Coming on more like a high-performance gaming mouse than a handy travel gadget, the new V2 Chargepod from Callpod takes the original multi-device charger and, well, supercharges it.

In addition to cellphones and USB-powered peripherals, the V2 will also juice a notebook (Mac or PC), a portable DVD-player or other power-hungry gadget, and there’s even a space for a camera battery charger. It works as a USB hub, too, so you can sync your iPhone or upload photos as you charge.

In short, it is all the chargers you’ll ever need, in a box the size of your current notebook’s wall-wart (and the shape of some future X-box handheld). Why on earth wouldn’t you buy this to replace all the junk you normally take on a trip? Well, there’s a catch.

The Chargepod might replace all your other chargers and hubs, but it costs the same as all of them put together: $200. For the frequent traveler, that’s a bargain. For the rest of us, it’s a little steep. And don’t forget, you’ll need to buy some cable-tips for your devices, which come in at $10 each. Available soon.

Chargepod [Callpod. Thanks, Steve!]

By day, the Airstash is a common, ordinary USB card reader. But by night, it dons the mantle of wireless connectivity, taking to the streets and sharing pictures an images in an ad-hoc, daredevil manner.

The Airstash looks much like a regular card reader, with a USB plug on one end and an SD card-shaped hole in the other. In between you can find a tiny, battery powered 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi router. Slot in a card and it can be reached wirelessly through the web browser of any Wi-Fi enabled computer or phone.

The design is simple, but the uses are manifold. You could use this to wirelessly copy photos from card to computer, but that, apart from saving you a USB port, is a little boring. What about carrying an extra 32GB of movies and music that can be streamed from the built-in server direct to your iPhone? Or creating a fully functional wireless network for sharing, well, anything? Because it uses vanilla Wi-Fi, it works with anything. And because it uses USB, it charges when you plug it into a spare port.

The product was shown last week at CES, and right now has neither a price or a shipping date (”available soon” is the only hint on the product page). If it is cheap, and if the battery in such a tiny case can last long enough to be useful, then this could be a very useful toy. And if it is given away at next
year’s CES in the same fashion as pen drives were at this year’s show, we’ll be very happy indeed.

Airstash product page [Airstash via Oh Gizmo!]

If you are a photographer, amateur or pro, you’ll be familiar with the two constants of the field: You can never have enough bags, and you can never find the right strap. James Duncan Davidson, photographer and podcaster, decided to do something about the strap.

You will know Davidson’s work through that iPhone photo, the one which shows staring, glassy-eyed devotees bathed in the light of the glass-caged iPhone demo unit. Unhappy with any available straps, most of which are either plain tiring to wear or just gimmicky, Davidson teamed up with industrial designer to make the LumaLoop, an across-the-shoulder strap with a quick-release lanyard.

The LumaLoop’s main selling point is comfort, quickly followed by flexibility. The shoulder pad is curved to remove the weight “hot-spot” that makes cameras feel so heavy, the bandolier-style design adds comfort and security, and the leather, buckles and webbing are all high-spec materials.

What we really like, though, is that you can either use the camera whilst still slung over your shoulder, or quickly squeeze the buckle to release it. A lanyard loops into either the strap-brackets, or a tripod-mount D-ring, or anything else designed to take a loop — even a mount on the a lens collar. When not in use, the camera dangles at your waist, and sits there comfortable enough to carry “all day long”.

The LumaLoop is $60 and comes in three sizes. Each strap comes with a lanyard, and extras will cost $10 a pop.

LumaLoop [LumaLabs]

See Also:

• Buckle Up! Seat-Belt Camera Straps
• R-Strap: Sharp Shooting on the Mean Streets
• DIY Camera Hand-Straps From Photojojo

It’s called ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, but it is way cooler than it sounds. The software, written by a team headed by Qui Pan, a student at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University in England, turns a regular, cheap webcam into a 3D scanner.

