‘Improve’ Great Works of Art by Adding in Gadgets [Photoshop Contest]

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I want you to insert gadgets or modern technology into famous works of art, be they paintings, drawings or photographs. A pretty straightforward challenge, but I’m looking for some real quality this time around. Don’t just slap a pic of a Bluetooth headset on the Mona Lisa. Make it look like it’s part of the painting. Come on, I know you’ve got the chops.

When you have your work of art perfected, send it to me at contests@gizmodo.com with gadget art in the subject line. Only JPGs and PNGs, please. Name your file FirstnameLastname.jpg using whatever name you want credited on the site. I’ll post the winners in the Gallery of Champions next Tuesday. Get to it!

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This week at Uncrate: We take a trip to the new hoglicious Harley-Davidson Museum, go green with the Brooks Trance 8 Biodegradable Running Shoe, and ditch our bulky wallets for the Money-band. We also hit the road in the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, jam out to One Day as a Lion, and find our way thanks to the Coleman Exponent Pack-Away Lantern. Finally, we get an ultra close shave thanks to some Carlton Safety Razors, get nerdy with Science! T-Shirts, and go undercover with the Louis Vuitton Monogramouflage Collection.

Via [gizmodo]

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Njection wants to free you from the tyranny of law. The company maintains a website where users can upload the skinny on red light cameras and speed traps, wiki-style, thus enabling drivers to avoid them, or at least slow down…

Njection wants to free you from the tyranny of law. The company maintains a website where users can upload the skinny on red light cameras and speed traps, wiki-style, thus enabling drivers to avoid them, or at least slow down when they are in the vicinity. It reminds me of the scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when principal Ed Rooney is sprinting along the school corridor, as fast as his hate-filled legs will carry him, and he slows up as he passes each classroom window.

But web, schmeb. Who adores speed traps when you are at home? You need that kind of info when you are on the road, and Njection will let you do just that. For $40 per year, you get a subscription to constantly updated files for your in car GPS device, delivered in CSV or OV2 formats (supported by most satnav units, including those from Garmin and TomTom).

The user added data isn’t limited to just the locations of these legal hotspots. Once logged in, you can add “Heat Map” information, which is a table listing the times when a particular camera is being monitored, and you can rate the traps in a hilariously Web 2.0 fashion:

This speed trap is not yet rated. You must be logged in to submit a vote.

Sounds just like Digg. You can even pick and select just what you want to avoid. $35 per year will buy you the locations of just the red light cameras, and $25 provides the whereabouts of speed traps. Curiously, the cops actually care about it. Talking to Reuters, Njection founder Shannon Atkinson said “I’ve gotten lots of positive feed back from police officers. It’s the idea of getting people to slow down in those areas and if this helps, they’re happy.”

Right now the service officially covers the US and some of the UK, but when I visited the site, it appears that there’s a lot of information already posted on Barcelona, so you, too, might have coverage.

Product page [Njection via Reuters]

Via [wired.com]

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Researchers Squeeze 60% More Light Out of OLEDs With Tiny Lenses [Oled]

Optics junkies at the University of Michigan have found a way to greatly boost the efficiency of OLEDs to produce 60% more light from the same amount of power as those previous, cranking out 70 lumens per watt. Their method uses a layer of five-micrometer-wide lenses mounted on top of a reflective grid, which coaxes the light out from the organic substrate and into the world. OLEDs to date have been held back by efficiency problems—they still can’t match CFL bulbs’ 90 lumens per watt, but they’re getting there. This could mean lighting that adds even less power consumption to OLED’s many benefits over compact fluorescents (longer life, better light, theoretical 100% efficiency, etc), and more energy-sipping OLED TV panels down the road. [Technology Review via DVICE]

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Games For Windows LIVE, the Personal computer equivalent of Xbox Live, has now gone free. As of now, you won’t have to subscribe to a Games For Windows LIVE Gold Account ($49 a year) in order to get the PC to Personal computer or PC to Xbox 360 multiplayer action. Great news for Computer owners, but we hope that Microsoft will refund the cash for people who still have a few months left on their account. [Games For Windows via Gamerscore Blog]

Via [gizmodo]

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The iPod Touch makes an admirable replacement for an iPhone, especially if you don’t care for ridiculously high data charges. But it comes with several disadvantages: You need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot when out and about, you don’t get…

The iPod Touch makes an admirable replacement for an iPhone, especially if you don’t care for ridiculously high data charges. But it comes with several disadvantages: You need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot when out and about, you don’t get a camera (it’s a crappy camera, sure, but good for taking notes) and, least often mentioned, there’s no speaker, making impromptu YouTube shows a distinctly private affair.

Korean manufacturer Neoneco addresses this problem with its Swing Speaker, a battery powered add-on for the iPods Nano and Classic along with the Touch. The battery life is a claimed 10 hours, but that battery also means that the speakers are active instead of the tinny passive speakers we normally find in this form factor.

These have just been released in Korea for $29 (Nano), $32 (Classic) and $36 (Touch). If they ever head West and sound half decent, I’m in: The price and size are just about perfect.

Product page [Neoneco via Aving]

Via [wired.com]

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Bamboo Keyboard Defines Plasticky Tat
A mass PR email is the perfect start to a dreary Monday, especially one which begins so anonymously. Dear Sir/Madam, We’ve contacted you today regarding a product which we believe you may be interested in featuring or writing about….

A mass PR email is the perfect begin to a dreary Monday, especially one which begins so anonymously.

Dear Sir/Madam, We’ve contacted you this day regarding a product which we believe you might be interested in featuring or writing about. [emphasis mine]

The product? A wooden keyboard and optical mouse, which look as if they were made in a school woodwork class, complete with poorly fitting joints and a thick coating of shiny shiny varnish. The body of the keyboard and the mouse are both made from four-year old bamboo, which “gives them a stunning visual appearance and helps to reduce the amount of plastics we use in everyday life.” I have extracted the salient product features from the list:

Keys are wood coloured plastic

105 keys and full of tactile key touch

Keyboard cable length is over 150cm

Mouse cable length is over 140cm

And the USP? “This keyboard is different from others as it uses wood coloured keys rather than black plastic keys or wooden keys.” Yes. wood colored plastic. So very much less tacky than black plastic.

To be fair, if this was made in shop class, it’s not a bad job, and the set only costs £30 ($60) from the sellers eBay store. Or you could just ask your kids to make you one — don’t forget the varnish.
Product page [Wooden Keyboard]

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