Household

Barring price and, uh, style, seems like if you’re after ambient lighting then you’re not going to do much better

than by embedding electroluminescent materials into your wallpaper. They don’t mention a manual override, but

apparently the Solar Powered Wallpaper system features a light sensor which bumps the brightness automatically, and

draws power from both solar cells or the grid. Probably less than

ideal for the bathroom.

[Via Near Near Future]

You’ve got to hand it to the Carnegie Mellon team behind the Hug (and its big brother, the SenseChair), a device

unequivocably fixated on using vibrations, heat, light, and sound to ease the lonely pangs of elderly life. We’ve never

heard of a device that vibrates and lights up being used to “mimic human interaction”, but apparently when the Hug is,

um, used while on the phone, talking to the fam becomes a much more emotionally gratifying experience. And thus the

rift between the elderly and the youthful becomes increasingly more tragic and disturbing. “Grandma no, old people

smell gross! Why don’t you go hug a robot instead?”

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about our smoke alarm —

except when we actually try to cook something and the thing inevitably starts wailing. And, of course, around this time

of year, we catch a glimpse of the reminders in the newspaper to change the alarm’s battery when we reset our clocks

(you did change your battery last Sunday, didn’t you?). But the team at OG Invent (in Stockholm, of course)

has apparently spent a lot of time thinking about smoke alarms, and they’ve come up with a version designed to be both

aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. The SnapAlarm is designed to snap onto a lamp cord, and pops open for battery

changes. This saves you from having to drill holes in your ceiling and then deal with a screwdriver when you replace

the battery. And, yes, if you’re into it, you can still mount this to your ceiling, but that sort of defeats the whole

point.

[Via Gizmag]

No matter how accurately we can tell the time, it

doesn’t solve the underlying problem that whatever it is we’re doing right now always ends up taking longer

than we planned. Friends are miffed, jobs are lost, and other disastrous outcomes are the end result of this

phenomenon. Enter The Egg, a project by students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which takes a unique

approach to time management. Your egg represents the time left until an impending appointment by glowing with less and

less luminosity as the hour draws near. When you (inevitably) need to give yourself a bit of extra time, you turn our

egg upside down and shake it to add more light and, consequently, more time. Your egg then notifies the eggs of your

friends/contacts that you will be later than expected. Of course, this would be predicated on some ovarian future in

which we all have Eggs on our desktops, but then again, many of us have

even stranger things there already.

If elementary school taught us one thing, it’s that the toothbrush is our most valued weapon in the harried battle

of good and evil that goes on in our mouths daily. Oh, and flossing. And mouthwash. And chewing gum. So it’s no wonder

scientists were motivated to discover that blue light coming off a halogen lamp is highly effective at killing

gingivalis and prevotella intermedia in lingua, and without harming the “good bacteria” up in there. The money quote,

however, is slightly more compelling: “We think it will be particularly beneficial to those who don’t like using a

toothbrush.” Yeah, but how else would we get that minty fresh feeling of cleanliness in the mornings? And what would

happen to Sonicare and Tom up in Maine?

This clock has the potential to solve our perennial problem of having 8 different clocks in the house, none of which

match each other and none of which actually tell the correct time. With the, uh, extremely no-frills fashion $195

OnTime Ethernet powered digital clock, we could at least have one accurate timepiece at our disposal. It’s

both powered (using the same 802.3af Power over Ethernet standard that VoIP phones use) and updated over the network

via an SNTP central time server, so it requires no AC wall wart and you never have to set it. Yeah, whatever — we’ll

still be showing up late. So does this mark the end of the era in which everything conceivable has been

USB-powered, and we’re now entering the

golden age of network-powered fragrance diffusers and

air humidifiers?

[Via TRFJ]

We’re already hard at work trying to figure out way to hack this thing to display the time in binary format instead

of regular numerals, but UrbanPeel is selling a Pin Clock that uses 3000 raised and lowered pins to display the

time.

This hack comes complete with the most humble marketing pitch ever, admonishing you not to build your own because

it’s a waste of time and of good clothespins that would be better purposed towards holding up your pants. But we can’t

resist sharing this next installment in the line of Chinese

kitchenware electronics. Next up: the Bamboo Xbox. Any takers?

[Thanks, Ericke]

Face it, the Japanese understand electronics are just better when they’re shaped like animals. Remember the

FrienZoo? And that was just the start—it’s just a fact of

life, like gravity or that Coney Island smells weird. And while we weren’t aware that kids actually needed their own

refrigerators, if yours apparently does perhaps it’s best to spring for an I-Box (this time, we presume, the I stands

for ice). It’s even got an integrated virtual pet on the facade, which we could only hope serves as a voice of

encouragement for your kid to eat their greens since we’d rather not imagine what kinds of awful junk a kid would stock

a fridge with.

[Via Popgadget]

Not so much a technotoilet as a whole-room

system, Toto and Daiwa House’s Intelligence Toilet—no, not a derogatory term for the CIA—combines a loo with a built-in

urine analyser, a blood-pressure cuff housed in the counter next to the throne, a set of scales built into the floor in

front of the sink, and a body-fat meter above it that you grip after washing. The data gets “provisionally saved in the

Intelligence Toilet” before being transferred via a home network to your PC, where it’s stored and graphed using a

piece of software that’ll also use the data to give you dietary advice and so forth. All this will apparently set you

back Y380,000-Y560,000 ($3,550-$5,230) on top of the price of a usual toilet (”usual” in Japan meaning “costs $3,000,

has warm water, massage and dryer attachments, and maybe even an

SD card slot”).