Normally, scanning in 3D requires purpose-made gear and time. ProFORMA lets you rotate any object in front of the camera and it scans it in real time, building a fully 3D texture mapped model as fast as you can turn an object. Even more impressive is what happens after the scan: The camera continues to track the objsct in space and matches it’s movement instantly with the on-screen model. Here’s a video of it in action:

It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are. Then things go over my head, involving a process called Delaunay tetrahedralisation to turn the 2D surfaces into a 3D model.

Like I said: clever math. But imagine, for a second, the uses. Forget Nintendo’s Mii avatars, for instance. Instead you could make a 3D version of yourself, or add your favorite household items into a game of Mario Kart. You could quite possibly hook this rig up to a 3D printer and make fast facsimiles of almost anything. And remember, this is all done using a single camera, just like the one that’s probably staring from the top of your laptop screen as you read this. I want to play with this right now.

ProFORMA product page [Cambridge University via Core77 via BoingBoing]

The GlideTV is a couch mouse, something pretty handy when a lot of us are watching TV and movies on our computer screens. It works over USB, and you plug a dongle into the machine to play. From there, you can control your cursor with a touchpad, and there are a few buttons which mimic the ones most used on a keyboard, like Escape and Enter. The best part is the rim around the pad which neatly contains a lot of extra buttons. And because it works like a regular mouse and (limited) keyboard, it works with most machines, from Media Center PCs to Macs to PS3s.

But the keyboard is the problem for this otherwise sexy half-egg (it looks like a sex toy, as you can see in the photo of it being fisted, above). If you are using Windows, you can download the GlideTV Navigator software, which will give you an onscreen keyboard, but we all know how quick and easy they are to use (not very, if you were wondering).

Still, the GlideTV, which comes from the brains of the people behind VUDU and SageTV, packs a lot into a tiny device. And at $150, that’s a good thing: For the same price, you could pick up a wireless keyboard with a trackpad or trackball. Then again, the GlideTV will fulfill that other living-room remote requirement: It can be lost down the back of the sofa. Try that with a full-size QWERTY. If only the Glide people would put a vibrator inside. Then it would be perfect.

Product page [GlideTV. Thanks, Patrick!]

Sofortbild is the second cheap alternative to a Nikon product we have seen this week. It is a piece of software with which to tether your Nikon DSLR, and it’s free. Why shoot tethered? There are lots of reasons, including the ability to remote control the camera and to almost instantly display your pictures on the big screen as you take them.

Sofortbild (which translates roughly as Instant Picture) doesn’t offer all the features of Nikon’s Camera Control software, but it adds a few things you won’t find in Nikon’s version, such as shooting a bracketed range of pictures and generating an HDR (high dynamic range) image from them. There is also GPS support and a rather nice HUD-style panel to show the metadata. In fact, the entire application wins in terms of interface — Nikon’s software products seem to be designed with a real hatred for the user.

You don’t get to use live view, which is a shame — it’s nice to see a live, full screen feed from the camera, and you can’t control as much as you can with the Nikon software, but it’s free, and Nikon Capture Control cost $180. That alone makes it worth a download.

Product page [Sofortbild]

Did you know that this kind of thing was even possible? The video shows Danny MacAskill. who rides for UK trials bike company Inspired Bicycles, shredding it in Edinburgh. As our own Danny Dumas says on Twitter*, “From what I gather this is parkour…done with bicycles.”

Keep watching. If you think it’s all over after the first couple of minutes, it isn’t. The video just gets bigger and better as it goes on.

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill April 2009 [YouTube via Danny Doom]

Product page [Inspired Bikes]

*Normally, of course, Danny’s answer to the Twitter question “What are you doing?” is “Styling my hair. My beautiful hair. In the mirror.”

The excellent iPhone jailbreaking tool, QuickPWN, has been updated to crack the v2.2 iPhone and iPod Touch software.

