The Tesla dealership is quiet as a cage of sleeping panthers. A pack of the electric roadsters, in varying degrees of grey, are strewn across the show floor looking 120mph standing still. I imagine most of them are awaiting for a venture capitalist to pick them up and take them from meeting to meeting for the rest of their uneventful lives. But outside is a bright blue roadster ready for the 10 minutes Telsa and God have handed me. This is my long awaited drive in the Tesla roadster.

[Photos by Monica Laipple and Giz, drive via Tim Ferriss]

Studying her lines it is clear to me this car has Lotus DNA, even though the car is much cleaner and classically beautiful looking than any bug eyed Elise or Exige, and more technologically advanced than the submarine Lotus James Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me (Thanks Ray). The British car maker helped to design the aluminum chassis, which weighs less than 200 pounds, and they handle early stage manufacturing. Tesla stresses that the Roadster is not just an electric Lotus, and it shares no more than 10% of the parts. Much more thought went into this car to simply dismiss it as such. But Tesla's engineers did choose to work with Lotus for a reason, the same reason why most auto journalists consider the Elise one of the last pure sports cars around and a great deal. The low power, light weight cars are simply one of the best handling and thrilling drives out there, described as some as a street legal go kart, and I'd agree that its one of the best driving experiences I've ever had. With shared genetics, this is perhaps the best way to judge the limits of electric performance as compared to their gas counterparts.

It's rare that Tesla lets people drive the car without a company copilot, so we'd be tailed by a Lexus chase car since I'm sitting copilot to Tim Ferriss, the guy who set up this ride, for the first shift. Starting the car is silent, and we kept trying to turn it over because we're idiots. If you don't step on the gas accelerator, there is no idle, so the car does not move forward even when your feet are not on the brakes. When Tim takes off from the lot, before I hear road noise and wind, I hear the odd purring of gears, which can almost be described as turbine like. With one gear and no engine noise, its surprisingly hard to gauge speed except by the pressure applied to the headrest by the back of your skull, the churning in your stomach or the unintended roller coaster face of your passenger. (Me.) Looking at the speedometer would be idiotic at these rates, in local traffic, but somehow we make it to about 60 for brief bursts on our way to the highway.

The rates to 60 are rated at 3.9 seconds by virtue of the electric motor's 248 HP and 280 Torque. By comparison, it bests the fastest road legal Lotus by a 10th of a second, but the power to weigh ratio is on par with the standard Elise because the battery pack brings it to 2700 pounds (over 700 pounds heavier than the Elise). The key here is that the car doesn't have to take the time to switch gears and electric motors deliver 100% of their torque at start. That power curve caused some problems earlier in two previous transmissions, which were being destroyed after a few thousand miles. To overcome that problem with the latest, more durable single gear tranny, Telsa wisely used a motor with a 14000 RPM redline that could keep rotating faster in a low gear to achieve a top speed of 125MPH, while improving on the 2008's single gear transmission time to sixty miles per hour down from 5.7 seconds to 3.9 seconds.

Behind the wheel, I found that the entire system works together to deliver power like thick gobs of thick yogurt, with no drive lash on throttle or lift, but not too buzzy either. I have to admit it's the perfect amount of torque for a car this weight, somewhere in between detroit muscle and a peaky four banger in a rice rocket. With traction control off, something I was prohibited from doing, I hear you can do doughnuts in the car, something not too easy in many roadsters. That's what I heard, anyhow. In some ways, it feels automatic, without the third pedal, but when you lift off the throttle, the car's regenerative systems seize power through engine braking. It feels like you're lifting off after revving high in second or third gear in a manual transmission sports car. Tim often didn't have to use the brakes, preferring to wind down to almost nothing by engine braking alone. I'd test the brakes later. We'd entered the highway, and the car's acceleration to 80 was great, but power tapered off closer to 110 as aerodynamics of a open top car caught up to it and torque fell. Hypothetically.

I knew the acceleration was appropriate for a car of the future, besting many gas vehicles out there. But one thing I'd never heard about was what all the battery weight (again, 2700 pounds vs sub 2000 pounds) was doing to the car's handling; the Tesla would not likely turn and brake like a space age wonder considering similar chassis, brakes, wheels and suspension There's no escaping the laws of physics. Even magical electric cars want to stay in motion, when in motion.

