LiveScribe Smartpen: Flytop for grown-ups

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The LiveScribe Smartpen lets you link audio to the notes you’re writing on the special dotted paper, and it also stores the notes you’re writing inside it electronically. You can then download the audio and holograph to your computer and index all the notes. If this thing is half as convenient as it claims, it’ll show up everywhere from grocery shopping lists to making classroom notes actually valuable to meaning I don’t have to tape record my interviews and then transcribe them painfully later, since my notes will again be in a usable format. It stores 100 hours of audio and you can print out the special paper it needs on most inkjets or laser printers (it doesn’t oblige you to continually buy expensive consumables to keep it useful). It also has an open SDK so geeks can expand it. The pen is projected to cost less than $200, meaning I will have one. [GT]

LiveScribe: Turn your paper on [via Gizmodo]

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Drunk salaryman cell phone strap

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Why settle for a Hello Kitty or Dr. Who cell phone charm when you can have middle management workers spiraling downwards into alcoholism? Either it’ll provide you with a salutory lesson and steer you back onto the dry and narrow, or, you’ll have a little plastic friend hanging from your mobile. Either way, it’s 400円. [GT]

Drunk salaryman cell phone strap(in Japanese) (viaTokyo Mango)

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Wii Crystal Chameleon case mod

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Already willing to risk your Wii’s life and safety in pursuit of blingification? Try the Wii Crystal Chameleon case mod, which makes your Wii a jellyfish-like box glowing red, blue, cyan, gray, orange, green or purple, as your whim dictates. Disassembly video and installation video thoughtfully provided. There’s also the small matter of the bill, which is $55, but since you bought a Wii instead of an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, you should have plenty of extra folding money lying around. [GT]

Wii case Crystal Chameleon [via Gizmodo]

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CueSight Laser-Sighted Pool Cues

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While the laser-sighted pool cue may look cool to geeks, taking this into any purist pool hall is a great way to get stomped. The cue has a small crosshairs projector in its tip, which places a big red X on the white cueball. The better your aim, the bigger the X. The creators, CueSight, have thoughtfully provided video of the laser-sighted pool cue in action so you can see exactly how it makes robots of us all. $150. [GT]

CueSight laser-sighted pool cue (via Coolest Gadgets)

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QiGO Internet Content Keys unlock extra internet

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QiGo Internet Content Keys are USB dongles which provide access to premium Internet content. Expect the modern equivalent to booth babes to be passing these things out at all the more stylish trade shows in future, as well as for them to appear in magazines (unless they’re not actually up to the job of making the internet cooler — because, trust me, the internet is already pretty damned cool). Actually they’d be good for distributed client presentations and super-secret world domination subsites. [GT]

Qigo (via Engadget)

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Ashera: $22,000 cat from Lifestyle Pets

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This may look like a regular 4 stone cat on a leash but it’s actually the Cat Of Tomorrow! The Ashera is a blend of the Asian Leopard cat, African Serval and an unnamed domestic breed (probably “alley”). It will grow to be 13-15 kilos. Lifestyle Pets also claims to be developing a tiny dog which I guess can be fed to the cat. My cat Lacerda weighs over 10 kilos, and what did he cost? Nothing, he just showed up in the kitchen one day. Feel free to drop by any I’ll see if I can turn up any of his brothers. But if you want your cat high tech, it’ll be $22,000 – or $28,000 if you want to raise it from a kitten. Plus $1500 shipping. [GT]

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A survey of strange inventions

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TechEBlog has been flipping through back issues of Popular Mechanics and has come up with a list ofstrange inventions. I especially like the wristwatch radio, though it makes me wonder how long it’ll be before TokyoFlash produces one that is gorgeous looking but produces incomprehensible sounds. [GT]

Strange Inventions You Never Knew About

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Regal Guest Response System: Tattle-tale device for movie goers

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The Regal chain of cinemas has placed the Regal
Guest Response System in 114 of its theaters across the United States. It’s a paging device, given to a random member of the Regal Crown Club loyalty program, as they enter the theater (one device per showing). The device has four buttons: “Picture”, “Sound”, “Piracy”, and “Other Disturbance” which can be pressed so that a manager can be alerted in the event of an emergency. “Other Disturbance” is somewhat vague, though. I want a button to press that says “Movie sucks, I want my eight quid back”. [GT]

Regal Guest Response System (via SciFi Tech)

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Kansei: robot with facial expressions

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Kansei, from Meji University in Japan, is a robot face capable of 36 expressions that vary according to emotional interpretations of words it hears. When Kansei hears a word, it uses software to access a database of 500,000 keywords, create word associations and determine an emotion — ranging from happiness to sadness, anger and fear — which is expressed by a system of 19 actuators under its silicone skin. Sometimes the reaction is extremely expressive, as here with the word “bomb”, sometimes very subtle. (The question arises, would it have the same expression if it was given the sentence “The party was the bomb”?) Video after the jump shows its interesting reaction to the word “president”.

(via Pink Tentacle)

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