Found in our mailbox the other day: The Oxo Good Grips Cord Catch. While we certainly love shiny electronic toys that do lots of different things, here's a product that's beautiful for its simplicity. The Catch has just one job — saving that charging cable from falling behind your desk. And it does it with style, sporting a nicely curved design and a silver finish. It stays in place via the rubberized bottom and sheer heft (the half-ounce spec on Oxo's product page is incorrect — it actually weighs closer to five).

After using the catch to hold our iPhone charging cable for a few days, we've given it a permanent place on our desk. We do have this suggested upgrade: The Catch's cable guide should have some kind of "flaps" to prevent cords from easily popping out of it. But even with that quibble, the $7 Catch has paid for itself with time saved in cancelled expeditions behind our gadget stack in search of fallen cords.

Gallery: Oxo Good Grips Cord Catch does exactly one thing (6 images)   view full gallery

The last shuttle to be launched at night rose off its launch pad before dawn this morning, atop a torrent of fire that seemed as bright as the sun. On board Endeavor (STS-130) is Cupola, a relatively huge bay window to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) that will give astronauts the most magnificent view ever seen from space (short of taking a spacewalk). Expect great pictures from this 1.6-ton behemoth — it's 9.7 feet wide and 5 feet long with seven windows all around, including a 31.5-inch circular window, the largest ever flown into space.

Also along for the ride is Tranquility, whose technical name is the unassuming "Node 3." That module will have six "birthing locations" (or in plain terms, places to plug in more modules), three of which aren't scheduled to be used, and one will be where Cupola will be connected. Tranquility will also contain the most advanced life-support systems ever flown in space, recycling wastewater and generating oxygen.

Via Space.com

Gallery: Shuttle's final night launch lifts largest window ever into orbit (6 images)   view full gallery

Do you require a bit of motivation to get out of bed in the morning? Well, there are few people more motivating than Darth Vader, right?

With this Darth Vader alarm clock, a shadow Vader will appear when the alarm goes off, reminding you to get out of bed or the forces of the Dark Side will overtake you. It also features a snooze button, just in case you feel the power of The Force deep inside you.

StarWars.com via Geek Alerts

Cinematographers got sick of lugging around bulky and anvil-heavy recording gear, so they designed the "extremely portable" Cinedeck, a hotshot digital video recorder that's 8 inches wide and weighs 4 pounds. It digitally records HD footage from any camera that outputs HDMI or HDSDI onto its off-the-shelf solid-state drives.

Besides functioning as a digital recorder and high-rez playback unit, this versatile box's on-board Intel Core2 Extreme quad qx9300 processor powers a fast Windows PC inside, letting you hook up a mouse, keyboard and a larger monitor to edit together your shots using whichever Windows editing software you prefer.

Shipping next month is the first Cinedeck/Extreme model, capable of handling resolutions up to 1080p. Later this year, the company will roll out versions for 3D shooting, higher-rez 2K film work, and even a model that handles footage from those sweet 1080p-shooting digital SLR cameras. Pricing starts at $7995, so you can see it's intended for pro use on film shoots.

Here's the press release with more details:

Gallery: Portable Cinedeck lets filmmakers record and edit high-rez footage (6 images)   view full gallery

Talking animals took a back seat to high technology this year during the commercial breaks of Super Bowl XLIV. After a slow start full of desperate beer lovers and lethal corn chips, the tech started flowing in abundance. By the time those old codgers called The Who took to the stage at halftime, we knew this was going to be a good year for tech-related Super Bowl commercials. Here are our top seven favorites:

How high a resolution do you need on your phone? The upcoming Qisda QCM-330 offers a whopping 1,280 x 1,024 resolution on its 4-inch screen, which is higher than many laptop screens.

The phone is being unveiled next month at the CeBIT tradeshow, and it looks like it'll be coming to Europe on Vodafone. How such a high pixel density will look on such a small screen has yet to be seen, but just spec-wise, it's impressive. We're looking forward to seeing more details of this monster once it's officially available.

Unwired View, via Slashgear, via Gizmodo

Tiny earbuds made of aluminum have been a Klipsch specialty for a couple of years now, and now the company adds to its stable of the world's tiniest cans with its high-end Image X10i in-ear headset, now sporting iPhone capability. Let's give them a listen, as well as try them out on our iPhone 3GS, determining if they're really worth their unusually steep $350 price.

Gallery: Are Klipsch Image X10i earphones too good for the iPhone? (8 images)   view full gallery

Canon just surprised the photo world with this fresh announcement, showing off its EOS Rebel T2i that will take its place atop the company's Rebel line of lower-cost digital SLR cameras.

