Doktor A, the creator this and other steampunk toys must be a mad genius living in the wrong time period. You can see his work currently on display at Gallery1988.

Just arrange cards in a semi circle in front of the device, place the planchard in the center of the cards, then set dial A to the spirit you wish to contact. Set dial B to the time since death if known. After that, you fully wind the patented clockwork mechanism. Next, you sit in a circle around the device and join hands. Once the spirit is contacted start asking questions using Morse code via the tap key mounted on top of the case.

Chalk this one up as yet another thing that will be lying around your home, waiting for infants and those with Homer Simpson IQs to put in their mouths. Hershey’s is teaming up with Jazwares to develop a line of consumer electronics that will have you craving sugar and running out to get some chocolate.

Look for 1 to 4GB USB drives shaped like your favorite treats. It’s not just USB drives though. Expect some digital cameras, earphones and speakers too, whether they take the form of Hershey’s Kisses or Mr. Goodbar. Prices should be in the $15 to $30 range. No release date yet. Expect them to end up in Halloween bags in affluent neighborhoods…Or regular neighborhoods by mistake.

Something interesting is happening in Germany and for once it has nothing to do with David Hasselhoff. It has to do with the fact that municipal budgets are tight. Many towns throughout the world are turning off street lights at night to save money. Saving money and electricity is awesome. But we need light when we need light. Like when old ladies are walking home.

So some German towns seem to have found a solution. Their lighting grids have been modified with a system called Dial4Light. That means that residents can use their cellphones to turn on the lights street by street. When 15 minutes passes, a timer turns the street dark again. That means less wasted energy and residents still have light.

Sirius XM is preparing to file for bankruptcy and it could happen within days, according to the New York Times. A bankruptcy would make Sirius XM one of the largest casualties of the economy. It would be the second-largest Chapter 11 filing so far this year.

The article speculates that the move might be designed to pressure Dish Network and EchoStar owner Charles Ergen into making an offer. According to the Wall Street Journal, he offered to purchase the satellite radio group last year, but was brushed off. Anyway, he apparently wants to try again.

Check out this great innovation in the world of packaging. Shown at the Nepcon world expo in Japan, a company named Sealedair demonstrated the ‘Pack in instance’ packing system. It looks like a perfect way to pack delicate items for shipment and it can be used no matter what product or box size you’re working with.

Just insert the packing material, inject the gel and you have a perfect mold of the object where it rests comfortably. It may just be the future of packing materials. I assume the real trick would be to make it cheap enough to be affordable to use.

You want to eat healthy, but it’s hard. Those nutritional labels are small for a reason. So they are hard to read. You’d rather focus on how delicious those chips are going to taste in an Oreo sandwich. But some of us actually want to know what we are putting in our bodies. Some people are obsessive about it. Whether you are just watching your sodium intake or you believe that too much high fructose corn syrup will give you erectile dysfunction, it could sure be easier to read those labels with a shopping cart like this.

These carts feature a built-in magnifying glass so you can easily read the package as well as have a closer look at the shrinking boxes they are giving us for the same money. The carts can be found at a co-op in Geneva, Switzerland, but I think we here in the US could do with some.

Looks like there was a happy ending for Chris Ogle. He’s the New Zealander who purchased an MP3 player that turned out to be full of classified US Army stuff from a thrift store. According to Reuters, the man gave the device back to US authorities.

But as a reward for his cooperation, he got a brand new MP3 player. We don’t know what brand he got, but we suspect that Uncle Sam bought it for him with your tax money. We will probably never know. But, hey at least they did that much for him.

New York Representative Pete King wants the US to have a law that requires all cameraphones make noise when they take a picture. It’s not unheard of. Japan and South Korea already have similar laws. In his quest for cameraphone sound King has re-introduced the “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act,” , which sounds very urgent and dramatic.