I snaked the car through a set of S turns, but behind other cars, so I was not able to find much data other than the car's does not oversteer easily. Through a banked onramp to highway 280, the ghetto skidpad, I wasn't light on the gas accelerator, and on the smooth, 270 degree banked circle, I could feel the car's rack and pinion wanting to push a bit. I wasn't sure of my speed, so its impossible to say when confidence was starting to fade. The chase car driver later implied they had to slow down 60 on the ramp, but I doubt I was going much faster than that. I'll conclusively say that the car handles less confidently than an Elise, but will destroy many road going sedans and coupes.

Back off the highway, with the chase car still catching up, I got a chance to try the brakes quickly rounding a corner and heading towards traffic. With a second lane opening up, I slammed them. Warm tires and chattered across the rough, slightly downhill road and I was forced to take the other lane or eat SUV. I felt the weight, and expected the car to stop shorter.

But here's something to chew on. I have no conclusive data of how fast we were going, given the singlegear, quiet propulsion of the vehicle. I could have been going 35, I could have been going 60, so it's not fair to judge the car's handling or braking. And Tesla and the internet have no skidpad, slalom or braking distance test results for the car. Conspiracy? I can't say. None of this really matters, because the Tesla Roadster is unique as a performance oriented electric car and deserves heaps of praise for what it is and how it feels to drive despite its efficiency from battery to wheels of 80-90%. Most gas engines sit at about 20%. Provided your public utility has some measure of efficiency to their electric production, you can do a lot of good in this car.

I wouldn't be describing this car properly without describing the interior. The Roadster's insides look similar but have been improved over its sister cars from the UK. Door sills have been lowered to make entrance easy (although still requiring some level of acrobatics) the leather seats are more comfortable and heated, the premium stereo is a single DIN JVC KD-NX5000, which features DivX and DVD playback, as well as navigation and a 40GB HDD and iPod dock. The position of the stereo is sort of low on the dashboard. The stereo's imaging is superb and there's a sub somewhere in the tiny cockpit thumping away. There's an electric touch LCD on the left managing battery charge, tire pressure monitors, etc. Your ass is dragging probably 8 inches from the ground.

I can't afford this car. If I wanted something similar to this in shape, feel and performance, I'd probably buy a used Elise for $30k if I could get over the bug eyes. But I can assure you that a Tesla is still a hell of a a car, by electric or gas terms, even if its just a bit more portly and more expensive than a comparable Lotus. I mean, its fast. It's electric. It's efficient. It's sexy. And you can actually buy it if you're rich. And while Tesla as a company may have had some problems in manufacturing at first, they didn't wait for old industry to get off its ass and build something revolutionary. Like Android, I hope it catalyzes the fossil fuel makers traditional makers into a game of catch up with cars that are just as fast and efficient, and hopefully a lot cheaper. And if that doesn't leave you somewhat impressed, then you belong with the dinosaurs.

Note: Impressions from a 10 minute drive are going to be impressions from a 10 minute drive, nothing more.

[Special Thanks to Tim Ferriss for facilitating this drive and donating half of his drive time to me, and for photographer Monica Laipple for the better shots above. Some more videos over at Tim's site. ]

As its name implies, Fake Calls simulates receiving a phone call shortly after launching the app. You can name the caller as anyone you wish, too: Steve Jobs, Mickey Mouse, Tupac Shakur — whatever gets you out of a bind.

The app costs $1 — a sound investment to me. I just gave it a test, and I can see it coming in handy on a weekly basis.

"Sorry, [insert high school acquaintance's name here]. It's Monica. She be callin' me."

Check out a video demoing the app on YouTube.

Product Page [Magic Tap via PC World]

Image: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

Dogs dressed up as iPhones! (not to mention some drinking, dancing, and general debauchery)

Related News:

• Dog dressed up in the iPhone costume for the Halloween celebration
• More Apple iPhone launch coverage from the 3rd Street Promenade Apple Store in Santa Monica, CA
• I finally understand why I don’t like Twitter
• Nokia N95, N95 8 GB, N82 Review: What do you want to know?
• Last day of CES; huge thanks to PodTech

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

7.5

The best way to see Los Angeles is at 200mph! Race at breakneck speeds through the streets of modern-day L.A. recreated in stunning detail. Drive the hottest range of real-world tuners, muscle cars, exotics and superbikes on the streets today. Customise your ride with the best after-market performance parts and custom kits. Illegal street racing with no track, no load times, no rules: welcome back to the Midnight Club!

