This lovely sleeve, snugly accommodating a netbook, was made by mendicon ’s girlfriend for his Acer Apire One. [via Gizmodo ]

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NES Controller Netbook Sleeve

If the desire to spend ten grand on an aluminum soma cube thumbdrive ever takes you, this one, by Toshi Satoji Design of Milan, comes highly recommended. [ Mnemosyne via Akihabara News ]

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Mnemosyne

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, and Texas Instruments have all agreed to accept microUSB as the standard phone charger format starting in 2010. Wonderful, welcome development, and I hope it means we’ll get this by proxy here in North America. Apple playing along has interesting ramifications to not just the iPhone, but to the entire iPod family: Will the long-standing Dock Connector, used by countless third-party accessories, finally be on the way out?

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Europe, meet your new phone charger standard

Kevin Kelly pointed me to the idea of ditching a sleeping bag for a tech blanket. He learned the tip from Ray Jardine, who extols the virtues of lightweight backpacking and camping in a series of books, including the recent Trail Life . The basic premise is that the flattened bottom of a sleeping bag is wasted material, since you’re compressing the insulation. A blanket can provide more warmth because it contours to your body rather than maintaining a bag or mummy shape. Plus, it’s much easier to overheat if you’re crashed out in a bag, as opposed to a blanket you can drape and quickly adjust throughout the night. Ray sells his own quilt kits , which I’d love to try. For the recent BBG camp trip, I used Therm-A-Rest’s $50 Tech Blanket (pictured). It is light to carry (1 lbs, 5 oz.), warm (quilted nylon exterior, polyester fill), and packs quick, easy and small (mine packed up smaller than the no-frills sleeping bag I have). What’s particularly smart about Therm-A-Rest’s set up is that their Fitted Sheet ($21) and blanket have snaps positioned periodically lengthwise, allowing you to quickly attach and remove the blanket. Not a pain to set up, take down. Better yet, it was far more comfortable than any sleeping back I’ve ever used. We were camping in mid-50sF, and I was never cold and never too warm. What’s more, unlike a sleeping back you might unzip and find completely open by the morning, the Tech Blanket provided enough room on either side for me to turn over without disrupting the whole tent. If you were camping in warmer weather, I’d imagine un-snapping one button on either side in the middle of the night wouldn’t be too difficult either. Note: I used the blanket and sheet with Therm-A-Rest’s $100 LuxuryCamp self-Inflating mattress and $28 Compressible Pillow . You don’t have to go all-out and get either of these. My favorite makeshift pillow is a small fleece case a friend made and gave to me. You just fill it with your clothes, towel, etc. The only thing you want to be sure of, is that you use a pad that’s size/shape is comparable to the fitted sheet. Otherwise, you won’t feel as snug. The sheets come in medium, regular and large which are 20×66 in., 20×72 in. and 25×77 in., respectively. If you already have a sleep pad that size, you should go for it. Again, we’re talking $21 for the sheet and $50 for a blanket that could also serve double duty at home. I’m in.

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Review: Therm-A-Rest Sleeping System

Product Page [Metaphys.jp]]

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Soh Folding Calculator

Cast in black matte rubber and featuring alien power sockets, ” HomePlug ” could easily be mistaken for a recharging base station for up to six vibrating buttplugs. It is in fact a British power strip with powerline ethernet. [Solwise via Red Ferret Journal ]

