Well, folks, it’s almost Groundhog Day again, and you know what that means.  No, the post office doesn’t get yet another screwball holiday off to screw up your Netflix queue–it means that once again, Punxsutawney Phil will emerge from his hole, look for his shadow, and give us yet another nigh-meaningless prediction of how much longer winter will go on.

And not surprisingly, animal rights groups are protesting, saying waking Phil up and taking pictures of him is cruel, and he should be replaced with a robot.

Now, leave aside the obvious fact that putting a gadget in place of an icon like Punxsutawney Phil is downright sacrilege, from an operational standpoint, how could it possibly work?  Is there some kind of light sensor that tells the Phil robot to hide from its shadow?  Does it test barometric pressure to provide an estimate on weather conditions?

Or does it just pop up and do something at random, and everyone else interprets, kind of like the ACTUAL groundhog does now?

Not sure how this works, and frankly, I agree with Bill Deeley of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club who said this about replacing Phil:

“I mean, come on, this is just crazy.”

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You guys remember a few months ago when we were talking about the ADE 651, supposed to be the world’s greatest bomb detector because it could literally sniff out explosives from up to half a mile out?  And how we said that we were pretty sure it was a gigantic fake because its engineering was comprised of an assortment of science terms strung together semirandomly?

Well, as it turns out, there’s an update.  Seems that the heart of the device is a series of cards, that were supposed to detect various kinds of explosives.  You want to find, say, TNT, you insert one kind of card, and so on.

The problem is that the cards in question seem to be worthless.  They’re nothing more than RFID tags that haven’t been activated.

The device’s inventor, meanwhile, adamantly insists that his device isn’t worthless, saying this:

“We have been dealing with doubters for 10 years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.”

Over $85 million worth of these things had been sold over the course of the last ten years, so it’s not surprising that the inventor was recently arrested.  He’s currently out on bail and facing trial in as many as several different countries, and I have to admit, watching him defend the device against all these people calling it an utter fraud should be really interesting.

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CES 2010 was chalk full of lame ass products and this weird fish eye screen was just one of them.  The display they had going was the V-Screen on top of a regular screen showing just how useless this product is.  I think they are trying to make some type of screen that mimics the feel and depth of all these new 3-D TV’s, but it falls way flat.

The screen picked up a ton of glare and might look better beyond the convention center but they made no effort to show us that.  I really thought it was some kind joke.  I’ll stick with regular vision TV any day.

Cold eyes got you down?  Supporting USB 1.1 and 2.0, this new Eye Warmer set-up from Thanko assures you that warm towel feeling you been missing all these years.  On sale now for just $22 you really owe it to yourself to not buy this for yourself or your friends and enemies.

Thanko really has some creative minds at work as the never cease to amaze with their vast array odd products.

File under crap gadgets?

[via CrunchGear]

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The ADE 651 is a device with an impressive marketing angle.  Over in Iraq, it’s being used to sniff out everything from bombs to guns to drugs and beyond, and detect them all from a distance of up to half a mile.  It’s a handheld device, easy to carry, the Iraqi military swears by it…there’s just one problem.

It doesn’t actually work.

ATSC, the company that makes the ADE 651, claims that they work via “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction”, which if I remember my collegiate physics courses correctly means “a bunch of sciencey terms strung together almost at random”.  Independent testing of many similar devices by the Department of Defense shows none of them work much better than pure chance.  And here’s the part that’ll kill you–they sold the Iraqi military fifteen hundred of these things at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 dollars EACH.

And there you go.  The Iraqis bought at least $24 million worth of bomb detectors that don’t detect.

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Way back in the depths of 2005, we talked about a kind of ultra portable scanner called the Docupen.  Well, the company that makes these has just released a brand new kind that they’re hoping will be so extreme you’ll likely ignore the mostly pointlessness of the device and buy several.  It’s the Docupen X-Series, and the X is almost certainly for X-treeeeeeme.

The Docupen is essentially a scanner the size of a standard ballpoint pen, and allows you to scan a document or a photo into JPEG format by rolling the scanner part along the surface of the thing you want scanned.  It has 64 gigs of internal memory, microSD card compatibility, and can scan to 600 dpi, which is no mean feat for a pen-sized scanner.

If you do a lot of photo manipulation or deal with a lot of actual paper documents–like, say, business cards at trade shows–then you might feel pretty good about the Docupen X-Series.  But you likely won’t feel good about its price, a whopping $369.

Chances are you’ll almost never need to use this, and chances are even greater that you’ll lose it in short order anyway, so it’s probably not what you’d call a good investment.

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I’d love to say I could say ‘I told you so’ but since I never once wrote about the inevitable demise of Nokia’s N-Gage gaming platform on this blog I really can’t.  But alas, the gaming unit has met its end.  The news actually comes as no surprise.  First it was all about the N-Gage phone, which at best was like talking into a stack of stale hard tacos.  That hardware obviously failed.  Then Nokia had an epiphany and decided to make N-Gage less about hardware and more about an app store for a select set of Nokia handsets – they had to have the computing power.  Course, then the iPhone came along and pretty much upstaged anything Nokia had done from a gaming stand point for mobile handsets.

