lamp

Sanyo's Eneloop Lamp: The flashlight that heals?

Sanyo is turning to LED light technology, a hot new area for experimentation, to squeeze three uses out of a single lamp. The company's new Eneloop Lamp is a desk light that can also work as an emergency flashlight and even send some healing energy your way--or so the company says.

Operating on rechargable AA "eneloop" batteries, Sanyo's new Eneloop Lamp based on high-luminance LED technology can be situated anywhere in the room since no cords constrain the placement.

It also uses a contactless charging system and has no metallic contact on the product body interrupting … Read more

IKEA lamp puts solar cells on your desk

Here's one more gadget that will help you reduce your electricity bill and do your bit for the environment at the same time. The Sunnan desk lamp from IKEA has solar cells that you leave in direct sunlight over the course of the day. A 9- to 12-hour recharging period will yield about four hours of light from its LED bulbs for use at night.

Like many other products from IKEA, the Sunnan desk lamp has an attractive design and, more importantly, isn't expensive. This one is listed at $20.

(Source: Crave Asia via bookofjoe)

Illuminate your blinds

Feeling a little blasé about how ordinary your blinds look from day to night? OK. Fine, so you don't care. How about if they did something more than just open and close?

Designed by Yoon-Hui Kim and Eun-Kyung Kim, the Solar Vertical Lamp takes an average vertical blind and embeds it with special mini photovoltaics and LED pixels. Close the blinds during the day and the miniature solar pads on the back of the blinds start to soak up the sun's energy. Once the sun goes down, artfully placed lighting pixels illuminate in certain parts of the … Read more

Spark Lamp a bright idea for energy watchers

Here's a lamp with a conscience. The Spark Lamp by designer Beverly Ng is a decorative LED lamp that can recharge itself by lying on its head. Which supposes that the solar panels are below and rather oddly placed (I would have placed the panels on the frame and stand for maximum exposure, but since I'm not Beverly, that's moot).

Here's the twist. The lamp is also Wi-Fi-capable and can tap the wireless to access your home's power usage information. When you hit the "on" switch, the lamp will flicker in different colors … Read more

LED swing is straight from a fairy tale

Here at Crave, it makes us very happy when designers write in to tell us about their creative goings-on.

The latest bit of inventor inspiration to hit the Crave in-box: the Swing Lamp by Boaz Cohen and Sayaka Yamamoto, who together make up the Netherlands-based industrial design duo BCXSY. Their 2-foot-wide LED-lit swing has an ethereal, whimsical feel as it whooshes through the dark like something out of Cirque du Soleil. It's powered by a rechargeable lithium battery.

Cohen and Yamamoto conceived of the illuminated polyethylene swing as part of a collection of products inspired by nostalgic childhood motifs. … Read more

Gadgettes 85: The things that glow episode

Glowing things can be somewhat morbid. They can be somewhat toolie. But sometimes, if you're lucky, they can be totally and completely PRETTTTTY. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 85

The Hanged Man Lamp: Ever so slightly morbid? http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/04/the_hanged_man.html

Mood Clock + USB Hub = Twice as much fun http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/04/usb_moody_clock.html

Glowing flower pot for the trippy garden owner http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/04/glowing_flower.html

Enjoy nighttime bocce ball with LED Bocce http://dvice.com/archives/2008/04/enjoy_nighttime.php

Light-up tweezers enable precision plucking … Read more

Lights-on with iHome's 'iLamp' iPod dock

A bog-roll holder with an iPod dock and speakers built-in was always going to be one of the most unusual instances of modern convergence. But although daft, it's sort of a useful idea, because most of us don't have speakers in our bathrooms. We do, however, have speakers in our bedrooms, which is why we're confused about whether a bedside lamp with an iPod dock and speakers built-in is anything but an epic fail.

iHome's new $180 iHL31 is the brother of the $130 iHL20, another iPod-ready lamp. Both are on sale only in the U.… Read more

Gadgettes 83: The Cool Concept Episode

Let us quit beating around the bush and accept that sometimes a cool concept is good enough. So expect these concepts to become reality sometime in the flying-car future. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 83

Good concept: Footlume runs lights up your steps http://dvice.com/archives/2008/03/footlume_run_li.php

Toilet-mounted washing machine for less water wastage http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/03/toiletmounted_w.html

ApriPoko: a robotic universal remote that has a question http://dvice.com/archives/2008/03/apripoko_a_robo.php

ASCII curtains let you get geeky with home decor http://www.popgadget.net/2008/03/get_geeky_with.php… Read more

BookLamp is a 'Pandora for books'

BookLamp is a project that the people at Amazon.com would be idiots to pass up buying.

It's a machine learning tool that's been designed to go through books and analyze not only how they're written, but also help group together novels that share similar structures and styles. The hope is to help people discover books they may like based on previously read novels, or what kind of reading experience they're going for. Internet radio recommendation service Pandora does something similar, employing a thumbs up and down system combined with listening history.

Because BookLamp's system uses machine learning, it skips the three major aspects of each book that humans usually tally: story line and plot, the characters, and writing style. Instead, it figures out bits of these three items by using written cues and quantifiers like word density, pacing, action, character dialogue (as noted by quotations), and level of description. The system also blends in one to five star ratings from Amazon.com.

So far, the database has 179 books, but is tracking more than 700,000 data points over 30,000 scenes from those titles. If it were to scale to track more works, in theory the results for related items would be even more precise. In its current state, users can go in and pick from one of the titles and get recommendations for similar titles, or view the graphs of what the system has recorded for its pacing, density, and other characteristics.

One of the coolest features, and the one I think is the killer app is the pacing analysis. It will go through and figure out when the pace of a book speeds up or slows down.

In the video demo (embedded after the break), creator Aaron Stanton picks Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park as an example, and demonstrates that BookLamp was smart enough to detect when the pace ramps up, including on what page that change occurs. I could see this being a great way to check and see if you're wasting your time on a read that's off to an incredibly slow start and potentially going nowhere. Instead of giving up, you could simply give the chart a quick look.

The project has been around since 2003 and continues to build up its database. There's a sign-up form to request a work to be added. You can also play around with the browsing and stats tool by registering. Be sure to hit the read more button to check out the video walk-through.

[via Digg]

The future belongs to Linux

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Microsoft hasn't been a player in the Net start-up world, in part because of the cost of its server product. Mr. Hilf tells [the WSJ] that Microsoft is trying to fix that with new licensing schemes that make Windows Server more affordable for start-ups....… Read more