Midnight Club is a racing series that’s been around for a while now, but this time the setting is rather different. The fourth instalment is set in a single, fully realised city in the same vain as Test Drive: Unlimited. As the title suggests, this setting is Los Angeles.

As this is a Rockstar game, the music plays a big part in the game – just as it does in Grand Theft Auto. Midnight Club: Los Angeles features The Chemical Brothers and MGMT amongst others such as Evil Nine – quite a diverse range of tracks are on offer to keep you happy whilst pulling handbrake turns around the city streets.

One thing you’ll notice when you first load the game is the visuals – there is a really good amount of detail and the car models themselves are top notch. It’s practically a real Aston Martin Vantage or Lamborghini Gallardo that you’re watching on screen – albeit the handling isn’t quite right – but we’ll come to that later.

Equally, the city itself as a setting looks really great. You’ll find the day/night cycle makes things a little different when you drive them and whether you’re cruising along Santa Monica or even up to the Hollywood Hills (notorious in real life for having street race/cruise sessions take place) you’ll enjoy how the game looks.

The game mechanic of setting up the races is actually the same as Test Drive: Unlimited. Flash your lights to initiate the challenge then race to the starting line before lining up and blasting away. Of course, apart from the ad-hoc challenges there are the usual suspects such as time trials, freeway races, A-B runs etc. Perhaps more interesting are the more mission based objectives, such as damaging another car or getting a vehicle to a specified location with no damage.

The reward system in the game is reasonably good – comprising both of money and respect. Naturally, you need both in order to make significant progress in the game and collect all of the 44 different vehicles that are on offer (bikes are included by the way, as is the current trend in racing games).

So far, so good I’m sure you’re thinking. However, there is a rather large flaw with Midnight Club: Los Angeles. It’s fairly noticeable even early on in the game. It also leads to a lot of frustration. It is quite simply the occasionally insurmountable difficulty level you’ll come across. Considering this is a game with a lot of free roaming (you don’t have to wait for loading times as you cruise) you’ll find this a rather annoying part of the game.

Unfortunately, this difficulty is an intrinsic part of the game, as it comes in the form of the enemy AI. Your opponents will act like a certain Lewis Hamilton at his best – seemingly showing no fear at all and getting the big payoff at the end. You, meanwhile, should you try this, will end up grinding into a wall or parked car and shouting very loudly at the game.

Ultimately, Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a good game but the fact that it is no longer an original concept means that I’d recommend Test Drive: Unlimited over this as there are so many similar elements to both games (it also shares the ridiculous difficulty of Platinum events in PGR3). However, the 16 player online aspect is really very good indeed – so perhaps it would make sense more for the multiplayer gamer. A good, but flawed game.

Long story short: It's the only one in the U.S. created to generate music — in this case, Rossini's "William Tell Overture" — using your car as the instrument (above).

Kate Linebaugh's article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal has the details, and follows.

Good Vibrations? A California Road Plays 'The William Tell Overture'

Drivers Heard the Music and Approved; Neighbors Grumbled About the Rumble

In early August, this quiet desert community got an odd request from Honda Motor Co. The car maker wanted to cut a pattern of grooves into a stretch of road so people in passing cars would hear the theme from "The Lone Ranger." Footage of Honda Civics "playing" the famous tune would be used in an advertising campaign.

Eager to attract business to the Antelope Valley, Mayor R. Rex Parris gave the project the greenlight. "It was a way of singing the city's praises," said Mr. Parris, wearing black cowboy boots with his business suit on a recent sunny afternoon.

Instead, the novel "singing road" bitterly divided this city of 145,000 people. Residents living within earshot complained of constant noise from the song. "Why don't I come to your house at 3 a.m. and butcher the 'William Tell Overture' and see how you like it," grumbled Brian Robin, a 43-year-old public-relations consultant who lives in a two-story house with his wife, two kids and four cats a quarter-mile from the musical road.