But like all things Nokia, the N-Gage store will stay open until September 2010, with service running through the end of next year.  Then Nokia will just offer all its gaming content through their Ovi store,  So to reiterate, Nokia ain’t getting out of the gaming biz, they’re just simply rebranding it.

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With winter fast approaching and the cold weather coming to match, you may well start to wonder how you’re going to keep your hands warm and still manage to work your iPod and whatnot.  Clearly you can’t hold a stylus in your mitten, and gloves are nice, but their fingers are way too big for a touchscreen.

Enter the Etre Touchy line of gloves, themselves a gadget, because they’re simultaneously fingered and fingerless.  More specifically, they’re missing their thumb and index finger.

You may wonder why you’d want to pay $33 for a pair of gloves that are missing a finger and a thumb.  I don’t much like to bandy around the phrase “doomed for failure”, because you never really know what’ll take off.

But I really can’t see this working, especially when you could crack out the scissors and make your own pair for much, MUCH, less money. Are they preparing for a slew of patent infringement lawsuits for anyone who makes their own at home?

In all honesty, I’m not sure why the makers of the Etre Touchy didn’t think of that either, but I guess it just doesn’t make for as entertaining a story.

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Now here’s an interesting idea for you, folks–you’ve heard of the universal remote before, but now it’s gone to a whole new level with the BluLink remote, a Bluetooth universal remote.

The BluLink can control up to six devices, including the Playstation 3, and even offers onboard memory so that no special PS3 settings are lost, even if you take out the two AA batteries that run it.

So for now, it’ll handle your PS3 remote switching needs, along with tackling the rest of your home theater control needs, without caring a whit what all’s in the way.  I say “for now”, of course, because there’s one fatal flaw to the BluLink remote…it only has the Bluetooth profile to control the PS3.

This means, of course, when the rest of the Bluetooth-ready TVs and DVD players and Blu-ray players and DVRs and whatnot come out, your new $49.95 BluLink will still be controlling the PS3…and only the PS3.

But for now, you can’t do much better.

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It was just this past February when Verizon officially put their Hub touchscreen VoIP device up for sale.  At the time it required a 2-year contract and $200 to get aboard, which is and was one of the many barriers to the device’s success.  ‘Was’ I say?  That’s right, the Verizon Hub has already been discontinued purportedly due to floundering sales, poor technical support and probably a whole slew of other reasons.  Engadget received word back from the company, which falls just short of admitting the Hub’s demise.  It’s a bit of a shame considering how cool it could have been, but when a product is flawed it is quickly represented by sales numbers or in this case lack there of.

Verizon Wireless, like many companies, continually changes and updates the products and services it offers to customers. Our sales teams in all channels will continue to focus on providing our customers the latest and most innovative wireless products and services. Verizon Wireless will continue to support existing Verizon Hub customers with post-sale service or support.

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So what would be your guess for the worst gadget of all time?  Soap on a rope?  Maybe the Pocket Fisherman or something else by gadget magnate Ron Popeil?

As it turns out, a recent poll of three thousand women by the insurance company Sheila’s Wheels pegged the worst gadget of all time–it’s the shower radio.  Many of them, respondents described, were insufficiently waterproof, allowing water to swamp the batteries.  Reception was poor at best and had a tendency to wander around the dial, and worst of all, the music often could not be heard over the sound of the shower.

I seldom have had good experiences with shower radios myself, though I confess that I haven’t tried one in quite some time, so maybe advances have made them better than they were in my day.  But from what three thousand women just said?  It’s not likely.

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I really don’t know what to think about this one, folks–if you’re a die-hard Star Trek fan and you’re desperately trying to get rid of seventy bucks, consider the Klingon Keyboard.

No, seriously.  Someone took what looks like a normal QWERTY keyboard, translated it all into Klingon and refaced the keys.  Even better, it actually connects with a PS/2 cable, and when’s the last time you saw that?

So now you can type your letter to Grandma in an approximation of Klingon.

Why stop there?  Hit on your cybercrushes in Klingon!  Get in a flame war and insist loudly that Hab SoSlI’ Quch (his mother has a smooth forehead–apparently an actual Klingon insult.  Oh, Google, what CAN’T you do?)

Better yet, for you more logical types, if the Klingon version sells well, the VULCAN version is next.  I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified.  I like my Star Trek as much as the next guy, and really like my Next Gen and DS9, but come ON.  A Klingon Keyboard?  Might as well sell a Klingon key CHAIN.

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You’ve got to hand it to Elijah Wood for just plain old dramatic tension, folks–the man’s convinced that, someday, our gadgets will destroy humanity.

Here’s what he had to say about the Blackberry Uprising:

‘It’s madness. If it gets out of control and if it’s used for the wrong reasons or if it takes us away from our own humanity, then maybe that will be our downfall.”

Okay, so you’d think that a guy who genuinely believed this might well choose to set an example for the rest of us and toss out his own hardware first, right?  Well, sadly, you’d be very muchly wrong.  The hobbit’s got a cell phone and a Blackberry, which he keeps on him at all times.  He even cites his iPod as the reason he got into DJing.  Though give him credit, he does keep them out of sight and out of use during restaurant meals and at movie theatres.

