A blog about likeable gadgets and electronic products such as GPS, MP3 players, digital cameras, cell phones, music equipment, computers or other geek-worthy toys.

Scoot over, Nordic Track™. Step aside, Stair Master™. America’s living rooms are tied of boring old fitness equipment taking up space, seldom used except on Sunday morning TV infomercials. Drum kits are the new phenom for home workout machinery. There’s the upcoming 2Box Drumit from Sweden. Or the more affordable Roland V-Drum HD-1 made in Japan:

Get either one for that total upper AND lower body work-out combined with virtual rock-star training!

Lose weight while playing along to your favorite hits produced back when they used actual drummers. Tone those arms so that you can beat all your friends playing Rock Band™ on your Sony PS3 & Microsoft XBox 360. Or, if music is not your thing, use one as an avant-garde techno sculpture center-piece.

Imagine a sports car like the Ferrari or Porsche with NO emissions, but is FASTER and gets its power from an electrical socket.

Behold, the long-awaited Tesla Roadster, finally available for a few of its customers. The only downside: in a race between LA and SF, the Roadster will have a substantial lead until somewhere past the Grapevine, where it will have to stop to recharge.

Still, celebrities like George Clooney are already signed up as customers. Tesla plans to release more affordable electric cars in the near future as well.

RSS, or the Really Simple Syndication technique is a very useful gadget of sorts, particularly to bloggers wanting to make their posts more accessible, and by readers wanting to manage reading dozens or even hundreds of blogs a day without having to bookmark and surf to each one. RSS is in XML format and contains your posts and meta-data about them, such as dates, authors, and links to images.

When you find a blog you like, subscribe to it with an RSS reader, which can be your browser itself or a website like Feedburner or Google Reader (my favorite). Some smartphones like the Blackberry, Palm Treo and Apple iPhone offer RSS readers, as does the Sony Portable Playstation (PSP).

Work it, baby!

Capture those Jacques Cousteau moments with these new, waterproof cameras by SeaLife. without worrying about destroying your digital camera. Or get vivid, high resolution evidence of the existence of sea monsters, just before your ship is capsized. You can be certain your camera will survive the ordeal.

While not especially warm and fuzzy, these Thingamagoops from Bleep Labs in Austin, Texas are quite cute and make intriguing electronic noises. Each one is actually an analog synthesizer hooked up to a light sensor and a light, creating a feedback loop of crazy acoustic fun. I’ve heard there are bands that use these on stage (made easier by the fact that each Thingamagoop has a phono out jack for plugging into an FX box or an amplifier.) On their site, you can custom make your Thingamagoop for $100.

If you were Gary Numan back in 1979 or so (and who wasn’t?), you needed about six Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesizers to play your mega-hit song Cars live. Now, Dave Smith, the Prophet’s inventor, has made a multi-timbral modern update to this classic musical gadget, the Prophet ‘08, shown here in table-top form.

“Here in my car…”

It happens all the time. You’re riding your bicycle when suddenly, you get a call on your cell phone. After a minute or two, the battery gives out! *gasp* What to do?

Well if you happened to have the HyMini Turbine Recharger, you’d be back conversing in no time.

Freak out your pets with these neato 3-D display cubes. Now if you could only get them to show Princess Leah begging for Ben Kenobi’s help, like in Star Wars!

Looking like a cross between Motorola’s K1m KRZR, an Apple iPhone, and a bar of Scharffenberger chocolate, LG’s Black Label phone is quite the handsome (and practically edible) gadget. It also sports a 5 megapixel camera. How many candy bars can you name that have one of those, hmm?

Over a year ago I got my very first car GPS unit, the Garmin Streetpilot C550, but already it has saved my ass many times while driving around the poorly visible and M.C. Escher-esque streets of Los Angeles. I’ve taken it with me to Vancouver and Texas where it surely saved me hours of wrong turns, and potential accidents caused by using my former navigational system, the venerable Paper Map or its offspring, the printed map from MapQuest or Google Maps.

Like pretty much any global positioning system out there, it’s not perfect. I bought it with the traffic alert attachment, which at least in L.A. is not terribly useful — it saying “Traffic Ahead” is about as silly and helpful as “Look Ma, a cow!” Gee, really? That’s nice dear.

Its navigation around total gridlock is, well, not any more useful than your own senses and knowledge of the area. More than once I have let it throw me into the middle of traffic morass when I just knew I should have acted like Luke Skywalker, listened to Ben Kenobi, turned off my “navi-computer”, and just let the Force guide me around.

Probably my favorite feature is just its ability to tell me what streets are coming up (particularly in the dark). That and being able to bookmark wherever you are the moment. I like to change my car icon to fun things like a monster truck, or a pirate ship. I have mine set to an Australian female voice. Oh, and it’s got a Bluetooth “Hands-free” mode for my cel phone, where it becomes almost like an iPhone touchscreen can spend the hour long, 7 mile commute calling friends.

One thing I don’t like about it — sometimes it says “Please drive to highlighted route” and shows a twisty purple line without any arrows indicating which way you are supposed to drive.

Still, I can’t live without this gadget now.