Since summer is almost here it’s time to start thinking about camping. In a series of posts I’ll highlight some of the newest and coolest camping gear around.

First off is the Biolite camp cooking stove. This stove is very eco friendly, as it takes the heat energy from your burning collected wood, and converts it into electrical energy via a thermoelectric generator. This powers a fan which pushes oxygen into the stove, resulting in a strong and clean combustion process. As a matter of fact, it uses just half the wood of a regular stove and creates 95% less smoke. So good for the environment, and keeps your smoke signal down in case you don’t want to found.

You’re welcome Mother Nature.

$129 –  Buy it here

Thanks to Eco Blog

This 3-in-1 solar powered charger from Chinavasion for $27.94 not only charges your gadgets, but can play MP3’s, and acts as a FM Transmitter as well. The charger comes with a free 2GB microSD card, but it can hold 32GB. Pretty cool, plus your helping the environment. Winning!

via Ubergizmo

The  YouRock MIDI Electric Guitar is a full-fledged MIDI controller, which are usually in keyboard form. This is great if you’re a pianist, but not so great when you are a guitar player trying to get a riff from your brain into your computer. Now just hook the YouRock to your multi-track recording or sequencing software, and output MIDI data directly.

Some of the features of the YouRock:

 
• 25 guitars, 50 synths, 25 tracks, and 50 drum tracks all in one package.
• Never needs tuning
• It’s a full-fledged MIDI controller
• It’s a synthesizer in guitar form
• It’s a Rock Band controller

Read More…

Home media players are becoming somewhat inexpensive with more and more features. However it’s tough to decide which one is for you. Streamingmedia.com has made a nice chart of current digital media players, and what each offers.

Home media players are becoming somewhat inexpensive with more and more features. However it’s tough to decide which one is for you. Streamingmedia.com has made a nice chart of current digital media players, and what each offers.

Got an iPad and a love of the sound of old vinyl records? Great, because now you can download an app call VinylLove that takes your, as close to the studio as you can get, music and fills it with pops and clicks. Basically making sound as if it’s playing on an old record player. It also has a feature where you can thumb through your virtual albums in a virtual crate.

Although I like my music clean sounding, I can understand the attraction to the warmth and feel of old records. But to make it even more real life, they should make it skip once in a while. Or the needle could skip across the album as they sometimes did. I guess that wouldn’t be a good selling point. $4.99

This is quite awesome. Great use of sound effects to go with the action.

Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

I was working a gig in Vegas with a brand new Phantom Flex high speed digital cinema camera. I had to try it out. In fact, I never did go to bed that night. I opened up a wormhole shooting at 2,564 frames per second.

Do it yourself by getting a  Phantom Flex camera, available for rental for $3000 a day.

Uh, you guys might want to back up...

Everyone has probably heard that Fox and Friends made a gaffe the other day, when they announced that the City of LA was buying about a billion dollars worth of jetpacks for their firemen and police. Of course it was later found out that this was all bullshit and they had to apologize.

But, the good news is that there really are jetpacks, make by Martin Jetpack that can be bought for about $100,000.  So your dreams of flying around looking into bedroom windows could actually come true. Although right now it is restricted to non-urban airspace. But one can dream, right? And it goes great with this.

No more phone charger wires! The new AirVolt Wireless Phone Charger, a ThinkGeek exclusive uses induction to charge your wireless phone.

Just in case you don’t know what that means, it’s when the passing of a conductor through a magnetic field that exists between two poles of a magnet generates electrical current. For you and me, that we can charge our phone without plugging it into an outlet. Yep, just put your brand new iPhone4 that drops calls like a hot potato on the charging tray. When the phone is charged, the AirVolt turns itself off and you’re ready to go. Score one for science.

$49.99 at ThinkGeek

Dyson, the maker of those awesome vacuums that are capable of picking up everything from dog hair, to the weird substance left on your carpet after your last party, is at it again. But this time with fans. Not just any fan either, but blade-less and quiet.

As Dyson explains it,

Dyson Air Multiplier™ fans draw air in through a mixed flow impeller – a combination of the technologies used in turbochargers and jet engines.  Only 7% of the air generated by Dyson Air Multiplier™ fans actually passes through the impeller, 93% results from the inducement and entrainment of surrounding air.

Alrighty, as long as it works.  You can pick one of these fans up for $299. If you have purchased one, drop me a line, I’m curious to see if they are indeed better then your regular run of the mill fan.

By now you’ve probably heard of Google TV. But what is it, and what does it mean to your future of home entertainment?

PC World answers 5 burning questions on our mind.