Photographer Holger Pooten is well known in Europe for his work with Nike, but as you can see here, he knows how to shoot gadgets, too. Here he’s frozen an exploded view of a fax machine, right in front of our eyes. Take a look at how he eviscerates a robot cat, and then does his magic on a vase full of orchids:

How does he do that? It’s nearly miraculous. Be sure to visit his site (NSFW) for dozens more of Holger’s unique photos. [Holger Pooten]

This PED3 rotating stand can hold your iPhone either vertically or horizontally, and also rotates 360 degrees, putting that useful appliance at your fingertips 24/7. It’s also designed to keep those wires out of your way. This grippy black stand would come in handy on a cross-country plane trip, letting you watch a movie without having to hold the iPhone in your hand the whole time. Looks like a worthy investment of $40. [Thought Out, via Pocket Lint, via Coolest Gadgets]

Are you sneaky enough for the SIM Card Spy Gear Remote Listening Device? Just take your SIM card out of your cellphone and stick it in this mysterious black box that’s about the size of a bar of soap. Hide the $85 device in an inconspicuous location wherever you want to do your listening, and then when you call your cellphone number from another phone, you suddenly have ears in exactly the right places. Please, use this for amusement only, you busybody. [Brando, via OhGizmo]

Sling Media rolled out Slingbox Solo, a set-top box that lets you watch a home-bound HD source from anywhere in the world on a PC, Mac, Palm OS or Symbian mobile device. It’s called “Solo” because it controls just one set-top box, instead of the four of its more-expensive Slingbox Pro brandmate.

The idea of a cheaper, single-source HD-compatible Slingbox is a great one. Before we got this Slingbox Solo, we’d been using a Slingbox Pro for a year, and its variety of inputs has proven to be way more than we’ve ever needed. (Really, why would we want to watch a DVD via the Slingbox? TiVo is all we want to watch remotely.) But this Slingbox Solo ($179.99), positioned in the Sling product line between the Slingbox Pro ($229.99) and the Slingbox AV ($129.99), hit that Goldilocks sweet spot: It’s just right.

The Slingbox Solo carries on that Aztec temple-like design of the Pro, but it’s about two thirds the width. If you care about such things, its shiny piano-black surface is definitely a fingerprint magnet, but after wiping it off with a microfiber cloth, it still looks sparkly, low-slung and sophisticated as it takes its place on our component rack.

Looking out back at the business end of the Solo, you’ll see that even though it only handles one input at a time, there’s no shortage of places to plug in. Whether you choose component, composite or SVideo, any source can be passed through so you can also plug it into your TV after that Sling magic has been performed on your video.

We plugged in our TiVo Series3 HD PVR, and the Sling Solo’s setup, functions and quality appeared to be identical to the Slingbox Pro. Just like the Slingbox Pro, even though HD sources go into the Solo at 720p, as long as you’re watching the signal over a high-speed home network they come out at 640×480 and then are stretched out to 16:9. That’s definitely better than standard definition but certainly not HD.

Using the system over the internet, its quality ratchets down to 320×240 but is stretched out to widescreen. Away from the home network, its video looks a bit blocky and suffers dropouts here and there, but picture quality is mostly dependent on the speed of the internet connection. In both instances, the Solo’s video looks just the same to us as the Pro model.

Solo is a worthy addition to the Slingbox line, and unlike the Slingbox Pro, requires no optional adapter to get it working with HD sources. Sure, we would've liked an HDMI port on the back of this baby (also lacking on the Pro), but component video will just have to do. And forget sending HDTV all over the world with the Slingbox—until bandwidth in the United States reaches that of Japan or Scandinavia, the Solo's kind of sub-HD resolution for watching TV all over your house or on the road will be just good enough for now.

Incidentally, Sling is also announcing that Solo also works in Canada ($199.99 looneys), and the UK (£129.99), calling it the company’s “first worldwide model.” The company’s also launching the Slingbox Pro in the UK for £199.99, and that’s packing a DVB-T tuner and includes an HD connect cable.

Who says Hillary’s a ballbuster? No, she’s a nutcracker. Here’s proof. Just in time for the Christmas season, shell out $29.99 and remove the shells from your walnuts with style. When she’s done cracking nuts, Hillary stands up on her own, lording over you as she awaits her next opportunity to bust a few nuts. And if you don’t like it, well, you can just sleep on the couch, buster. [Teptronics]

Let’s do a little search on Google Images and see what subject people take a picture of the very first thing they unbox that brand-new digital camera. All you need to do is search DSC00001, and most of the results will be the first picture taken. (NSFW)

Sure, DSC00001.jpg is not necessarily the first picture; you can reset some digi-cams so they start numbering at the beginning again, but for the most part, most people don’t bother to do that. So take a look at this Google search, and you’ll notice there is a certain over-representation here. Better be careful, the results may not be safe for work. Well, unless you have Safe Search on. [BlogStorm]

If you’re thinking about dropping more than $1000 on a fancy new receiver just because it has four HDMI inputs, wait a doggone minute. This IOGear Automatic HDMI Switch has four HDMI ports going in and one going to your TV, and it’s pretty smart, too, automatically figuring out which component is on and then sending that (up to 1080p) signal directly to your HDMI-equipped TV set.

If you want to control things yourself, there’s also a remote that lets you select the source manually, and then you can also teach that remote’s commands to your universal learning (cough! Harmony! cough!) remote, too. IOGear was even nice enough to include a six-foot HDMI cable, but was a little bashful about pricing thus far. We’ll update this post with the price as soon as their reps get over their shyness attack.

UPDATE: Whoa, it’s $189. That’s a lot of cheddar.
UPDATE 2: Here’s the IOGear]

With Kameraflage, now you’ll be able to plant subliminal messages on T-shirts, movies and billboards that can only be seen with digital cameras. This context-sensitive display technology, developed by Sarah Logie and Connor Dickie, works by using colors that are invisible to us but easily picked up by the silicon chips in digital cameras. As you can see, the lovely model above is wearing a shirt that only reveals that cloud’s lightning bolt when seen through an iPhone’s digital camera, although any ordinary unmodified digital camera would get the same result. She just as easily could have placed her phone number in that cloud. Hmm. Let’s think of some other uses for this cool tech.

Another use for the technology would be to watermark video and filmed content, so when pirates try to videotape movies by taking a camcorder into the theater, there could be a big bunch of funky-looking text all over it. Enabling this is a clever trick using a patented invisible light projector developed by Logie and Dickie. More Kameraflage clothing will be demonstrated at the ACM SIGGRAPH Unravel fashion show on August 6 in San Diego. [Kameraflage]