Liberate your power strip! If you’re anything like us, you’ve got an overloaded power strip somewhere in your house with a pile of wires connected for charging up all of your portable goodies — cell phone, camera, mp3 player, an extra cell charger for when your friends come over with a nearly dead cell phone, etc. It’s an unsightly mess and, if you’re really unsorted, likely a fire hazard. So here’s to simplifying life and consolidating that socket frenzy into a single plugged multicharger.

The Five Device Recharging Station stores and powers up to five devices with four integrated AC ports and two USB ports with surge surpressors (the integrated surge protector is rated at 1,080 joules, the strongest available in a charging station). The grey front panel features nonskid surfaces to cradle your devices as they charge keeping your iPod, PDA and cell phone on display and within reach while juicing up simultaneously. This is extra handy for the traveling types as the unit easily folds flat for charging on the go (never mess with swapping cords in the hotel room again!). For $49.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer, put this on your must-have list for 2008 de-cluttering.

GM showed off their driver-free Chevy Tahoe at CES in an effort to remove “driver error” on the road. CEO Rick Wagoner says they expect to have these on the road by 2018. The video below explains more about this latest innovation.

Home ownership, while wonderful, certainly comes with some drawbacks — like maintenance. While staining the deck on my old house one sweaty summer afternoon, I started thinking about all of the hands-on upkeep around a house that can suck the will to live right out of you: cleaning the gutters, painting/staining the exteriors, and, my least favorite ever, mowing the lawn. Sure, you can hire the neighbor kid to wrangle the lawn for you, but when you’re throwing a $20 bill at him every week the expense of this outsourced luxury starts ticking up.

Which is what makes Robomow so great — sure, it’s a bit of an investment off the bat, but imagine this new residential utopia where you never again have to push a mower around for hours, wrestle with a bag of clippings, drip gas all over your shoes or waste a beautiful weekend afternoon trying to tame the wilds of your yard. Now you can leave all the grunt work to a robot; with a wire laid around the outer edges of your lawn, the robotic mower jumps to life with a press of the green “Go” button and travels the grass in a systematic criss-cross pattern covering the lawn several times from side to side to ensure that the entire yard is uniformly clipped. The Robomow features a battery powered 3 blade cutting system with a triple-chamber mulching system, working twice as fast as a typical gas mower, that cuts grass into very small clippings that are buried into the roots of your lawn where they decompose and act like a natural fertilizer. If you’re ready to pick up one of the higher end models with a charging station, you can even set a weekly program for the mower and, whether you’re home or not, the Robomow will diligently get to work at the appointed day and time then automatically return to the charging station when finished.

Robomow has been featured on a slew of programs with plenty of videos and interviews available on the Robomow online store website at robomowerusa.com. Here’s a quick video that shows the Robomow zipping across the lawn — and only the lawn.

With four mower models available, you can choose which version is best for you — the site provides a chart with lawn size estimates to help determine which mower model fits your lawn — and prices from $999 to $1799 with free shipping. Granted, it’s a bit of a jump in price from your standard upright mower, but when you consider the longterm costs and quality time earned by sidestepping this annoying chore, you can see why it’s the best selling robotic lawnmower around.

Sure, digital photo frames are all the rage these days, but what about a more creative (and permanent) way to preserve your favorite photos? If this doesn’t scream “perfect Mom gift”, I don’t know what does — the folks over at Light Affection specialize in turning your beloved photos into working light pieces, from night lights to framed standing lamps.

The technique is based on an old art form called lithophanes, the process of creating a porcelain engraving that comes to life when illuminated from behind. After submitting your favorite image (color or black & white), Light Affection carves an original piece that’s assembled into a photo frame and mounted with a backlight for a final lamp that glows in classic sepia tones.

The standing lamps include the main carved piece (your photo), a frame, a black stand, light bulb and plug-in electric cord. Production can take a couple of weeks, but for a unique gift that will always be remembered patience pays off. Prices vary depending on the final size, but be prepared to pay anywhere from $39 to $239 at lightaffection.com.

One thing you can count on every January after the fatted parties of November and December are quite literally under your belt: a deluge of diet and weight loss gadgets and programs. And, every year, the products seem to get a little more… bizarre. Like the Spring-Flex UB, a spring-based (der) exerciser made to clamp onto any desk or table for a quick upper body workout. They’re selling it as a great upper body workout that’s “good for business” — insisting that you can do your exercises at work when you’re on phone calls, between meetings, or taking a coffee break — but we’re calling shenanigans. If you’re on the phone, the last thing the caller needs to hear is you grunting and puffing, or at least deserves your undivided attention for decent business; between meetings you’re probably actually working, which overrides the luxury of hooking your hands into an exerciser and blowing work off; and during a coffee break? Really? How are you meant to actually drink the coffee while exercising? Through a straw?

Still, if you’re worried about your upper body tone and can’t seem to find any time to work it out other than at work, the Spring-Flex UB is available from Gadget Universe for $79.95. Note: this product does NOTHING for the case of the spreading office ass, so don’t forget to get up and walk around every now and again.

