Vulture Bytes: Obsolete-Media Furniture and a Pinocchio Stylus
We’re as surprised as you that the pop-culture-infused gadgets keep coming, week after week. This week we bring you: a chair made out of cassettes, a Chap Stick for your iPhone, a collection of film-festival-approved short films, a hands-free stylus for your iDevice, and Al Gore’s new vision of the future.
While you click through, remember, your tips are never in short supply over at VultureBytes@gmail.com.
Finally, you can realize your life goal of sitting on Phil Collins. This chair, made by some Spanish designers whose fondest memories must all have taken place in the eighties, is, as you can see, made of cassettes. We can only imagine it’s as uncomfortable as it is imaginative. But it’s more than just a nostalgia cushion; it’s also equipped with nostalgia technology. Bolted to the side of the chair is a Walkman so that you can put your old cassettes to use as you sit on top of someone else’s. Postmodern in all the right ways. PRICE: 230 Euros if you’re having it delivered to the U.S. 
Over the months, Vulture Bytes has offered dozens of iPhone and iPad cases that are small variations on the ones Apple recommends. But we have a confession to make: We don’t actually believe that you need a case for your gadget. It seems so silly to be covering up the very thing that you’re protecting. Keeping the back of an iPhone unscratched doesn’t matter if you can never actually look at that back. And what bugs us even more are those screen protectors. The glass was made to be touched. But the smudges, you say. To which we respond: use NuScreen HD. It’s a Chap Stick for your iPhone, keeping the glass smooth and less fingerprinted than it would be otherwise. This way, when you’re using the phone, you don’t have to feel like you’re covering up that which was built in Jobs’s image. PRICE: $20 
Since you’re a Vulture reader, you likely read film-festival coverage with the same aspirational lust you once reserved for your older siblings’ social cliques. The parties! The people! The time spent in dark rooms not talking to the pretty people sitting next to you! We felt the same way last week when the Tribeca Film Festival was in town and our invite to all the after-parties got stuck in our spam filter. So instead of going, we stayed at home and gathered around YouTube to watch the short films we could have seen at the festival. YouTube has been stealthily collecting shorts from a handful of artists and film festivals — Sundance and Tribeca included — for a few months now. Eight of Tribeca’s are up, one of which suggests the world will end (and we’ll all fall in love) when the earth loses its gravitational force. PRICE: Free 
Vulture Bytes, long a champion of iPad styluses, brings this next item to you out of obligation. It’s another touch-screen stylus — a nose-mounted one. It’s not for sale, though you could easily make your own with a touch stylus, some plaster, and a midnight viewing of Phantom of the Opera or Roxanne. It’s obviously a joke. But like all good comedy, there’s a grain of truth somewhere in there. An extra digit has never been needed more than in this multi-touch era. Absent that, we’ll have to make the best of what we’ve got. Not recommended for video-chat use unless you’re into that sort of thing. PRICE: Consult your local crafts store. 
It wasn’t enough for Al Gore to warn us all about the future of the planet. Now he’s warning us about the future of books. His latest, Our Choice, is another about global warming, and this one comes not just as a book, but also as an app. He’s partnered with Push Pop Press to make global warming seem slightly less boring (but just as important etc., etc.), with the image effects you’re used to seeing in The Daily, and the embedded videos that you may have played around with in Wired’s app. It’s worth checking out if only to see what books — especially the ones that aren’t heady and stat-heavy like this one — are going to look like in the future. We’ll be first into the App Store when they release the Harry Potter book-movie mash-up app, with each page illustrated with scenes from the movie. PRICE: $5 Vulture Bytes: Obsolete-Media Furniture and a Pinocchio StylusncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57kWloamdgany3wcutrKudj5fGtbHSmKukl2RjtbW5yw%3D%3D
Christie Applegate
Update: 2024-07-29