Opponents like Mr. Robin pushed to fill in the grooves, posting homemade signs around nearby neighborhoods. Proponents, however, saw the stretch of asphalt as an American icon — the country's first melodic sequence of rumble strips and thus a piece of history for their town and their children. They urged the mayor not to give in to the will of a small minority. In the past few weeks, both groups have had their way.

Singing roads first flourished in Asia. Built in three locations in northern and central Japan, they were the product of a team of researchers at Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute. After driving over the marks on a road left by a bulldozer, the Japanese scientists determined that cutting grooves at measured intervals onto a road's surface created vibrations producing notes up and down the scale.

A similar road in South Korea plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb," according to a video on YouTube.com. More than a decade ago, in Denmark, another road used a technology that made use of buttons above the road's surface.

The idea that led to Lancaster's rendition of the cavalry charge in Gioacchino Rossini's "William Tell Overture" came from Honda's Santa Monica advertising agency, Rubin Postaer & Associates. Advertising executives there were inspired by a YouTube video of a man playing Mozart by attaching rods to his Rollerblades that hit water-filled bottles as he skated down a street.

RPA hired a production company that enlisted former punk drummer K.K. Barrett and his mathematician-musician friends to tune the pavement. Mr. Barrett, whose career began as the drummer for the Screamers, a Los Angeles techno-punk band, went to work on the Rossini piece.

By cutting ¾-inch deep grooves set 2 inches apart into asphalt, he was able to find a high F. With the same grooves 4 inches apart, he got a low F. From there, he measured his way to find all the 12 notes in between.

The width of the grooves determined the loudness of the sound. Half an inch was too soft, Mr. Barrett said, so he made it an inch. In retrospect, he says, that may have been too much. "We wanted to make sure it was loud and it was," he said. Nobody measured decibel levels, but city officials found the music could be heard half a mile away.

The noise catapulted the Civic Music Road, as it was called, from civic attraction to civic dispute.

The road was completed in early September. And just days later, residents began posting videos of the 30-second drive online, attracting thousands of hits and hundreds of visitors to this quiet dusty city about 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The new popularity of the stretch on Avenue K soon created traffic problems and lots of illegal U-turns made by listeners who wanted to hear the masked Texas Ranger's theme over and over again.

For some of the hundred homes within half a mile of the road, that was a problem. Debra White Hayes couldn't sleep through the noise, which she described as incessant droning "like monsters." Thinking it was local teenagers partying, the retiree called the sheriff. But the noise didn't stop. With each interrupted night's sleep, her asthma got worse, she says. When she discovered the tune was to be a permanent fixture in her neighborhood, Ms. White Hayes says she wrote Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mr. Parris says it wasn't the complaints of nearby residents that caused the city to decide to repave the road. "Quite frankly, I would have saved the road if it weren't for the safety concerns." After the mayor ordered the repaving, he said City Hall got 500 phone calls from residents demanding that the musical road be saved. Fans lined up for two miles on the desert highway to experience the final days of the melodic rumble strips. David Gilroy, whose house is about 500 feet from the road, painted a sign to get people to call City Hall and advocate to keep the road. "It's history for our kids," said Mr. Gilroy, downing a Bud Light behind his house. His daughter and a 12-year-old friend collected three-and-a-half pages of signatures at their school to save the attraction.

"Of all the things you think people will react to," mused Mr. Parris. "It was immediate." The campaign "was vitriolic and it even had a level of organization. Their complaint: How dare you cave in to a few complainers."

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 23, 18 days after the musical road was created, construction crews steamrolled fresh new asphalt over the music-making grooves. Honda footed the $20,000 bill. A day later, passing cars produced nothing but a gentle hiss.

Mr. Parris, however, didn't want to give up the tourist attraction and the marketing potential for his city. He marshaled city officials to find a new location — a stretch of road out toward the airport with a median to make U-turns safer, and no nearby residents. He reached out to Honda to finance a repeat performance. But, this time, the car maker wasn't interested.