They tried it first in 2007, but it died. The idea behind the bill is to prevent people from taking cameraphone pictures without other people knowing. That’s what the sound is all about. It would sound off and be “audible within a reasonable radius” and you would not be able to disable it.

When you buy used stuff like computers, ipods etc, you can sometimes find surprises inside. Cool games, songs you like, porn… Chris Ogle bought an MP3 player for $14.50 at an Oklahoma second-hand store that had a much bigger surprise inside. 60 files that contained classified info like Iraq and Afghanistan deployed soldiers’ personal info, mission briefing and even a base equipment manifest.

Chris says the MP3 player never worked properly, so when he plugged it in to see why, he found the files. What he got was huge lists of soldier’s SSNs, cellphone numbers and health info. Chris is reportedly returning it to the DOD upon request. Hell, we all lose our flash drives from time to time.

Circuit City has been one of the hardest hit electronic’s retailers in this economy. After announcing the closing of many of it’s stores in November and saying that they would not be shutting down additional stores in December, looks like they will be closing down more after all.

The company’s CEO admitted that liquidation might be a very real possibility if a sale of the company didn’t occur by January 16th, and well, time’s up. According to a report from the AP, the once giant electronics retailer will be forced to liquidate after all, which is good news for bargain hunters and bad news for employees.

Something caused this wind turbine in the UK to break. It could have been any of a million things, all very rational. But residents of the village of Conisholme, in Lincolnshire are having none of that. They know that aliens did it. And they don’t need any stinkin’ Men In Black, Mulder & Scully, Leonard Nimoy, Agents from Majestic or Alien corpses to prove it.

They claim that they saw bright lights in the sky “like an octopus’ tentacles” right around the time that the blades were damaged. Others claim that the damage was the result of a “cow-sized ice chunk” and even a “robot stealth bomber” was blamed. According to The Guardian, the mysterious lights were most likely from fireworks being shot off for one of their 80 year old residents. But what are you going to believe, something rational, or stories about aliens in robot stealth bombers?

It took long enough didn’t it? But it has arrived. The same benefits of HD DVD have finally made it over to Blu-ray. A Blu-ray/DVD hybrid disc. It features a single-layer of Blu-ray on one side and a standard DVD on the very same side (You won’t have to flip it).

As you are used to hearing, it’s appearing first in Japan, with something called Code Blue emergency helicopter doctor Blu-ray BOX as the first hybrid title. It’s a shame we have to miss that one. No word yet on when or if we will see this technology in the states, but a little backwards compatibility never hurt anybody.

Here’s a great idea. If you ride your bike at night, hopefully you have reflectors attached so cars can see you and you don’t get ran over. Thing is, there is now a better type of reflector for your bike, as in making the entire bike a reflector. Did I mention that it’s invisible?

Impossible you say? Not anymore. It’s made possible by retroreflective vinyl. The material looks black under normal light, but turns completely and utterly white and reflective when a bright light, like headlights shines on it. It also gives you a two-color chameleon-like bike. You can actually buy it and do it to your own bike.

Energizer has partnered with Pandora Radio to create a brand new message board that caters to passionate users of the Pandora community. Many of you are faithful users of Pandora, so I don’t need to tell you how awesome the popular internet radio site is. The new message board is a place where users can share tips on how they use Pandora as well as be a part of posts by up and coming artists and discussions on all kinds of musical subjects.

The message board just launched and since the subject here is music, Energizer, Pandora and Slipperybrick want to help stuff your stocking with some extra music. We’re giving away TEN $20 iTunes vouchers.

In what could be the first step toward recording your dreams, researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor. That means it won’t be long before you can share your thoughts and dreams with others the way you share your flickr pics. They’ve successfully displayed simple images produced in the human brain on a computer screen.

The device converts electrical signals sent to the visual cortex into images that can be viewed on a computer screen. In the experiment, they showed test subjects the six letters in the word neuron and successfully reconstructed the word on screen by measuring brain activity. So, is this awesome or scary as hell? I vote scary.