Anyone who has picked up Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy can tell you that the author really loved his technology.  In fact, the gadgets and gizmos and home furnishing in the three books are almost characters in and of themselves, thanks to Larsson’s long, loving paragraphs of description about the makes, specs, and vintages of various things that fill the home of characters like Lisbeth Salander.

For those interested, or those that can’t instantly place a gadget to its name, the fine folks at Engadget have put together The Girl With The Insanely Long Gear List, a complete collection of the gadgets in Larsson’s world AND a gallery of appropriate images.  It’s like looking into Apple’s past, given Larsson’s Mac-centric nature.  There are also page citations for those playing the home game.

Not to be outdone, the fine folks at Apartment Therapy have put together their own version of Lisbeth Salander’s shopping cart with Lisbeth Salander’s IKEA Shopping List.  Once again, it’s a complete list of the stuff she was spending her kroner on, completely with pictures of the stuff no longer available and links to the stuff that you can buy (just in case you want to make your own Millennium Trilogy room in your house).  Even better than Engadget’s page citations are Apartment Therapy’s book citation, giving the appropriate passages with links inserted into the text!

For the record, I’ve not read any of the books.  Are they good?  Anyone with an opinion, feel free to speak up.

Lots more awesome AT&T ads at Funzug.

Somebody’s working overtime at BBC headquarters, checking in closets, desk drawers, and in between couch cushions.  Why?  Well, the British Broadcasting Corporation has somehow managed to lose some $378,000 (or 240,000 pounds) worth of electronics!

We’re not talking just mobile phones, either.  The firm has lost a staggering 146 laptops, 65 mobile phones and 17 Blackberries between April 2008 and March 2010.  On the positive side, 19 of those items were later recovered.  Of course, that still leaves 209 items still outstanding, but hey, let’s focus on the positives here!

I can understand losing phones; I lose my phone all the time in couch cushions, bedding, and on shelves.  However, losing a laptop?  That’s a much bigger issue.  How do you just walk away from laptop computer?  That seems like the kind of thing you’d miss if you wandered off and left it in a restaurant or coffee house.

The future is solar powered.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it, it won’t be long before every gadget at your disposal has a potential solar charging station, either in your house, on your backpack or briefcase, or on the gadget itself.  Life Scoop has a line-up of seven solar-powered gadgets that might not be available in America at the moment, but that probably will be before too long.

Of particular interest to me is the solar-powered cell phone from Samsung India.  It takes Samsung’s Solar Guru a good 40 hours to charge up just thanks to sunlight, but an hour will give the phone 5-10 minutes of battery life, which is more than enough to keep the thing useful throughout the day even if the battery runs dry.

A more effective solution is the solar-powered case/battery combination from Novothink.  It has solar cells to capture light, a lithium-ion battery to store the juice, and official Apple certification so you know it works with your iPod or iPhone.  Best of all, a fully-powered unit gives an iPod an additional 20 hours of listening pleasure or an iPhone an extra 4 hours of battery-draining 3G service!

Be prepared to spot a lot more reflective solar arrays in the future.

It’s August.  I know, it’s kind of shocking that the summer is already gone.  Depending on where you live, you’ve got about two weeks or so until everybody starts going back to school, and if you’re sending your kids off to college, you already know just how much that entails and just how much stuff they’ve got to take with them.  However, you, as a good parent, are preparing them for a normal life.  You’re not preparing them for college life!

Yes, all the stuff you’re sending with your kid(s) to college is useful, but where’s the really useful stuff?  You know, like a noodle timer for ramen noodles, or an alarm clock louder than a jet engine at takeoff?  Those are just two of the odd gadgets highlighted in the list of 11 dorm gadgets you never knew you needed over at MSNBC.

Believe me, that cup o’ noodle timer is going to get a whole lot of use.

Lots of people are hopping on the ebook bandwagon.  For example, Stieg Larsson has become the first author to sell over one million ebook copies of a novel.  More will be on the horizon.  In three years, ebook sales have already surpassed sales of hardback books, and that’s not going to slow down, especially since Amazon is cutting the price of the third generation of Kindle to only $139.

That’s not a bare-bones Kindle, either.  That’s with an improved E Ink screen and built-in WiFi connectivity.  If you’re somewhere with WiFi, you’re at an ebook store.  Just think, the prices are only going to get lower, and the functionality is going to get better; it’s only a matter of time.

As more people buy ebooks, and more people get ebook reading programs, readers, or whatever, you’ll start to see a razor and blade situation.  They give away the razors at cost (or lower) in order to sell you the blades. If they can get the price of the Kindle under $100, that makes it an impulse buy, or a reasonable gift buy.  Then the floodgates open and ebook sales are going to go through the roof.  You can bank on that.

