, limp legs churning with sinew-snapping speed. It's also good for those who have some use of their legs and need help building up the muscles again.

It gives the disabled a chance to exercise and travel short distances. When they reach their destination, they've already got their chair. What's not to like?

Speedy is a UK company, so I'm unsure if any of their products are available outside of their home country. And they make more than just the clip-on Pedalofit, producing a full range of interesting hand-powered bikes and wheelchair additions as well.

Product Page [SpeedyBikes.co.uk via Gearfuse via Oh Gizmo]

* But really, what doesn't?

These bejeweled gas masks were one-offs created by artist Diddo Velema for the "Luxury Show 2008" in Bucharest, Romania. I'm not normally one to be swayed by the gold-and-crystal crowd, but I could totally wear one of these to the club, slipping it on just before hijacking the sound system with some Kompressor and releasing my own VX mood fog.