I have seen lots of cool clocks but this 3D Spherites Floating Clock is one of the best yet. I didn’t think much of it until the end of the video when the guy runs his hand through the clock. Until that point I though this was simply an interesting 3D clock. The Spherites site doesn’t have much details about the actual technology used. I wonder if it is using this technique?

New gadgets are starting to come off the assembly line faster than they can be  acknowledged. This gadget however is a breakthrough. The people from WildCharge came up with a very interesting and useful device. They call it the Wild Charger. It is a pad that you can place various gadgets on to charge.This device works on the basic principal that if two conductive objects meet, current can pass through them. No wires, no untangling, no mess. In order to do this your gadget has to be outfitted with the WildCharger  hardware.The hardware basically consists of a backing you put on the device that has contact pads on it. After that you just set it on the conductive pad and let it charge. With adapters for many devices this is a good buy for any techie. Check it out here.

Paysonbadboy has put together a system to watch his home TV on his Treo 700 by using a capture card and the internet. I love the ability for some cheap hardware and a bit on inventive thinking to do something this cool!

"I am using a cheap $15 program I actually bought to capture my outdoor security camera that captures pictures when it senses motion. It saves pictures to the hard drive, uploads to an internet site, and can stream live video which I normally don’t use. The only thing it doesn’t do is allow you to remotely change the station. I never need to do this, so I don’t care. My initial desire to stream video is to watch what the kids are doing at home when I am away via a webcam in the living room, etc. I fiddled around and figured out how to set it up one day and all I have to do is set it to enable a streaming connection. I wrote a simple playlist file that my media player would understand. It directly connects to my home IP adress (from Cox) and the router forwards the port number to the correct computer. The program on the computer does the rest. It uses a capture card to stream the audio and video. I usually have it set for 10 or 15 frames per second for webcam use, but I turned it up to 30 for the football game."

Here is a cool popcorn popper that could be handy next time you are out camping. It is quite small so it may not be of much use if you have a big family but it is sure to be fun for the kids to pop some of their own popcorn in a can that they just used to quench their thirst with. 🙂

"Learn how you can build a simplest popcorn machine made from a soda can. You can use this in camp fire ,or on top of a candle or simple on your oven."

Via: DIY Happy

Congratulations to the last contest winner.
The prize this week is a new product that we just added to the store. These LED mounting adapter boards let you solder to a small circuit board instead of soldering directly to LED and resistor leads.
This contest will run for one week (March 29 – April 3, 2008) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added April 11 2008 

The item to guess was a tower clock mechanism

The winner is Josh..

Thanks to all who entered.

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Below is a picture of the prize.

You will get 20 LED Mounting Adapter Boards, 20 LEDs of your choice and 20 Resistors.

So you think that installing solar power in a house has to be expensive? This article shows that it is possible to do it yourself on a small budget.

"I put the batteries in their container, and connected the 2 together in series with a #1 Car Battery Cable from Canadian Tire that cost $14. The connectors where already on it that fit the batteries I got them, so it was convenient. So 2 X 6 volts 225 amp/hour Deep Cycle batteries connected in series = 12 Volts 225 Amp/Hours. Inverter and CableI connected the 300 Watt Xantrex Inverter (Also from Canadian Tire) to the batteries using #10 Cable. (This is plenty for the small loads it will be drawing)"

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The Doktor has hacked together a cool way of controlling something on your computer via USB. Looks to be a USB joystick that has been re-purposed to interface with new buttons. This looks to be the ‘new parallel port’. In the days when computers had parallel ports interfacing with the real world usually meant connecting inputs and outputs directly to the IO lines of the port. They were often buffered to prevent an accident from taking out your motherboard. Using an inexpensive USB joystick sounds like a great way to allow for contacts to be monitored in software. I can think of connecting them to door contacts, motion sensors, rain sensors…