So maybe it’s not quite as dire as he predicted.  But I guess if your iPod ever announces it wants to take over the world, maybe you’d better take it seriously…

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Will this be the strangest thing you see all day?  Claiming to translate your dogs barking into actual sentences and emotions, I think you can clearly see through the dog’s eyes in the above pic that it wants no part of this crap.  All you do is attach the collar to your dog and then when it barks and it will, a corresponding emotion is transmitted wirelessly to the control module.  As of now your dog’s voice is a Japanese female speaking her native tongue.  Check out the video below.

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With all the rumblings of the PSP 4000 going with download only software, OnLive wants you to ditch your home console for thier “low cost” micro console where there are no physical games and everything is downloadable.  Here’s a quote:

The brainchild of Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, WebTV and more, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos, the technology looks to revolutionize the way computer games are brought home. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the latest video game hardware that will make games like Crysis playable at nearly maxed settings, let OnLive’s servers handle the processing. All that’s required is a low cost “micro console” or a low end PC and a broadband internet connection.  Using patented video compression in tandem with algorithms that compensate for lag, jitter and packet loss, OnLive delivers video at up to 720p resolution at frame rates up to 60 frames per second. Of course, the quality of the video feed relies on your connection.

While my ComScam connection is fairly fast, it bottlenecks frequently and I don’t think I would want to rely on my wavering connection to play games at only 720p.  Bloop.  Where’s the pic of the controller?  Consider me not sold.

[Geekologie]

I urinate enough.  I don’t need a USB powered bamboo water garden to exacerbate my already too many trips to the bathroom.  USB junk is on the rise and it’s looking as if it might never stop.  More of a joke gift than anything else, I can’t see anyone buying this for themselves.  Only 25 dollars, I can see this being funny at airports and such.  Would definitely be cooler if there was whiskey running through it!  The day I post on the USB bedpan, life will have truly come full circle.

[NewLaunches]

MicroSoft is contemplating digging a shallow grave for the 360 Elite console as retailers complain about its lackluster sales performance.  When the Elite first hit the shelves it had a hard drive capacity 100 Gb’s over the Premium’s 20 Gb’s and was the only console to have an HDMI out.  Now every 360 has an HDMI out and the Premium now boasts a 60 Gb hard drive.  So besides the attractive black hardware, the included HDMI cable, and 60 Gb’s more storage, there’s no difference between the Premium, and it’s $100 more.  100 dollars more for an extra 60 Gb’s you probably will never use and a HDMI cable?  Not worth it.  No official word on the Elite’s demise yet, but MicroSoft is also rumbling about an even larger hard drive to surpass the 120 Gb version, that will be available for purchase on Arcade and Premium systems.

[SlashGear]

Don’t Trekkies have it hard enough?  Or soft enough if you catch my double meaning?  Regardless though, who greenlights this madness?  On sale for $30-$40 next month in department stores across the whatever, you can choose between three brutally e(a)ffective scents that go by the names of:  Tiberius, Red Shirt, and Ponn Farr.  What do you think the testing process for these fragrances was like?  A cold distant warehouse, a shirtless Trekkie strapped to a wet mattress while he’s doused with weird alcohols and oils?  When learning something new everyday equates to this, I think I have a problem with my informational intake valve.

[OhGizmo!]

I just couldn’t help posting on this.  The past few months I have been pleasantly obsessed with the word dangle.  I mean who doesn’t wanna let stuff dangle?  Anyway, when I saw the Danglet I thought sweet name, lame as all hell product.  There is no way I, or anybody else is gonna trust this iAccessory to protect our beloved iStuff.  Priced at $14.99 plus S&H, I dare you to buy one and film yourself doing what these kids are doing at the end of this video.  I think I can safely say that my iPhone is something I never want to see get its dangle on!  Can it really be that secure? Look at the size of the pin!  There is no way!  Here’s a quote from the company:

“Danglet simply plugs into the dock connector port on the bottom of your iPod or iPhone, securely snapping into place, and provides a sturdy stainless steel loop through which any string or hook mounted wrist or neck strap can be attached. We provide basic wrist and neck straps with your Danglet. But, you can go ahead and use any strap you may already own or choose to buy. Danglet fits them all.”

[Danglet via iSmashPhone]

I have a PS3 but I don’t buy PS3 games.  I use it to watch Blu Ray movies from Netflix.  Sony’s latest last ditch effort is to utilize the large capacity of the Blu Ray Disc by combining a movie and a game on one disc.  Sitting dead last in the console race behind Nintendo’s Wii and Mircrosoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s having trouble keeping its system “Present Proof” let alone “Future Proof” in which they boasted upon release of the PS3.  How will this work?  Some random movie with some random game?  Will the game and the movie have anything to do with one another, like movie games?  Ironman 2 game with Ironman movie?  It doesn’t sound that cool to me and I don’t want to mix my media like that.  Maybe two games on one disc?  Or 3 to 5 movies per disc?  I dunno, but they better have some more promising ideas looming soon!  Already in progress, we should see some combo titles sometime this year.  Bloop.

[Slashgear]