Is newer always better? We took the Motorola RAZR2 for a test drive to see how it stacked up against the first generations and found it slick and stylized, everything the press promised it would be. The first thing you notice after charging up is how impossibly clear the new screens seem in comparison to the older versions; a solid and elegant chunk of molded metal and plastic (the keypad has graduated from the etched metal to a grooved heavy plastic) features an internal and external display set that immediately blows you over, perfect for video playback and scanning info without squinting. Playing up to its media features, the external screen has a touch-sensitive strip along the bottom allowing you to control your music playback without engaging the keypad, and supports up to 2GB of onboard memory (enough for up to 1000 songs) for easy storage of your mp3s, pictures and videos on the go (check below for samples of pictures taken with the RAZR2).

Answering a long call for faster Motorola software, the company also upgraded to a lightning-fast 500mhz processor to help speed things along as you stream audio and video directly . There’s some concern that this may actually drain the battery much faster than before (one friend insists he has to recharge every evening, but this may also be a product of sitting on the phone all day), but we’ve only had to recharge every few days without much problem on the standard battery. Plus synching up with your computer is a snap — no cables or software necessary to crack to code, just use the Bluetooth feature to download photos from your phone, drag-and-drop new ringtones from your arsenal of mp3s, or back up your contact list. The new RAZR2 features Motorola’s Crystal Talk technology which works to reduce noise and adjust volume automatically leading to quality, clear calls on both ends of the phone (it’s not another one of those “phone in a box” speakerphone mobiles). If your service is carried through Sprint Nextel or Verizon, you can also utilize a built in receiver to pick up GPS satellite signals for pointed driving directions when you’re in a lurch.

The RAZR2 also comes with a full media player with the ability to sync with Microsoft Windows Media Player 11, a full HTML web browser, external music keys, point-to-point video, built-in email functionality, Google mobile search, USB 2.0, stereo Bluetooth, and Haptics technology that provides vibrating feedback when the keys are pressed. The RAZR2 is available in 3 versions: the V9 (3G HSDPA), the V9m (EVDO CDMA) and the V8 (GSM).

Photos taken with the RAZR2:

Thanks to the guys over at hField Tecnology we had an engaging new gadget to play with over our holiday vacation. The Wi-Fire is a USB device that extends wireless access connections from up to 1,000 feet away which is three times further than a traditional internal wireless adapter.

The Wi-Fire uses a powerful directional antenna, highly sensitive receiver and proprietary software (which is included) to find and enhance normal Wi-Fi signals. Now we are not saying that just because you will be able to find and connect to a range of wireless connections that you should do so willy nilly but, with this product and an open network or with the help of the guys over at Whisher you will be equipped to do so.

Right out of the box the Wi-Fire delivered. We installed the simple to use software, plugged in the directional antenna, and instantly we were able to see 6 new connections that were previously undetectable with our regular Linksys USB adapters. In addition to our new found networks our own network signal went from 85% to a full 100% once we properly aligned the antenna.

If you live in an area with a lot of open Wi-Fi networks or have a large area to cover with your own network the guys over at hField are definitely on to something with the Wi-Fire. With an MSRP of just $79 you should seriously consider the Wi-Fire the next time you are in the market for a new wireless adapter.

‘Tis the season to keep your best single malt on lockdown! Ever notice after a night of having friends over that your best liquor bottles suddenly have only a couple of jiggers left, even after reminding your sloshed guests that the party favors were restricted to the bottles left out in the open? Because there’s always that joker that’s going to take the time to dig deep into the dark corners of your bar cabinet no matter how well you think you’ve hidden your best booze, the Liquor Lock is ready to puzzle — and stop — your misbehaving friends. The concept is pretty simple: replacing the standard cork or screw top, the lock fits atop your bottle with a 3 digit combination lock. To set in place, just enter the combination and turn the top clockwise, effectively expanding the rubber stopper inside and locking the top on tight. With the right code, opening is a reverse of this two-step and releases the pressure of the rubber with a counter-clockwise turn. At $14.95 each from Sporty’s Men’s Collection (or $13.50 each for 3 or more) it may not be the best solution to secure all of the bottles in your liquor cabinet, but it’s a great start for the special bottles in your collection.

(Skip to the end for photos taken with this camera.) Don’t judge a camera by it’s LCD screen — this may be the biggest lesson we learned with the Fujifilm FinePix Z10fd. While using the camera and adjusting the color and available manual settings, we were sure that every picture was going to come out blurry and with an overly blue hue given what was being displayed by the preview LCD screen; changing from one pre-set camera mode to another seemed to barely alter the color composition of the image in the viewfinder, but after downloading batches to the computer we found a completely different set of pictures than what had been displayed on the camera. Why would there be a color disconnect between the LCD and actual picture? Can’t be sure, but in trying to correct the apparent blue overtones we managed to do some real overcompensating; nothing that a round in Photoshop couldn’t fix, but it’s an extra step you might rather do without.

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Tell me about your childhood… Ever had one of those friends that constantly needs to dump their emotional baggage on your doorstep? Played barstool therapist a few times too many? Take a classic passive-aggressive stab at the problem and start gifting the Wind-Up Freud Pillow to all of your troubled friends — now they can bitch and moan in the comfort of their own home with a silkscreened Freud at their ear. Doubly hilarious: there’s a wind up music box buried in the fluff stuffing that plays “Memories (The Way We Were)”. Made of 100% cotton, the conversational pillow is available from The Unemployed Philosophers Guild for $32.95.