If you'd told me last week that this week I would be happily providing a home to three electric candles I'd have scoffed in your face in a very un-ladylike manner. Electric candles! What kind of a crazy mind thought that one up? They always look so rubbish, with their fake dripping wax and their wobbling light trapped in flame-shaped bulbs. Ludicrous. But back then I hadn't seen these Philips Imageo LED CandleLights. There's not a drip of fake wax in sight on these babies, plus the glass holders are designed to make it look like you've got little tea lights inside - so you don't get a glimpse of any fake flammage (unless you peer inside, that is).

Looks like we've gone for a hat trick of USB memory key stories today, which is only right and proper what with the current spate of football games occurring of late (anyone would think there was some sort of international competition on). That's right! It's yet another bit of World Cup football-related media coverage. Just in case you haven't seen enough of that recently. There's really no reason for me to write about this football-shaped USB memory stick, but it does give me the opportunity to do some "Go England!" type copy. Plus, I get to direct your attention to Who Ate All The Bratwurst, our excellent World Cup blog.

128MB Football USB 2.0 key, £9.99 from Digital Era

More Digital Era gear: In the Pink USB Key | Simply Scarlett USB key | Pink Powder Puff PMP

More Football: The Five Worst World Cup Gadgets

Hopefully we'll see these little Sony Micro Vault Mini USB drives for sale over here soon. They've just appeared in Korea, and come in a number of fruit-inspired colours as well as 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB capacities.

Via New Launches

More super mini USB Keys: Iomega Micro Minis | pink iTiny | Lipstick USB Key

When is a guitar not a guitar? When it's a USB memory stick. In this case, a 256 meg USB stick with a fancy guitar case.

Before you pull out your $15 to purchase the tiny (160 x 46 x 20mm) instrument to play in your tiny rock band, you should note that the product pages specifies, "Guitar can not be played." This fact, however, we not stop me from shouting out "Freebird!" at you if I see it plugged into your PC.

Product Page (via The Gadgeteer)

Other Guitars: Oppo X41 M Guitar-Shaped Music Player| Top Ten Guitars for Girls | Hello Kitty Strat

Another day, another unusual USB device. This is the Availabot. Program it to recognise a particular IM friend, and it will stand straight and tall when they're on-line, and collapse into a sad heap when they are not. They can even be made to resemble your friends. (This, of course, is to add to the avatar experience I'm sure, and not so you can flick the Availabot squarely on the head every time your chat buddy says something ridiculous - or to act out Availabot puppet shows with your friends as the dramatis persona. ) And, as you can plug in as many as your machine can handle....you can work surrounded by a small, standing-up/sitting down puppet army. And surely that won't be distracting.

Currently these little guys (and gals) are only compatible with iChat - but they're planning on making them Skype and Windows compatible in the future.

Availabot (via pasta and vinegar)

There's no point buying youself an expensive toy like a PSP only to have it banging around in your bag. This case is especially designed for the PSP to fit inside snugly whilst still allowing you full access to the controls. The case also has flat panel speakers in the lid, powered by 2x AAA batteries, which give off 3watts of output so you can listen to your music even whilst on the go. £22.99 at Dr Gadget

Related: Kroo PSP cases I Sony PSP I Vaja's retro PSP cases

All you budding astronomers - or those of you who would rather just gaze at the night sky - should be enchanted by a watch that promises to show you all the major constellations. Admittedly it only shows those in the Northern hemisphere but all you have to do is align the time and date on the bezel to see which constellations will be visible that evening. The downside to all this starry goodness is that the dial is pretty thick at 9mm but then it does glow for 2-3 hours too. $49.99 at Think Geek

Coffee: bad for your health, stains your teeth, gives you horrible stale coffee breath. Lovely, though, isn't it. For those of you who simply cannot face the day without the joy of heart palpitations and a faint feeling of paranoia, this Preva xSport Portable Espresso maker is designed to issue a hit of caffeine even when you're up the top of a mountain. The instructions say "simply insert an espresso pod, add an ounce or two of hot water, attach the lid, give it about 10 pumps and out comes a shot of espresso".