The city went ahead anyway and 24 days after the first road was paved into silence, a new one had been put in, with 1,270 feet of grooves tuned to Rossini's score. The city paid $30,000 for the job, and officials are confident they'll find a new sponsor, or even "a revenue-generating application," Mr. Parris says, "like a jingle."

Mark Verstegen has trained some of the greatest athletes in the world at his Athletes' Performance facilities in Arizona, California, and Florida. It's the kind of place where you go if you're hoping to be a top pick in the NFL draft, but need to boost your 40-yard dash time. The trainers work intensively with these elite athletes, using Verstegen's techniques, which focus heavily on increasing functional strength and mobility.

So how do you take this experience with the best of the best, and apply it to us mere mortals? Verstegen has written books about his Core Performance method, but last month he opened the Core Performance Center, a gym in Santa Monica that blends his training ideas with some seriously tech.

"One of the key factors in training pro athletes and "achievers" alike is creating a path for sustainable success," says Verstegen. "If you peel back the layers and job titles on athletes and achievers, you will find what I call a "Red Thread" commonality--the instrinsic commitment to excellence, so ultimately the approach to performance is very similar."

The achievers that Verstegen mentions are the target consumers for the Core Performance Centers. "They're people who want the best in life and are willing to work to achieve it," says Verstegen. "To me, this includes busy moms, overscheduled executives: really any individual who is constantly asking "how can I improve?" Our job is to match their commitment, providing them with proven systems and specialists to ensure that they meet their performance goals."

A central part of the experience at the Core Performance Center is a custom-designed machine called the CPro (it's pictured at the top of the story). When you start your workout, you log into the CPro, and it retrieves your workout history, and the results of your evaluation by the onsite coaching team. It knows what your workout should be today, and it's ready to guide you through it.

But first, the machine asks you how you're feeling. If you're feeling good, you're ready to go. But if you say your tired, or sick, or injured, it asks for more information about what's bothering you, and uses that information to modify your workout.

"The idea for the CPro came from my years of coaching," says Verstegen. Every Coach at Athletes' Performance has an Assistant Coach working with them, whose job is to set up the next movement for the athlete, to record each movement the athlete has completed, and to help motivate the athlete to complete just one more repetition or work that much harder in a training session. The CPro accomplishes that same objective in the CPC: it demonstrates movements, records each individual's performance, and automatically adapts if a member is having a tough day or just doesn't feel well."

It's that level of adaptation that makes Core Performance Center so interesting to someone like me, who's been dedicated to tracking his workouts at a micro level. When you walk in the door, you put on a heart rate strap, and the system tracks every beat until you leave. Each repetition you do on the Cpro--using compressed air rather than weights for resistance--is measured for the wattage you produce. The effort you expend doing aerobic work on a treadmill or stationary bike is also captured.

And then all of that is looped back into your plan for the next work out. Basically, the Core Performance Center looks to replace the most time-consuming part of a coach's job--creating training plans--with tech, freeing up the coaches to, you know, coach.

"For us, the technology enables us to move toward more meaningful interactions with people on the floor during their workouts," says Craig Friedman, the Director of Methodology for Athletes' Performance. "It's like a really smart assistant coach."

But that sort of power doesn't come easily. "There are 18,000 rules in the CPro's code base," says Athletes' Performance CTO Jon Zerden. "It basically took us 18 months to translate the logic that our coaches would use to make adjustments into computer code."

Right now, there's just one Core Performance Center. But Verstegen says the company plans to open more in the next calendar year. If my soreness after a workout at CPC is any gauge, it's a super-effective way to get in shape, and the intersection of the exercise and information technologies is really impressive.

Mark Verstegen has trained some of the greatest athletes in the world at his Athletes' Performance facilities in Arizona, California, and Florida. It's the kind of place where you go if you're hoping to be a top pick in the NFL draft, but need to boost your 40-yard dash time. The trainers work intensively with these elite athletes, using Verstegen's techniques, which focus heavily on increasing functional strength and mobility.

So how do you take this experience with the best of the best, and apply it to us mere mortals? Verstegen has written books about his Core Performance method, but last month he opened the Core Performance Center, a gym in Santa Monica that blends his training ideas with some seriously tech.

