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In honor of our special guest, Micky Hoogendijk, we cover gadgets with an international flare. You might think that a show as classy as this one might not include any questionable content. You would be wrong.

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Giorgio Armani extends designer touch to new mobile

Samsung Blue Earth sees light in Sweden

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/10/lgs-pop-touchsc.php

Dolce Gusto single-cup coffee maker is a beautiful thing

Dyson Fan

Speakers as thin as your TV

At first glance, James Dyson's latest invention looks like a powerful HD antenna or perhaps a small portal into another world. But in fact, the device, which carries the vaunting title of Dyson Air Multiplier, is something much more common: a fan.

What, a fan with no blades? Yes, that's exactly what you're looking at, and what makes the Air Multiplier so hard for people to classify at first. This fan uses some innovative airflow engineering to pull air up through an energy-efficient brushless motorbase and multiply it 15 times, expelling it through an airfoil-shaped ramp at a rate of 118 gallons a second, according to the press release.

Dyson, the company, says its fluid dynamics engineers spent four years "running hundreds of simulations to precisely measure and optimize the machine's aperture and airfoil-shaped ramp" and air fluctuations were mapped with something called a Laser Doppler Annometry.

(Credit: SourcingMap)

Back when I was a kid, we had to blow on our laptops (and carry them 10 miles in the snow, by the way) to keep them cool. These days, you young whippersnappers have things a whole lot easier.

Take, for example, the Chinese Beijing Opera USB laptop cooling pad. Just plug it in. It contains three quiet built-in fans to dissipate hot air from underneath your notebook and keep your system cool. But it's also a decorative nod to the high drama of Chinese opera.

The cooling pad is powered via a retractable USB cable, and is light and portable, weighing about 1.5 pounds. An added bonus: that fierce-looking red, white, and black face mask might scare off laptop thieves.

The cooling pad goes for $24.99 online, plus a $5 shipping fee. Rhythmic accompaniment not included. Thanks, Jenny, for sending this one in.

(Credit: Frontline Aerospace)

Another entrant in the race to produce a ducted-fan-propelled, vertical-take-off-and-landing UAV, the planned "humvee of the air" will morph to different missions and reach targets three times faster than helicopters, according to the manufacturer.

The official name of the vehicle is VTOL-Swift Tactical Aerial Resource, or V-STAR. With a cruising speed of 288 knots, a 650-mile range and a 400-pound payload, the V-STAR promises to be a "breakthrough solution for frontline military logistics," according to Broomfield, Colo.-based Frontline Aerospace. The aircraft would use a Rolls-Royce gas turbine with counter-rotating blades and "diamond-box-wing" design that transitions to forward flight when needed.

The company is touting the V-Star's multirole flexibility. "The modular payload approach allows for rapid change-out in the field--one minute providing troops with ammo, food, water and fuel--and the next minute providing tactical reconnaissance, communications and close combat support," according to the press release.

It's also making a pitch for green appeal, by incorporating advanced MicroFire technology to give it a decidedly un-Humvee-like fuel efficiency and reduced carbon emission footprint.

"Frankly, we are keeping our MicroFire capability somewhat under wraps at this point," said Frontline founder and Chief Executive Officer Ryan S. Wood. "But we realize MicroFire can increase endurance and fuel economy not only for UAVs, but also create significant fuel savings for a whole class of helicopter engines worldwide--thus creating a true 'green' helicopter."

MicroFire is a "high-temperature counter-flow heat exchanger that extracts heat from the hot engine exhaust and transfers it to the compressed engine air before combustion," an operation that "can sometimes double the overall thermal efficiency of the engine," according to Frontline.

Given the flying Hummer's ability to morph from attack to recon or target acquisition and then back to combat logistics all while fighting global warming--there's only one thing left to do. Build a stretch version in time for prom season.

Paramount Pictures and application developer FanRocket announced a service for Facebook users that will allow them to send movie clips to each other. The clips, which are sent as messages and last from a few seconds to several minutes, are intended to help recipients "relive the moment" in a familiar film, a studio executive told the Associated Press.