Jailbreaking your iPhone lets you install third party applications other than those available from the iTunes App Store, and with QuickPWN it is easy — you just click a few buttons on screen and wait. After it’s done, you’ll see two new application icons on the iPhone’s home screen, Cydia and Installer. Both of these can be used to browse new applications and to download them direct to the iPhone.

For iPod Touch users, there is the added bonus of Google Street View, the feature left out of the v2.2 update. A couple of things that QuickPWN doesn’t do: It won’t unlock your iPhone from your cell carrier, and it won’t work on the second generation iPod Touch (the one with the curved back and volume buttons). For everything else, its a free download for Windows or OS X.

Product page [QuickPWN]

See Also:

• Pwnage 2.0 Released: Gadget Lab Jailbreaks iPod Touch
• IPhone 3G Software Already Unlocked
• WinPwn: iPhone Pwnage Comes To Windows

Ron Henry is a man who has clearly spent too much time in front of the mirror, muttering to himself “You talkin’ to me?”. Check out his kick-ass, quick-draw camera technique:

What’s Ron so excited about? The R-Strap, a fast-access camera support. Instead of wearing your camera like a big nerd-necklace, the R-Strap lets you sling it across your shoulder. Because the strap hooks onto the tripod mount on the bottom, the camera is right-side-up when you get it to your eye.

There’s more. Ron’s company, Black Rapid, also sells a screw-in clip for the tripod bush on your camera or lens — if you have a quick-release mounting plate for your tripod which has a D-ring, you won’t need this. The basic models is adjustable and has the plastic stopper which ensures the camera stays on your hip when you’re done, and there are two more: The RS-2 – with extra pockets – and the RS-3 Camo, which is patterned to contrast with regular, everyday clothes.

The straps start at around $50. But we came to this post by way of Lifehacker, which points to a DIY version made from an old laptop-bag shoulder strap, a luggage tag and a screw. I liked the idea, but I already have a strap from an old camera bag, and my camera is already sporting the requisite D-ring from my tripod. Why not make my own?

The hardest part was rummaging through the junk drawer. I dug out the strap which has two plastic clips, one on each end. The real R-Strap has two, but it makes no difference other than that the R-Strap hook is on a swivel mount. As you can see below, the D-ring on the tripod mount is easily big enough to cope.

That’s it. The strap holds the camera on my hip, ready to go. I like how it seems to stick out less than slinging the camera over a shoulder with a regular two-point strap. Another advantage is that, if you get the length right, you can use the strap to steady the camera — pull the camera against the strap and it will tighten as you look at the LCD screen, stopping the wobbles. If you’re using a non live-view DSLR, hooking your right elbow into the strap will push it down and shorten it enough to tighten it as you bring the camera up to your eye.

I’ll certainly be making a v 2.0 version — my camera bag needs its strap back and I’d prefer a thinner one anyway. See how well it works in this quick video, complete with cheesy camera-shutter sound effects found as found in the original, and authentic De Niro-style gunplay.

Product page [Black Rapid via Lifehacker]
DIY R-Strap [Instructables]

The new iPod Touch is fully equipped to work as a VoIP phone, according to our sister blog, Cult of Mac. Our old friend Kyle Wiens of iFixit found that the Touch 2.0’s headphone socket now has an extra fifth wire running to it. This is to support the new microphone and remote-control equipped headphones from Apple.

On the new Nano and Classic, the mic is solely for recording audio. But the Touch has Wi-Fi. While Apple explicitly forbids VoIP applications from accessing the 3G and EDGE networks on the iPhone, it appears that VoIP calls over Wi-Fi are fine. All it needs is somebody to write an application and put it in the App Store.

Of course, even if this fails, or the Mobile OS X SDK doesn’t provide hooks into the microphone for third party developers, there’s always another option — Jailbreaking. If there was ever a killer app to make it worth hacking your Touch, VoIP is it.

Confirmed: iPod Touch Can Support VoIP Calls [Cult of Mac]