The devotion of Apple fans is downright amazing at times.  No matter what the company does to them, they’ll keep coming back for more.  Antennagate hasn’t slowed down the company in the slightest; in fact, the company’s more devoted fanboys are grasping onto Antennagate as a chance to take a peek behind the doors of the Cupertino company’s top-secret testing labs.  It’s an almost religious devotion that some scholars are actually arguing IS religious in nature.  There’s a great article breaking down the religious aspects of Apple’s official public story.

The core of pretty much every religion ever can be broken down into four key elements:  creation, a hero, a villain, and some sort of resurrection or victory over death.  If you look at it, that’s definitely the official Apple narrative.  The company was founded by hero Steve Jobs, they’re opposed by villain Bill Gates and the forces of Microsoft, and when the company had forced out its founding hero, he came back just in time to save the company like a black turtleneck-wearing John Wayne to save the day.  Obviously someone in Apple’s PR department knows their Joseph Campbell (or at least their Star Wars).

What’s been kind of amazing about this whole episode is that otherwise smart people have refused to acknowledge that Apple has released a flawed product in the iPhone 4.  Or, conveniently, they’re ignoring all the evidence of the iPhone’s flawed design and continue to lust after the 4G because, well, it’s an iPhone and they want it.  I guess you want what you want, and it’s hard to argue against faith, be it faith in a religion or faith in a gadgetmonger.

It’s the summer.  That means it’s time for watermelon.  At every gathering, and at every picnic, cookout, or what-have-you, there’s going to be watermelon everywhere.  It’s just so fresh and cool and delicious.  It’s like scooping out a big mouthful of summer’s brain.  There’s no much better than watermelon.

That said, there’s not much worse than hot watermelon.  I mean, it’s still pretty good, but it’s just such a huge disappointment to have it not be all cold and delicious.  As such, you’re faced with a dilemma.  Do you sacrifice precious cooler space for a massive mound of melon?  Of course not!  You simply roll out your trusty portable watermelon cooler!

You mean you don’t have a watermelon cooler?  Well, the Joybond Watermelon Cooler is about the best watermelon cooler (or heater, for non-watermelon foods) you can get your hands on.  For $230-ish, they’ll even import it from Japan for you!  Despite being only about 14 pounds, this gadget can hold up to 14 liters, so it’s perfect for just about anything you’d want to keep cool!

Well, Apple held its big press conference today, and it’s nothing you wouldn’t have expected if you’ve ever seen a corporate butt-covering session.  Among the factoids trotted out by Steve Jobs was the fact that they’ve only had about 15,000 complaints to AppleCare out of 3 million iPhone 4G purchasers and that the iPhone 4G only drops calls at a slightly higher rate than the iPhone 3GS (which was also notoriously bad about dropping calls).  Of course, that ignores just how many actual calls per 100 are dropped by the iPhone in general and how many complaining customers have called AT&T about their crappy phone, but whatever.  Spin is spin; you can’t expect Turtleneck to give you a straight answer.

However, Apple does have a solution to the problem.  You take your beautiful iPhone and conceal its lovely design with an obnoxiously-colored rubber baby buggy bumper!  That’s right, the solution to the iPhone’s poor internal design is to ruin its lovely external design with a rubber and plastic cover-up.  That’s like taking a supermodel and making her wear a potato sack!  Sure it means she won’t get a sunburn, but you’re still ruining the best thing about her.

If there’s one good thing about the bumper crop of Apple bumpers, it’s that they’re going to be free to iPhone 4 owners.  If you’ve already bought one of Apple’s $30 rubberized monstrosities, you’ll be reimbursed for your expense.  People who bought a cheaper third party accessory to allow them to use their phone like a normal person will NOT be getting a refund, because they didn’t pay the Apple Tax.

Image: OSX Daily

While the Kindle and iPad might make reading your entire library a whole lot easier, it’ll also take you more time to do it.  While the study is very limited in scope, when a group of readers were given an Ernest Hemingway short story to read across a variety of methods, there was one universal truth:  reading was faster on a physical book and slower on an ebook reading platform.  The Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, and even a PC browser were tested versus the physical book and were all found wanting.

No matter what the platform was, the real book was faster to read.  On average, the stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read; the iPad was 6.2 percent slower while the Kindle was 10.7 percent slower.  There was no real statistical difference between the two e-reading gadgets; the PC score was not given.

Users still prefer the physical book, too; while the experience scores for the Kindle, iPad, and paper book were all roughly the same, users felt more relaxed using the book versus the technology.  Apparently, the gadgets made users feel like they were still at work when they were really trying to relax!  Fittingly, the PC’s experience score was a lousy 3.6 on a 7-point scale, really driving home the work/relaxation problem gadgets suffer from.

So while this won’t slow down the sales of ebooks or the adoption of ebook readers, it proves that designers still have a little more work to do when it comes to actually replicating the book experience in gadget form.  It’s only a matter of time (and several generations) before they perfect the form factor, but until then real books still rule the library.