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Lego-inspired helmet concept protects your brain, reads comics so you don't have to
Love comic books, but think that reading is for dumb jerks? Jonathan Robson has your back. The Scotland-based designer has created this minifigure-inspired helmet, which will help you make it through that sequential tome while protecting your head from lightweight falling debris. The helmet has volume control and a page skipping button on the side while, on the back, there's a port for plugging in a Lego USB flash drive loaded up with audio content. The helmet is designed for kids, of course, but it should also work for tiny-headed grownups sick and tired of all of those pesky word bubbles. Another view of the concept after the break.
Playdisc: the single-album DAP
Remember back in the day when you used to have to carry a bag full of CDs, cassettes, or eight tracks if you wanted some musical variety on the go? Well we thought that the popularity of digital audio players would have convinced manufacturers that people prefer toting around less stuff to more stuff, but a company called Axxen Korea apparently feels that there's still a demand out there for lugging around albums on physical media. Instead of creating a new format to store music on, however, Axxen has come up with a strange product called the Playdisc that can best be described as a DAP whose playlist never changes. So if Slick Rick were to come out with a new album and decide to release it on one of these 128MB devices, you'd have to bring it with you anytime you wanted to listen to the tunes, along with the rest of the Playdiscs you might have a jonesing for that day. Now we can see the appeal of preloaded audio players for content like books on tape -- where you only want to listen once and then dispose of it -- but it seems ridiculous to store anything with replay value on separate, dedicated devices. Needless to say, we can't see this technology going anywhere, but if folks do start giving up their iPods in favor of cases of Playdiscs, we'll have to admit that we don't know as much about consumer preferences as we thought we did. Keep reading to check out the type of battery you'll need to buy in bulk in order to power a bunch of these things...
