So, you’ve decided on the Amazon Kindle as your e-reader of choice, only to mourn the fact that it’s mostly only good for one thing: reading. Do you see your friends with their iPads and rooted Nook Colors and are feeling a little left out? BBC’s Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell comes to the rescue, bringing video playing capabilities to the Kindle by way of the iPlayer for Kindle.

Sort of. You see, Longstaff-Tyrrell essentially took the BBC iPlayer video streaming service and adapted it to the Kindle platform by tossing in some software coding of his own and adding closed captioning. You can “watch” the videos on your e-reader because the iPlayer takes DVB digital TV and closed captioning info, together with any frame that has dialogue involved, and puts them together. You get some really, really choppy video, since they’re eliminating a bunch of frames, but you still get a little sense of movement.

The finished product is then converted into an HTML file, which is then converted into a PDF file for viewing on your iPad. So, what you get isn’t a video file at all. Instead, you get a series of frames, not unlike what you’d get with a graphic novel or comic book. It’s a neat idea, to be sure, but not exactly useful.

Want to watch a video? Go get a tablet, but go ahead and keep reading your e-books on your Kindle.

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Paul Rudd might have taught us how to slap the bass, but what if you could go around slapping your jeans to the beat with a full electronic drum set? That’s exactly the dream realized by 17-year-old Aseem Mishra.

The British visionary has outfitted his denim with a fully functional drum kit, placing the eight pads on various places on both thighs. Taking it a bit further than Boris Smus‘ drum kit from a couple years back. This is complete with toms, the hi-hat, and so on. Better still, the pads are pressure sensitive, so you can tap them for a lighter sound or wail on your legs for more of an Anthrax style rocking out.

But from the outside, they just look like a pair of jeans. The downside is that he has to carry around a backpack that houses the speakers and some of the other necessary electronic tidbits, but he says you could just as easily plug the pants trousers into a real amp and get some really loud sound from your drum jeans. Killer.

Or, you know, you could take out a drum app on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone, or whatever else and almost achieve the same thing, except you wouldn’t have sore thighs afterward. In any case, the invention has landed the British chap the Young Engineer of the Year award.

[Video]

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