Since you have to add hot water, you'll need to make sure you've got a kettle of some kind, plus you're going to want some of those biscotti things... and maybe some frothed milk and sprinkles. In fact, if you've got a serious coffee addiction, it's probably easier for you just to remain within 40 feet of a coffee shop at all times and leave mountain climbing to the health freaks.

Preva xSport [via Single Serve Coffee]

More caffeine kicks: Tassimo Hot Drinks Machine | Nespresso Home Espresso Machine | Bialetti Cowprint Cappuccino Maker | Tea Sticks |

So far I've been pretty impressed with the phone designs coming out from the new (transitional) BenQ-Siemens brand. Sure, they still haven't just updated the SL55 with the latest tech and re-released it (no matter how many times I ring to suggest it), but these current super-slim handsets are looking pretty good anyway. Sliders are great for people like me who like a phone with that added fiddle factor. Candy bars are no good for fidgets, flip phones are OK, but sliders are like portable activity centres for the hand.

The EL71 not only provides you with something to obsessively open and close, it's also just 16.5mm thick, has a 262K colour screen, 2-inch display and a 1.3mp camera. It'll play MP3s, has an LED flash, takes microSD cards to bump up the 16MB memory and you can hook it up to your stereo (if you buy the necessary cable).

The Lensbaby is a portable bellows-cum-tilt-shift lens for your digital camera.  Basically it has a very small field of total focus, and the rest goes into blurry sexitude.  You can change the aperture by swapping the disks, and move the "sweet spot" of focus just by wiggling the thing around until you're happy.  Creates very stylized and funky looking pictures (though, like a fisheye lens, it does come with overwhelming temptation to use irresponsibly and goofily).  Original Lensbaby goes for $96 USD and Lensbaby 2.0 (which has super-cool magnets) goes for $150 from the Lensbaby online store.  Plus a very modest $8.50 shipping.  Dear Santa... [GT]

Lensbaby

Related stories: Gummi Phone-Cam Special Effects | Fujifilm's Underwater Strobe Kit

Finding a good spot to put your digital camera tripod can be tricky.  If you have that problem, you need a Gorillapod.  You can attach any lightweight digicam to it and use its grippy legs to suspend or otherwise attach it to anything handy in the general area.  This is particularly useful if you want to shoot at a weird angle but don't have an articulated LCD.  The Gorillapod has been praised everywhere from Macworld to Playboy - which is not something you can say about every gadget.  $25 USD (which is a reasonable price for any half-decent tabletop tripod anyhow).  [GT]

Gorillapod

Related tripod stories:  Fujifilm Camcushion | Orange Pic Stic for the festivals

So you're not at Glastonbury this year.  Okay.  You can still be at the V festival, Oxegen or the Carling Weekend: Reading and Leeds festivals, or camping.  But you may do so in comfort nonetheless, especially if you can have a piping hot shower every morning and feel just as crisp as if you were at home, courtesy of the Portable Car Shower from Maplin.  You fill it with water, hook up the hoses, and away you go.  Just add either power from your car, or 4 D cell batteries (and the batteries naturally let you use a solar charger so that'd be in keeping with the whole outdoor motif.  The best £19.99 you can spend on camping gear.  [GT]

Portable Car Shower from Maplin

Related stories:  Sunlinq Folding Solar Panel | Eco Camping Kit from Biome

It's amazing what you can get in pink isn't it? Just look at this kitchen kit with peeler, garlic press (smelly and pink!) corkscrew, nut cracker (minds out of the gutter, ladies) and can opener all in a neat stand.

Oh it comes in blue too. Still £7.50 at Amazon is quite a good price for 5 kitchen gadgets.

