360 DEGREES Weblog

Salt and pepper shakers definitely don’t make for ideal Christmas gifts. Not only would you be considered cheap, you would also be criticized for your lack of taste in selecting a gift. However one look at the Vipp Salt and Pepper Mills and you will wish that someone gifts them to you. Functional pieces of art, the Vipp Salt and Pepper Mills are made using aluminum, stainless steel, and matte rubber. Sure to become the topic of conversation at your dinner table, these designer Salt and Pepper Mills are one must have creation. $200

Gucci’s new 3D glasses allegedly improve the 3D viewing experience – beyond personal aesthetics.

“The Gucci 3-D glasses contain a high tech multi-layered mirrored coating which allows the wearer to view themselves in a mirror without distortion. The mirrored coating not only provides a premium look as well as offers superior viewing and contrast enhancement, but also allows over 98 percent of visible light through, therefore not affecting viewing in a cinema environment. An anti-reflective coating has been applied to the back of the lens for additional overall image quality by reducing scattered light, glare and blue light.”

To me you’ll still look like a character out of the 2001 epic ‘BLOW” but then sitting in front of your TV.

Ahh look at these classic Soviet era ads. What a great time the Comrades must have had!!!

German furniture firm Dedon has earlier impressed us with the stunning Summer Cloud beach chair and this time, they have the Nestrest. The Nestrest hanging lounger transforms your regular garden sofa into a small architectural piece. An ideal place for relaxation, meditation and conversations, the Nestrest lounger is made from specially created 4cm wide DeDon Fiber. Thanks to the special fiber, the person sitting inside can look out, but the outsider cannot peep into the privacy.

Want to be able to have more control over your car by using your iPhone? Check out the AutoBot, a device that can connect to the OBD-II connector in your car, sending out diagnostics information, allowing you to check if the tire pressure is low or when you need an oil change directly from your phone. If you’re in an accident, AutoBot can also notify your friends and family. Parents will probably be rubbing their hands in glee thanks to a feature that will allow them to spy on kids, getting updates when they leave certain areas. The device costs $300 and the service will be supported through ads, sending you relevant information such as coupons in times when you need an oil change.

The retro camera craze continues with the Sprocket Rocket Camera ($89). Designed to work with standard old 35mm film, the Rocket captures panoramic shots so big that they extend onto the sprocket holes of the film, giving the camera its name and the shots it takes a distinctive look. It also features two shutter settings, two aperture settings, the ability to rewind the film for double exposures, and a hot shoe for flash use.

Tube free toilet paper- that’s something I can really get behind. Do we really need a cardboard tube to support our toilet paper rolls? Well we’re about to find out (and I mean the general “we”, the Craziest Gadgets team is not heading off to the test “office” to try it out, maybe after dinner) because Scott toilet paper is going tubeless. In the United States 17 billion toilet paper tubes produced annually account for 160 million pounds of trash so that our toilet paper can stay in a perfectly round formation while on the roll. What a waste. A special winding technique will be used to keep the TP rolled up. I guess the kids will have to use paper towel tubes for their pretend telescopes now.

For people like me that hate making beds, this Letto Zip Bed is really a step in the right direction. A simple zipper lets you get your bed back into order quickly and relatively painlessly. It is the work of Italian furniture maker Florida, and is definitely the way that beds need to be heading – but it is no panacea – you still have to zip and that is only marginally easier than making a bed the old-fashioned way.

Not even Johnny Depp has worked as much with Tim Burton as has celebrated composer Danny Elfman. The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box ($500) celebrates this unique partnership with an epic limited edition set that includes all 13 original scores Elfman has composed for Burton, unreleased music, a bonus DVD, a skeleton key flash drive with all the musical goods in MP3 format, a 250+ page book, and exclusive artwork by Burton, all packaged in a working zoetrope box. Sure, it’s a little eccentric, but so are they.

It’s still not a substitute for a built-in memory card reader in a laptop, but Elecom’s new MR-C25 Series USB memory card reader might just be the next best thing. In addition to reading both SD and microSD cards, it’s able to rotate a full 180 degrees to give you access to ports on either side of the card reader. From the looks of things, you may still run into some problems with ports that are particularly close together (and with bulky plugs or devices), but it should definitely prevent at least some unwanted USB swapping. Unfortunately, there’s no still word on a price or release over here just yet, but it does apparently come in both black and white to better match your laptop.