Red means stop. Stop looking in your fridge for the temple of Gozer. Stop setting your AC to Arctic. When the Home Joule turns red, it means you should consume less electricity — either because you're using a lot or because your energy costs are rising. Plug this little miser into any outlet and it displays a constant flow of data that includes your power usage, its price, and even current weather conditions. If you respond to requests for lower consumption, you can not only lower your utility bill but also earn rewards such as movie tickets. The Home Joule is available in New York now, other cities later.
Home Joule: $TBD, www.consumerpowerline.com/homejoule
Unchained Melody
So what if you can't score a record deal? Jack an iPod and four instruments or mics into the TuneStudio to record a CD-quality WAV file of your groundbreaking Esperanto power ballad onto the iPod's hard drive. You can tweak each of the four channels' sound with separate three-band equalizers and controls for level and gain, then listen to the resulting track through the headset or monitor jack. Take that, Danger Mouse!
Tune Studio: $250, www.belkin.com
Performance Enhancer
Your double life: doling out head shots to videogame mutants by night, getting shot down by your mutant boss by day. Now you can dress up your company-issue notebook for a killer evening at home. Plug the Asus XG Station into your ExpressCard slot and it shifts the burden to its own Nvidia 7900 processor, delivering nine times the graphics grunt of a typical laptop. And with its full suite of Dolby audio, the carnage sounds as good as it looks.
XG Station: $600, www.asus.com
- Joe Brown
credit Todd Tankersley
credit Todd Tankersley
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