Kids love to hide under tables. Problem is they don’t make great forts, since every side is exposed and the adults occasionally like to eat on it. The “Daily Shelter” by artist Ingrid Brandth is a dining-room table that kids will love. It converts to a secret fort. First, it’s an ordinary table. But it can secretly turn into a shelter where kids can hide from scary ghosts or just use their imagination. Ask any kid, there’s nothing cooler than a fort. A table that turns into a fort? Pure awesomeness. [BoingBoing]

Lots of kids and more than a few adults are instant gratification sorts. It’s hard to get some people to save money and teaching kids to save can be a bigger challenge. A new bank from a company called Ekomini aims to make teaching kids to save a little easier.The bank plugs into an internet connected computer via USB and lets the kids keep up with how much change they put into the bank. The bank connects to an online virtual world letting the kids play games that encourage investment and saving. The device has a sensor built-in that reads coins as they are inserted into the

L5 Technology has launched a new accessory for your iPhone and iPod Touch that will turn it into a universal remote to control your HDTV and the rest of your home entertainment equipment.The L5 Remote is a small infrared dongle that plugs into your iPhone or iPod Touch, it comes with a free application that features everything you need to control your home entertainment setup.“With the fast pace of innovation in the smartphone market, handhelds are becoming the consumer electronics platform of choice, causing disruptions across many markets. We see peripherals that connect

The Google Chrome browser launched on the 11th December 2008 in a public stable release. Has just edged its way past the Apple Safari browser according to statistics published on the Market Share website.The Google Chrome browser now has a 4.63% share of the market with Safari at 4.46%. As you would expect IE 62.69% and Firefox 24.61% still have dominance. But its a good start for the newcomer which is gaining strength all the time.After using Firefox for a a number of years, when Chrome was released I gave it a go and found it a little difficult to live without my FF plugins to

Even though it may be digital, looking through a gallery of someone’s photos on an LCD picture frame can be just as tedious as flipping through an actual photo album or sitting through a slideshow. But Casio hopes to make things more exciting?, interesting maybe?, with their new Digital Art Frame which essentially lets you apply a small collection of Photoshop-like filters to your photos. The effects include water color painting, color pencil sketch, pointillism, gothic oil painting, oil painting, pastel painting, airbrush and fauvist oil painting, and are cheesy enough

Would you want to be able to ditch your Logitech Harmony universal remote control? If you’re an iPhone user, it seems that it might be possible, thanks to L5. The company has come up with an accessory that will clip on to the iPhone’s power socket, and allows the phone to beam commands to electrical devices up to 30ft away. The app itself will be free, but you’ll have to fork out about $45 for the device to plug to your iPhone. Features of the device include:Powerful enough to replace a coffee table full of

A company called L5 Technology introduces the L5 Remote, an accessory that turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a universal remote control. In fact, this is not a new thing as we’ve seen two similar products, the RE from New Kinetix and the RedEye from ThinkFlood.Basically, the L5 Remote is comprised of a small hardware device that plugs into an iPhone or iPod touch dock connector and a free app to be available from the iTunes App Store. The hardware device serves as signal transmitter while the app allows users to customize remote control interface. Using infrared

These Klipsch LightSpeakers don’t look like much, but if you hate wires, they should appeal to you. The LED light bulb fits 5 and 6-inch light fixtures and is even dimmable, so you can replace the usual bulbs you use with these, which will apparently last for 40,000 hours. Then you’ll be playing music wirelessly through your lights, which is what Thomas Edison wanted all along. They contain a 2.5-inch wide dispersion driver and use 20 watts. The kit comes with a transmitter that connects to a PC, CD player or iPod and sends the audio to up to eight of the light bulbs

Epson thinks that greeting cards could use a face lift and it thinks it has found the answer in augmented reality greeting cards. On the website they’ve set up for the end of year nengajo cards and they show how easy it is to use one of their Colorio printers to print off a color postcard with a picture of your face over a cute picture of 2010’s year of the tiger character. When you hold it up to a webcam it brings the augmented reality to life. If you like that sort of thing, a video can be found here.[Gizmodo]

The latest iPhone app to turn your phone into an instrument is the String Trio, an air violin, viola and cello application for the iPhone. 20 classical and folk songs are included, while the greySox app plays with strokes of the virtual “bow”. The iPhone’s motion sensor is used to detect the angle and length of the strokes and adjusts the playback of the music accordingly. String Trio is available at the iTunes App Store for $1.99.Good luck on your first concert.[Technabob]