If your usual DAB radio just isn't portable enough then have a look at Pure's handheld PocketDAB which is a rather tiny 123g. It's combined with FM radio, a new colour scheme and a rechargeable battery pack that gives up to 24 hours of playback. Sennheiser in-ear headphones double up as an aerial. The orange backlit display features rolling text so you can get your news, sports results, call-in phone numbers and so on depending on which station you are tuned in to.

Why are DAB radios better than analogue? For a start you tune in via the station name rather than trying to remember which frequency they are at. Read more

Back in the early days of Shiny Shiny (when all this was fields), I used to scour the web with a dedication that would make you weep, searching for pink technology to satisfy my kitsch-loving requirements. Now I can't get away from bloody pink. This Ever Green DN-2000 is the latest in a long line of pink players. It uses SD memory cards (there's no built in memory), has no display so you can't see what's playing, and doesn't have a rechargeable battery (it uses AAA batteries). It's tiny though, and cheap as well, but since it's not going to be over here any time soon, all this is academic. But it's pink, though, so I had to include it.

SD card MP3 player DN-2000 from Evergreen Corporation [Via Gizmodo]

Recent Pink: Nintendo DS Lite | Pink Safe | Pink Intempo Buddy GPS

There's nothing we like more than trying to get hold of free booty for our beloved readers (that's you), which is why we did the happy clapping dance when Kodak agreed to part with one of  those smart little EasyShare V603 cameras. Not only that, but they're also going to going to throw in an EasyShare Printer Dock Plus Series 3 so you can pop your camera on board and print off your pics in a faff-free manner. The V603 itself is a 6.1-mp camera with a 3X optical zoom lens. It's got 22 different scene modes and it will shoot video at 30fps. If you can't live a minute longer without one in your life, send us an email - including your full name and address - with the answer to this question:

Q. How many megapixels is the V603?

Please put "Kodak comp" in the subject header, remember to give your address details and send your emails here.

The fact that one happens to purchase a ubiquitous personal music device doesn't mean one lacks individualism.  At least that seems to be the subliminal message behind Pimp Ya Player, a gear4 sponsored website celebrating the practise of the MP3 player custom case mod.  (Pictured here, the iBling).  At least I think that's the underlying message; it's hard to tell, the site's so garish.  It truly takes its "Pimpin' Hints" ("The more bling the better," and "Chrome.  Chrome. And more chrome!") to heart.

I know fingerprint authentication is all the rage these days...but have our digital lifestyles become so demanding that we can't even take a quick swim without having to check our email? (Or is it that we've beome too lazy to dry off after a quick dip before putting our hands right back on our gear?) Whatever the reason, SecuTronix has a fingerprint scanner that can read your wet and clammy hands.

Wait - I think I've got it. This is clearly for people who need to secure underwater access to their secret, volcanic, villainous lair. Well, people who need to secure  underwater access to their secret, volcanic, villainous lair and who run Windows 2000 or XP, because those are the XPs with which they are compatible. (Tough luck you MAC and LINUX using Super Villains. Looks like Aquaman can still get the drop on you.)

Akhibara

More Gadgets for the Water Logged: Woolgee waterproof MP3 Player | Budget Waterproof Camera from NHJ | iPod Swimwear

Don't you find having to reach for your iPod to skip tracks a lot of effort? Yep. Me too. So, you need the CruiseControl.

With the receiver plugged into your dock connection you can use the remote to adjust the volume, skip repeat and shuffle tracks and the like. According to the bumpf, it works up to a distance of 50 metres, including through walls.

Yes, that's right. That to your left is a picture of Sarah Beeny (for non-UK readers, she's a property developer on TV who gives advice to unwitting victims, and then gets extremely cross when they don't follow it).

Sarah Beeny has now diversified from being cross, to setting up all the wonderful single people of the United Kingdom. The idea behind MySingleFriend is that we've all got mates we'd like to set up, and what's better than a recommendation from a friend, after all? So all the profiles have a blurb written by you, and a glowing reference from one of your wonderful friends.