Thanks to the SuperSync for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a number of registered copies of their software to the winners. SuperSync is an application designed to compare and synchronize music libraries, ensuring that users will always have complete access to all of their own music. With SuperSync, music libraries can be accessed via the Internet anywhere, anytime, making it easier for users to manage multiple music libraries and stay organized.

This contest will run for one week (October 17 – 23, 2009) . 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 November 6, 2009

The item to guess was the Orange Power Pump

The winner is Isaac W.  and Blair T, both of them won a 5 license pack of SuperSync.  (There were 39 entries)

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Below is a screen shot of the the prize.

This is a great TED Talk with Woody Norris. He is a mainly self taught inventing genius! Near the end of the video he talks about some of the cool military uses for his new directional sound device that are very interesting (and funny). He also discusses some of his ideas that have sold for millions of dollars. His interests vary more than most people, you may remember the AirScooter II Ultralight Helicopter that we featured before, yes that is one of his ideas also!

"Woody’s electronics knowledge is mainly self-taught, consisting of repairing broken radios he begged from the local repair shop on the way home from school. "I had a chicken coop full of 20 or 30 or 50 radios… I fixed most of them." He had a mere six months of basic electronics training in the Air Force, where he worked with radar and electronics used to trigger A and H bombs."

Folding bikes have their place. I much prefer to use a normal full sized bike but if I needed to take a bike to work that would fit under my desk then all of a sudden you don’t have many options. When I was young I had a folding bike, other then the small wheels (smaller then the ones on the bike in the picture) it rode quite well and was neat to see it when it collapsed into such a small package. See the interesting video below that tells the story about how this interesting the Brompton folding bike company started.

How to keep a room comfortable before you enter without running a cooling or heating system all the time? That is the problem that was faced here. The solution was to use IR to turn the system on automatically by making a Hacked Air Conditioner Infrared Remote Control.

Via: Elektronika

Thanks Mario.

"Here in China, there is no central air, so my office is heated/cooled by a room air conditioner. Because of this, it’s cold when I arrive at work in the winter, and hot in the summer. So an idea was born to create a small, battery powered, IR emitter that would issue the same "ON" command the AC’s remote control does, but does it an hour or so before I get to work in the morning. Timing will be handled by using the watchdog interrupt. The watchdog will fire every 8 seconds (450 ticks per hour). If we set up a 24 hour counter, then the counter should roll over every 10,800 ticks. If we start our IR emitter at 5:00pm we should initialize the timer counter to 7,650. We want the IR emitter to send the "ON" command to the AC unit at 7:30am (3,375 ticks), then again every 10 minutes (75 ticks) until 8:30am (3,825 ticks)."

Have a look at this cool PSP GO Mod. There isn’t much details since the creator doesn’t speak English.

Thanks Wouter!

Doyle sent in about an interesting product that he makes. It is a Terracotta Pot Candle Heater. He sells the units but also provides all the details for us DIY people to make our own. It consists of nuts and bolts which provide the metal mass along with 3 terracotta pots and a metal base. I haven’t made or used one of these but it seems like it would be the perfect device to put in an office or a den just to keep the chill out of the air.

By looking at his Web site I can see that Doyle is a serial inventor! Have a look at the recycled tin can solar furnace and his Heat Stick to see a few of his other ideas.

We have all seen these power meters on the outside of homes but have you ever seen inside? Popular Science gives us a sneak peek inside one of these Electric Power Usage Meters. Oddly there is no crazy voodoo electronics or mechanical parts in there. Now the question is, based on knowing exactly how it’s constructed how can it be defeated? Sure if you rip it out and plug it in upside down to let it run backwards but is there a working covert method of making it run slower or stop? There is this Plug and Save device that has lots of crazy claims, I haven’t seen anywhere that explains what kind of magic is in the box though. I don’t see how it could work, anyone care to enlighten us on how it could or couldn’t work? Not sure if this article is a plant but it looks convincing.