"One of the key factors in training pro athletes and "achievers" alike is creating a path for sustainable success," says Verstegen. "If you peel back the layers and job titles on athletes and achievers, you will find what I call a "Red Thread" commonality--the instrinsic commitment to excellence, so ultimately the approach to performance is very similar."

The achievers that Verstegen mentions are the target consumers for the Core Performance Centers. "They're people who want the best in life and are willing to work to achieve it," says Verstegen. "To me, this includes busy moms, overscheduled executives: really any individual who is constantly asking "how can I improve?" Our job is to match their commitment, providing them with proven systems and specialists to ensure that they meet their performance goals."

A central part of the experience at the Core Performance Center is a custom-designed machine called the CPro (it's pictured at the top of the story). When you start your workout, you log into the CPro, and it retrieves your workout history, and the results of your evaluation by the onsite coaching team. It knows what your workout should be today, and it's ready to guide you through it.

But first, the machine asks you how you're feeling. If you're feeling good, you're ready to go. But if you say your tired, or sick, or injured, it asks for more information about what's bothering you, and uses that information to modify your workout.

"The idea for the CPro came from my years of coaching," says Verstegen. Every Coach at Athletes' Performance has an Assistant Coach working with them, whose job is to set up the next movement for the athlete, to record each movement the athlete has completed, and to help motivate the athlete to complete just one more repetition or work that much harder in a training session. The CPro accomplishes that same objective in the CPC: it demonstrates movements, records each individual's performance, and automatically adapts if a member is having a tough day or just doesn't feel well."

It's that level of adaptation that makes Core Performance Center so interesting to someone like me, who's been dedicated to tracking his workouts at a micro level. When you walk in the door, you put on a heart rate strap, and the system tracks every beat until you leave. Each repetition you do on the Cpro--using compressed air rather than weights for resistance--is measured for the wattage you produce. The effort you expend doing aerobic work on a treadmill or stationary bike is also captured.

And then all of that is looped back into your plan for the next work out. Basically, the Core Performance Center looks to replace the most time-consuming part of a coach's job--creating training plans--with tech, freeing up the coaches to, you know, coach.

"For us, the technology enables us to move toward more meaningful interactions with people on the floor during their workouts," says Craig Friedman, the Director of Methodology for Athletes' Performance. "It's like a really smart assistant coach."

But that sort of power doesn't come easily. "There are 18,000 rules in the CPro's code base," says Athletes' Performance CTO Jon Zerden. "It basically took us 18 months to translate the logic that our coaches would use to make adjustments into computer code."

Right now, there's just one Core Performance Center. But Verstegen says the company plans to open more in the next calendar year. If my soreness after a workout at CPC is any gauge, it's a super-effective way to get in shape, and the intersection of the exercise and information technologies is really impressive.

Opening today in Manhattan and 2 October 2008 in Santa Monica, Design Within Reach's new Tools for Living stores not only feature awesome products (nearly 800) that you can buy in the store and take with you. These smaller items are also available on the Design Within Reach site, but the experience of seeing them all in the store and leaving with them is much more satisfying. And so are the prices—with items starting at just a few dollars there is a practical item or simple gift for most household, office and gift needs. We took a tour of the new SoHo location (formerly the first DWR store in Manhattan) the other day and have a few favorites.

The Picnic Trunk with Table features everything you need to enjoy a civilized meal outdoors—plates, cutlery, glasses, napkins—and a table to put them on. $200.

The Cuboro Standard Building Block Set set is still one of the best toys around. The set comes with 54 beech wood blocks that allow you to create Rube Goldberg-esque constructions that marbles can travel through, and is as great on the desk as it is in a kid's room. $275.

Shunji Kurimori's Cedar Sake Cups and Cedar Sake Bottle (below, left) are made in the Japanese wood craft style called Magewappa. They are a beautiful example of traditional technique (Kurimori is a sixth generation artisan), modern style, sustainable design and practicality. Their unique construction and natural material maintain sake at your preferred cold or warm temperature. The bottle is $140, and a set of two cups is $80.

Another Japanese design, the Water Pitcher (below, right) uses mountain stones and charcoal to filter and enhance the water naturally. $85.