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HomePlug

My pug Gus is a lazy sack. No disrespect, but it’s true. Which is why I’m not at all opposed to putting him to work and/or keeping more rigorous tabs on his extreme indolence so that I can hold it over his head. Enter the SNIF system, an accelerometer built into an RFID tag that logs and transmits motion data to an Ethernet base station that plugs into your router. In addition to streaming real-time, online status updates (sleeping, sitting, walking, etc.), the SNIF web site creates a browse-able history of your pets activity or, in Gus’ case, inactivity. Check out my pug’s data, and observations after the jump… This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs . Quantifying your life , a variety of health data points, experiences, food consumed, etc. makes sense. But doing it on behalf of your dog ? Well, I just don’t know. The SNIF Tag system is simple to set up, easy to use, and $150, which is about as expensive as a no-frills, wristwatch heart rate monitor you could use to track your own activity level. However, what’s important to realize, is the SNIF doesn’t actually provide any hard and fast health data. It doesn’t measure calories burned or heart rate or even GSR . So what does it track? “Average Power Correlate” (APC), which the company claims is a “correlation based on empirical measurement.” In other words, a relative measure of the amount of energy that accumulates in the tag’s accelerometer. Thus, the charted numbers themselves are rather meaningless, which was a bummer in that I was unable to make any comparison(s) to my own level of fitness, distance traveled, etc. Still, the visual cues are interesting and do provide a clear picture. Days can be broken down by the hour: Then into 5-minute chunks: Potentially helpful if you have a sick animal (sad!) and want to determine whether he/she consistently loses energy after meals &mdash or anytime you’re not home. You can also call up historical data and “Compare” your dog to other animals registered for SNIF, including by breed, zip code, and general classification (Gus is a “Toy”): Of course, this data is potentially meaningless for a variety of reasons, least of which is the fact the data are only as good as the people submitting it. If I forget to put the tag on until after Gus’ morning walk, or neglect to charge the battery every night, then I’m submitting only a portion of his actual activity, which skews the results others might be comparing their animals to. It’s also worth considering the Hawthorne Effect , which suggests people don’t behave naturally in situations where they know they’re being monitored. Hence, some SNIF users might be taking their dogs on longer or more frequent walks than normal. And that, right there, seems to be about the only real reason I could see someone buying this device. It’s a reminder to take care of your dog, to dedicate extra time and energy towards his/her health. The real-time monitoring &mdash perhaps by virtue of the fact Gus isn’t a sporty little pugger &mdash was fun at first, but got old real quick: From a technical perspective, too, the system could be improved. I really wish the base station was wireless. Having to plug directly into my router was a pain in the ass &mdash and if I wanted to upload data via USB (instead of wirelessly via the tag, which only works up to 50 ft.*), I would’ve had to lug my laptop across the room to the router. It’s worth noting this was a non-issue for me, because the SNIF USB software isn’t yet Mac-compatible (another complaint). Lastly, SNIF offers all the familiar social networking tools and features: friend invites/accepts, messaging, wall posts, etc. To be honest, I found these all useless. There simply isn’t a critical mass of users: Total number of dogs in SNIF network: 212 Registered pugs: 7 (including Gus) Dogs in my zip code: a 9-year-old female Coton De Tulear (huh-wha?) One suggestion that could be kinda fun for some dog owners: Add in a customizable status update a la Critter . SNIF could let you program in a range of phrases for specific APCs, and then broadcast those 140-character messages to your mobile: “Dad, I’m totally bored right now,” “Your socks are delicious!”, “Am I kidding about the socks? Guess you’ll have to come home to find out, dude!” Then again, do I need or want to receive regular, sarcastic Tweets from my dog? …probably not. *you can purchase extra base stations for $75 Previously: The Pet's Eye View Camera lets you experience your dog's foulness … Zoombak tracks dogs (or anything else) with aGPS - Boing Boing Gadgets Putin's satellite-tracked dog not a harbinger for anything - Boing … Garmin Astro DC 30 GPS collar for hunting dogs - Boing Boing Gadgets

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Review: A Few Days with a SNIF Tag

Logitech is among the best maker of mice (its poor Mac support notwithstanding) but designs tend toward gray, black and the occasional flash of plastichrome. These new V220s, $30 notebook size models with no extra buttons, make a more colorful presentation–so long as you like blues and reds.

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Logitech V220 kisses gunmental gray goodbye

Lighterside’s $7 chocolate-scented calculator presents a choking hazard and is not for children under 3 years.

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Choculator

“Very cool engineering! But the parts in the $70 Touchstone kit are very simple, and we’d be shocked if it cost more than $5 to manufacture.” [Ifixit Twitter status] iFixit: “Did it take you much time to create the Touchstone Charger? How soon did you knock it off?” Palm: “Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days - one day to do the work and another to finish it…” iFixit: “The labour of two days is that for which you ask seventy guineas?” Palm: “No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

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Palm’s $70 Touchstone Charger and its "$5" innards