Cool Stuff: Super-Geek Specials

Computerworld -

Grand Canyon Display Series
Manufacturer: Liebermann Inc., Los Angeles, Calif.
Price: Starting at $8,500



Except in a hot dance club or a humongous trade show exhibit, the most spectacular monitors you're ever likely to see are the Grand Canyon Displays. These ultrawide screens deliver resolutions up to 25 times better than VGA (6,400 by 1,200 pixels), with wide viewing angles, fast video response, excellent color fidelity and red-green-blue auto-geometry-sensing color correction. Available in 76-, 81- and 92-in. sizes, with price tags to match: $8,500, $12,500 and $17,500, respectively.

io Digital Pen
Manufacturer: Logitech Inc., Fremont, Calif.
Price: $199

Lots of computer users still want to write or take notes with pen and paper. You may remember from a few years ago the CrossPad, which tried to capture such jottings in computer-readable form, or the less-than-successful IBM TransNote laptop/pad hybrid. And current tablet PCs don't cut it for users who don't like the feel of writing on glass. Logitech offers an alternative: an electronic pen—a very large one—called the io Digital Pen and Paper. For $199, you can take and store up to 40 pages of notes, drawings and more and download them to your PC, where you can invoke handwriting recognition to hopefully turn your scribbling into editable text. One catch: You must use specially formatted paper, which is available in the form of pads, notebooks, graph paper and yellow Post-it notes.

The Duct-Tape Wallet
Manufacturer: Ducti, Monument, Colo.
Price: $10-$30



Duct tape is the ultimate in low tech—which gives it, paradoxically, a lot of high-tech appeal. Ducti makes wallets and checkbooks from specially engineered duct tape that won't lift, peel apart, get sticky or crud up with lint from your pocket or purse. According to reseller ThinkGeek.com, "These durable and well-constructed duct tape wallets are great for all programmers, but Perl coders might enjoy them the most."

Ambient Orb
Manufacturer: Ambient Devices Inc., Cambridge, Mass.
Price: $150

It doesn't really do anything, but it's curiously compelling. The Ambient Orb is a lighted sphere of frosted glass that slowly changes among thousands of colors to reflect vagaries of the weather, the state of the stock market, whether your boss is online or other conditions. You plug the Orb into a 110-volt outlet, and it's automatically up and running on a nationwide wireless network—no connection to a PC or the Internet is required. You can select your Orb's channel via a Web interface, and it will be updated regularly, perhaps as often as every few minutes. Out of the box, the Orb reflects the Dow Jones Index, glowing green to indicate prices up, red when they're down, yellow when things are calm. If there's a change of more than 1.5%, the Orb pulsates. Some weather and stock reports are free, and others are available at extra cost. A developer interface lets Web programmers control the color of their Orbs with a simple HTTP "get" call.