The Rainwater Hog (below, left) provides a simple and practical means of capturing 47 gallons of rainwater from the roof of your house which can be repurposed for multiple uses. Designed by Sydney-based architect Sally Dominguez because she couldn't find a similar product, the versatile Hog can be installed in many ways and joined with other Hogs if a large volume of water is collectible. True to its nature, the product is shipped without any packaging. More information available at the Rainwater Hog site. $450.

The Dave Ellis designed Tepee (below, right), one of the 150 or so products sold in the stores that are not available to take with you, provides a viable outdoor sleeping solution with a bit of character. $2,200.

These nesting Rubber Tubs (below) provide a useful product imagined from the vast quantities of used tires thrown away every year. Hand sewn as if made of leather, these unique tubs are great for storage and lugging stuff around the house. Set of three for $350.

DWR: Tools for Living SoHo
142 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Tel: +1.212.471.0280

DWR: Tools for Living Santa Monica
332 Santa Monica Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Tel: +1.310.458.0543

I read about this new technology in Anne Eisenberg's July 20, 2008 New York Times Business section "Novelties" column where she wrote, "A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas."

Here's the Times piece.

Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot

Robots already cut the grass and vacuum rugs. Now they are helping with a more artistic job: creating vast photographic panoramas with ordinary cameras.

A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.

Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.

The roboticized camera mount and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. The work was part of a project to introduce people to different countries and cultures through images.

The GigaPan provides a low-cost alternative to sophisticated motorized camera mounts on the market used to take panoramic photos, said Greg Downing, co-founder of the xRez Studio in Santa Monica, Calif., which specializes in gigapixel photography. The motorized mounts can cost thousands of dollars, he said, and typically require a high-end camera.

Dr. Nourbakhsh said the Carnegie Mellon robotic mount, to be released commercially later this year, would be priced “so that as many people as possible can afford to use it.”

“We hope it will cost in the low hundreds of dollars — well below $500,” he said. The GigaPan will attach to any ordinary point-and-shoot digital camera.

About 300 test models of the GigaPan robot and software have been tried worldwide during the past year by scientists, schoolchildren and photography fans, among others, Dr. Nourbakhsh said.

People can share their panoramas at a Web site provided by Carnegie Mellon (www.gigapan.org).

Ronald C. Schott, an assistant professor of geology at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., who tried the GigaPan during its testing phase, has posted many of his panoramas at the site. Preparing to shoot the pictures is straightforward, he said. The photographer attaches the mount to an ordinary tripod, attaches the camera and decides on the breadth of the scene. Then the robot goes to work, dividing the total vista into segments and clicking away.

Dr. Schott, who had earlier tried to create panoramas on his own by moving the tripod for each shot, thought that the robot did a far better job. “Doing it manually was tedious and often ineffective,” he said.

Dr. Schott’s GigaPan images can be seen at (http://www.gigapan.org/viewProfile.php?userid=1252). “As you zoom in you get progressively higher resolution images, and at the deepest level is the fully detailed image that the robot shot,” he said.

The details in these images often surprise him. “I find things I hadn’t noticed when I was in the field,” he said. “This gives you the joy of discovery not found in traditional photos.”

Richard Palmer, an environmental health specialist at the Hawaii State Department of Health in Honolulu, also tested the GigaPan. One main advantage of the system, he said, is that users can use a telephoto lens rather than a wide-angle one, providing more detail and depth to the image.

“That means that when you zoom in to look at the images, you are viewing them just as you would if you were looking through a pair of binoculars” with powerful magnification, he said. “You can take panoramas from video, but you won’t have a still image that you can stop and look at in this high detail.”

One of Dr. Palmer’s panoramas — of Hanauma Bay on the coast of Oahu in Hawaii — has 1,750 total frames, 25 rows by 70 columns. (http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5322) The exposures and number of frames were calculated automatically by the computer inside the GigaPan.

It took about an hour and a half for the robot to shoot the scene in a fairly silent process, with only “a low hum, and the steady click of the camera,” he said.

Dr. Palmer was busy, too, during the shoot. The robotic device attracted a lot of attention from bystanders as it captured the scene, and he ended up protecting it from them, lest they overturned it.

Dr. Palmer plans to use the GigaPan both for artistic images and for documenting Hawaii’s natural ecosystems. “It’s another way to be creative,” he said. “It’s therapy.”