App lets you check your blood alcohol
In light of the serious consequences of being caught driving drunk, we’re surprised that a larger consumer market hasn’t developed for personal breathalyzers.
Sure, there’s a stigma attached to somebody who needs to carry one of these around, but isn’t it better to have a bad rep than a criminal one? The new BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer features an iPhone app and breathalyzer unit that combine to read and report blood alcohol content levels, and the results can be shared via Twitter or Facebook. The device has a fuel-cell sensor for professionalgrade accuracy and the app has the ability to graph blood alcohol content levels over time so you can get a real sense as to when the effect from those cheeky few will finally wear off. You can even explore real-time blood alcohol content results from anonymous users who opt to share them on a map, and while this seems like a dumb idea, BACtrack is taking real steps here to make breathalyzer use more socially accepted. Alternatively, we could all just drink less. $150; visit bactrack.com.
DON’ T SUFFER LIKE A BRENDA
Who can forget the 1992 episode of Beverly Hills 90210 called A Competitive Edge, when a con artist backed her vehicle into a car driven by young Brenda Walsh and then extorted the Walsh family for accident and injury claims? Director David Carson’s irreverent message: Collisions can happen at any time, so it’s worth having a mechanism in place to record what actually happened. The new Sceptre CarCam Recorder CCR2000 does just that, as it constantly records HD video and then loops back and records over the video until it captures an accident. Mounted to the windshield, it provides an excellent view of the road ahead, and it has a 120-degree angle lens, HDMI output and a sensor that detects when there’s a collision then saves the preceding footage to ensure there’s a record of the incident. It arrives with an eight-gigabyte SD card that’ll record 250 minutes, and a battery for recording without a power source. Just be careful, because filming an accident is a double-edged sword if you’re the one who causes it. $399; visit sceptre.com.