mac.iLounge

Who says you can’t let your nerd flag fly in even the fanciest of situations? Adafruit has you covered with its new LED and aluminum iCufflinks ($128). If you can imagine tearing the power buttons off a couple of MacBook Pros, making them gently pulse like Apple’s famous status lights, and throwing them on the sleeves of a tux, you’ll understand what’s being offered here. Between the outfit and the accessory, you’re bound to impress somebody.

There’s only one hitch here: you have to unscrew the back and pop a battery in, at which point iCufflinks will pulsate for 24 hours before dying; an actual working power button would have been a nice element of the design. Adafruit’s project is open source, so if you don’t want to shell out the cash but do happen to have access to aluminum machining tools, you can feel free to build your own, and possibly better. Also cool: Adafruit reverse-engineered the “breathing” pattern of the lights on Macs to code iCufflinks. A necklace version is planned for release this summer.