Five Custom Gadgets You Can't Buy

photojournaliste noted a little story running over on Forbes which kinda looks like their editors read Slashdot. Their Five Gadgets You Can't Buy include a few things you might have seen here, as well as some new custom hardware hacks. If you didn't get it for christmas, maybe one of these will inspire you to build it yourself.

Comments

Re:Only one that was even remotely intersesting

[bhtooefr]

Directions to build the thing: http://mini-itx.com/projects/falcon-itx/

Re:I thought...

[Xeo 024]

I thought there was already an iPod external battery pack for sale by someone. A google search shows one for sale by Bilk'n, er, Belkin.

You're right, people have been selling external battery packs for awhile now. But this article seems to be talking about a home-made one called the "Altoids iPod Battery". Why anyone would want to buy this battery pack is beyond me, it looks absolutely horrendous and you can buy a much better looking and capable one from various different vendors.

If you click on "Click Here for Custom Gadgets You Can't Buy" image, it'll open up a window with a picture of this "Altoids iPod Battery".

Here is the caption:

Altoids iPod Battery

This external power source for iPod music players uses three nine-volt batteries to provide up to ten hours of play time.

Ten hours?
This battery claims to provide 40 hours (3G only).
While this one allegedly can provide 14 hours.

All in all it's a really crappy article.

Apple: Where is your Tablet?

[WillAdams]

Instead of a new Mac, I picked up a copy of Phatware's PenOffice, to make my Fujitsu Stylistic even more useful (PenOffice works w/ a wider variety of apps than Windows Pen Services, doesn't lock up like CIC PenX does on my machine after ~15 minutes use, and has a nifty annotation feature for Word .docs) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.

Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?

Even if it did nothing but display a .pdf version (why aren't .pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word?)

Being able to run Mac applications in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is just icing on the cake.

And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management, note-taking and reading some ebooks.

William
(whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)