On the show today: A new device for tracking your sleep – or your insomnia, pepper spray taken to a more personal level, and after 30 years, Weird Al is number one.
There’s no shortage of high-tech personal fitness monitors out there, and really, no shortage of sleep diagnosis apps and gizmos either. But design firm Hello has a different take on snoozing tech with their Sleep Sense machine.
The Sleep Sense, or just the Sense, does track when you were asleep or not, but perhaps more importantly, it records what’s going on in your room while you’re dozing, including what’s in the air, lights that come on, your partner’s snoring and much more. Of course, it pairs with a smartphone app, and it also features a smart alarm that they say wakes you up at the right time, instead of just some random time. It will also score your sleep. Plus, it looks pretty cool.
The Sense is on Kickstarter right now and they’ve already blown past their $100,000 goal, but you can still get an early release Sense unit for a $99 pledge.
A lot of people carry pepper spray for self defense, but the folks at ContentVia have taken things to another level with the Defender, a pepper spray device that also packs a camera for capturing a suspect’s image.
And that’s not all. Users pair the Defender to their Apple or Android smartphone and if the device is activated, it automatically sends the image of the pepper spray target and your exact location to police through Defender’s “Everywhere Security” program. Buyers get a year of free service with purchase and after that, it looks like it’s going to be $15 a month. ContentVia says it uses some stout pepper spray and the Defender also makes a lot of noise.
The Defender project blew past their $100,000 goal in just two days, but you can still get one for a $159 pledge.
And finally, if you grew up in the 1980s, you know all about video parody king Weird Al Yankovic. He’s the guy who roasted Michael Jackson and every other star from the early days of music videos, only to fade away just like those ground breaking videos. Well, we’re happy to say, Weird Al is back.
And in a big way! In a stroke of marketing genius, Yankovic began releasing videos – really funny videos – on July 7 ahead of the release of his new album, Mandatory Fun. Then he followed up with a new video per day every day for a week, jabbing at Lorde’s Royals with “Foil” and skewering our online jabber with Word Crimes – which you’ve gotta see. Even Pharrell’s Happy gets the Weird Al treatment with “Tacky.”
The result? Mandatory Fun hit the charts at number one, and no one was more surprised than the man with the crazy hair himself. We have all eight of Weird Al’s videos right here, so check em out and have a laugh to get your weekend started.
Your host today is Greg Nibler.