This 18-megapixel powerhouse is the beneficiary of a lot of trickle-down from Canon's twice-as-expensive EOS 7D camera. That means you'll be able to get a $799 camera (body only) with such advanced features as 9-point autofocus, a 63-zone dual-layering metering system just like the 7D, a 3-inch live-view smudge-resistant viewfinder, ISO of 100- 6400, and 1080p video shooting at 24, 25, or 30 frames per second with an external mic input.

Canon's not saying yet when this relatively cheap camera ($899 with an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 image-stabilized kit lens) will be available, but soon thereafter, the company's going to need to raise the bar on its higher-end cameras just to keep up. And whoa, Nikon, you have a lot of catching up to do now.

UPDATE: The T2i (also known as the EOS 550D) shoots some really nice video, too — take a look, or see it in 1080p directly on YouTube:

Gallery: Canon EOS Rebel T2i: new king of the cheap DSLRs? (11 images)   view full gallery

When we first heard about Airship Ventures, a company that's resurrected the Zeppelin for air tours of San Francisco and other locations, we said: Sign us up! Well, the company took us seriously, giving us a free ride on one of their airships for a quick flight around the Bay Area (such a ride typically costs about $500). The result: some top-notch sightseeing, and the only flight we've ever taken when it was okay to open a window on the aircraft. It's all caught by our trusty camcorder — experience airship travel via the video and continue reading for the full story on the Zeppelin.

Gallery: You can see Google from here: a Zeppelin view of San Francisco (8 images)   view full gallery

Increasingly, the problem of creating sustainable, eco-friendly solutions extends beyond transportation and is moving into the realm of home building. Europe-based design team A&V first came up with a concept design and then executed their vision that is the MercuryHouseOne.

The tiny raindrop-shaped structure is not just futuristically styled, but also features a highly efficient set of solar panels on the top of the building allowing energy to flow into the home year round. You can find out more about the design and possible real world applications for the structure here.

Via Tuvie

When I was a kid, I had dynamo powered lights on my bike. They worked great as long as you were moving along, but quickly dimmed if you slowed down or stopped. Now a California company called High Tide Associates has updated this technology for the 21st century with the RollerGen, a bike mounted generator that charges your portable electronics.

Rather than the wimpy 3-5 watts of my old dynamo, the RollerGen can spit out a whopping 30 watts, which get stored in a small battery called the BOS (bar of soap). This sits next to the generator in a small rack over the rear wheel, and there's enough extra room for your electronic gizmos.

This all sounds great, but I wonder how the RollerGen works in the rain. Also, at $495 for the complete system, it seems pretty darned expensive compared to the alternatives.

RollerGen, via GeekSugar.com

Gallery: RollerGen charges your devices with pedal power (5 images)   view full gallery

Want to impress your Super Bowl visitors this weekend with more than 7-layer dip and mini-sandwiches? Have some extra time on your hands? Happen to have 66 feet of salvaged particle board sitting around?

Well, even if you don't meet all of those requirements, this is still a pretty neat project. Roommates Jandra, Priya, and Ruella cobbled together their very own apartment photo booth for pretty cheap, though they got a little help and used their heads to keep the price down. Still, none of it is stuff you couldn't find at a hardware store or IKEA.

Check out the full list of instructions here.

Via Apartment Therapy

CBS will be getting tricky with the Super Bowl XLIV broadcast, rolling out a special magnifying glass effect created by Orad TVs Motion Video Play (MVP) system. As you can see in this video, the MVP can give you a much tighter look at what's happening, and it can automatically follow a player wherever he goes in the shot.

That's not all the MVP can do. It's loaded with image analysis tech that works beautifully on live television, generating real-time tracking information of multiple players or objects. You might have seen some of these tricks on football broadcasts, tracking the trajectory of the football. Amazing stuff.

Via Orad

While hundreds of millions of Super Bowl viewers munch on enough potato chips to reach the moon if laid end to end (293,000 miles' worth, to be exact), this Sunday's game will feature spectacularly detailed slow motion replays. Among the 50 cameras deployed for the broadcast, CBS will be using six Vision Research Phantom V640 super slow-mo cameras.

Super cameras indeed. Surprisingly, CBS won't be cranking them anywhere near as high as they can go, where we'll see slow motion at a rate of between 480 to 540 frames per second on the Super Bowl XLIV broadcast. The Phantom V640 is capable of shooting 1,500 four-megapixel frames per second, or 2,700 HD frames per second. That's almost fast enough to see a bullet going through an apple, or a water balloon popping in a very special way.

Via Vision Research