The service, called VooZoo, certainly takes message ornamentation a step or two beyond the emoticon, letting the "stars do the talking," as the FanRocket site says. I'm not sure, though, that some Facebook users will be familiar with some of the titles in the Paramount/VooZoo archive, which ranges from The Ten Commandments to Breakfast at Tiffany's to Beverly Hills Cop. Paramount said it has not set revenue goals for the project, but a button that appears at the end of each clip allows the recipient to purchase a related movie DVD.

I've written about "fan clubs" before--by and large, I think they're a scam by which very popular artists and concert promoters can charge even more money than the already ridiculous list prices. Usually, "fan clubs" make you pay a one-time fee of something like $100 for the right to buy tickets slightly earlier than the unwashed masses, then they throw in a couple of nearly worthless perks. In the case of The Police, I got the "right" to buy tickets near the top of the arena, access to online chat rooms, and a poster worth about $5. (There are exceptions--apparently Dave Matthews Band's fan club is worth the price of admission.)

You were planning on seeing them again on this leg of the tour, weren't you?

(Credit: ThePolice.com)

Fine, I was willing to pay. Once.

Happily, I happened to check out the Lefsetz Letter today and in reading through e-mails from his readers (scroll down), I noticed that The Police fan club is automatically renewing fan club memberships and charging consumers another $100 unless they GO TO THE WEB SITE AND OPT OUT. Even if you have no intention of seeing them on the final leg of their U.S. tour, even if you'll never buy another Police ticket, album, or piece of paraphernalia in your life, you will be charged $100 for another year's access to the messageboards plus "a new premium item along with some exclusive bonus material that will not be available anywhere else" (it sounds like some exclusive online video, or perhaps they'll be generous and actually ship a DVD). This nugget of useful information was buried at the very end of a mass e-mail announcing the U.S. tour with Elvis Costello. I ignore those e-mails because they sent me one every time they announced new dates. An online document explaining the automatic re-charge is here.

Unconscionable. If you get burned by this, I'm not sure you'll have any recourse. You can contact your credit card company and try to do a charge back, but I'm guessing that notification of this automatic re-up was included somewhere in the original contract, so good luck. I'm hoping that if enough people get burned, someone will launch a class-action suit.

It's amazing, but the recording industry seems absolutely committed to wringing every last buck out of fans' hands, with absolutely no concern for the long-term health of the business.

(Credit: Gadget Grid)

We appreciate additional help cooling down the computer as much as anyone else, for obvious reasons. But the way things are going, external PC fans may be getting more complicated than the climate control system for our entire building.

Take this multi-fan controller from Zalman, for example. It looks like something out of a Doppler weather center. The box can control four fans, indicates power consumption in real time on a color LCD, and even sounds an alarm when a fan stops working, according to Gadget Grid.

But what hooked us is the animated propellers. Hours of mesmerizing fun.

Solar radio visor

(Credit: Gearfuse)

Solar fan hat

Finally, the solar-powered fan hat has a mate. Let's have a round of applause for the "Solar-Powered Visor Radio."

Like its counterpart, this is a functional piece of headgear that makes use of the sun's rays to impress your friends, but for entertainment purposes as well as protection from melanoma and heat stroke. The visor has a speaker on each side, Gearfuse says, piping in tunes from a built-in AM/FM tuner.

It just goes to show that being green is no guarantee of immunity from the dreaded Date Repellant Syndrome.

(Credit: FoxFury)

Anyone who's witnessed the flash-bulb fusillade that accompanies every swing of Barry Bonds' bat knows how distracting they can be to the rest of the crowd. So we shudder to think what a massive LED barrage would look like if it becomes a stadium standard.

The "Fan Light" from FoxFury--which is already trying to make coal miners out of all of us with its headlamps--is peddling its latest bulbs as a way to show your team's true colors, or at least two of them, while in the stands. "With each shake of the arm, the colors alternate," the company says in a press release. "With other Fan Light users next to you, you can creat a light flag/frenzy, making patterns and cheering messages; all without disturbing the individuals around you." Right.

This ranks right up there with the "Taxi Hailer" in the category of dubious lighting uses. We never thought we'd say this, but is it possible to bring back The Wave?