I was reminiscing and watching videos on YouTube when I saw this video by Bill Sharpe and Gary Numan:
Our little friend the original Mackintosh computer is a key component of the video along with a dot matrix printer. It’s so fun to see my beloved toys from so long ago in action.
I owned a VW Beetle for six years. During that time, I owned THREE smartphones. I had always longed for something to easily hold my phone at dashboard level and I never ONCE even considered using my bud vase.
What the heck was the matter with me?!!
Nathan Barry, on Flickr, has created this AWESOME iPhone holder using the budvase on his Beetle:
Works perfectly, and the iPhone picked one of my all favourite tunes for the test run! It holds the iPhone securely and safely in easy view from the driving position, pops on and off very easily, and it’s close enough for the speakerphone mode to negate the need for any handsfree kit.
You can see all the photos here:
Very cool! It makes me almost wish I had my VW Beetle back, until I remember the never-ending struggle with the Check Engine light. Maybe I can hack something like this for my Prius…
I was watching an old episode of House the other day. The patient wouldn’t allow Wilson to do a colonoscopy, so they had her swallow a Pillcam. The show followed the pillcam into her body snapping photos every few seconds. All very cool, but I didn’t believe a word of it. I thought it might be a good plot device for a medical drama, but I had no inkling that the Pillcam might be real.
It is. It’s made by a company called Given Imaging:
The PillCam SB video capsule is designed specifically to help your doctor see inside your small bowel (small intestine) to diagnose disorders such as Crohn’s disease, Celiac disease, benign and cancerous tumors, ulcerative colitis as well as others disorders. The small intestine is the part of the gastrointestinal tract that connects the stomach to the large intestine and absorbs nutrients. PillCam SB transmits images at a rate of two images per second for approximately eight hours, resulting in more than 50,000 images.
It’s funny how little trust I have in television programming. I immediately thought that Pillcam was fake and that the refusal of the colonoscopy was just a plot device to demonstrate the patient’s insistence on control. Now, I’m pretty sure the entire episode based on control was a plot device to show off the cool new toy from Given Imaging.
I have to admit that I love House M.D. and his gadget-loving ways. From his DS to his PSP to his tiny medical camera the size of a calcium pill and even his bad-ass motorcycle, he’s got to be the most geekiest of the television personalities.
Wired Magazine has a great article about the MP3 Hybrid Scooter from Piaggio.
The electric motor powers the MP3 Hybrid at low speeds and provides the gasoline engine with additional oomph when you open ‘er up — boosting acceleration by as much as 85 percent, the company says. The scooter can run in full electric or in one of three hybrid modes designed to maximize performance, maximize fuel economy or recharge the batteries quickly. Piaggio says the MP3 hybrid goes 60 kilometers on a liter of gas, which works out to about 141 mpg.
With three wheels for stability, freeway speeds and 141 mpg, this sounds like a great commuter bike, but only if you live in areas without weather. In Salt Lake City, this scooter would only be useful for about four months out of the year.
These motorcycles made out of watch parts are really cool:
You can see more here:
I love watches, so a little part of me cringes when I see this sort of thing. There used to be a beautifully functioning watch that made up that motorcycle. It makes me sad to think of all the dead watches that were sacrificed to make these.
I know watches die of their own accord, but it almost feels like a coat made out of the fur of a beloved pet.
Via: CraziestGadgets.com » Miniature Motorcycles Made from Watch Parts
A friend of mine purchased the Free Standing full size Harvest Shelf from Shelf Reliance and really loves it. I liked the idea of the food rotating through and not getting lost at the back of the cupboard, but I don’t have a ton of canned goods. As I researched further I found the CanSolidator and CanDensor models also by Shelf Reliance. Costco had a deal on two so I bought four, and was glad I did.
When I first put the unit together it was too small for my pantry leaving 5 inches of shelf in front and 7 inches on the side. Each bar of the unit is 10 inches long, so as long as your shelf is divisible by 10 inches wide these are great. The other issue I had with the CanSolidator was that after putting the two bars together and splitting it up for the cans (all the pieces for one shelf kit), I was one spacer short of fitting in four rows of standard size cans (the size of a Campbell’s soup can), making the unit even more of a space hog.
After trying various configurations and not liking any of them because they took up more space and held less, I ended up cutting the bars and adding an additional 7 inches to my row, which also allowed me a lot more variation in configuring for different can sizes. It’s not too hard to cut the bars apart and you can order additional pieces by the piece at ShelfReliance.com. I used my Open It! tool to cut the pieces to size. All in all it took me a half day of working and reworking the lay outs to get it right. I now have three shelves made up of most of the pieces of the four shelf kits.
I like that I know at a glance exactly how many cans I have of soup or tuna. I like that it automatically rotates my food for me so I eat the oldest stuff first. So for me it was worth the hassle of breaking it apart and putting it together the way I wanted it. This unit will take up more room and hold less than just stacking the cans on your shelves so if its space you’re worried about this might not be the best fit.
We have all purchased items in hard-to-open vacuum-formed plastic packaging and after trying to cut it with scissors, we try to tear it and then get a giant cut from just trying to grab the item out – we swear to never buy anything packaged like that again, but then we end up buying something packaged that way again because it’s all sold that way.
The tool everyone need is the Open It!. It easily cuts through the plastic and even has a blade knife for opening boxes. If for some reason you also need a screw driver, it has that too. The blades are on a spring-loaded scissor mechanism similar to garden shears (except much shorter) and sharp enough to cut through layers of plastic and cardstock easily. I even used it to cut through the hard plastic bars of my CanSolidator, and anytime I want a straight cut through something thick or difficultly placed this is my tool of choice.
Here’s a photo of how you can use it to open packaging:
Use it to snip open a plastic tie:
The box cutter can zip open a CD or DVD wrapper:
It’s difficult to find one tool that can do so many things, but Open It! has been my favorite.
Long ago, Palm devices were able to share data. You could beam over your business card, other contact information, or appointments from one Palm device to another using the IR ports. It’s a feature that Mike and I used quite regularly. I would set an appointment on my Treo and I’d immediately beam it over to Mike’s Treo so we would both remember the event. We also used it for contacts, but not nearly as often as for appointments.
It was something I REALLY missed when we upgraded to the iPhone.
Now, Skorpiostech has brought some of that capability back. With Handshake, I can share a photo or contact information with another iPhone. Here is a video explaining how it works:
You have a choice between the free and premium versions. The free version has an advertisement at the top and the premium version has no advertising for a one-time fee of three bucks. Here are the iTunes links to each of them.
Now all they have to do is add a feature to share appointments and I will have one more feature in my iPhone that I missed when I switched from my Treo.
Via: First Look: Handshake for iPhone – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
With the last iPhone update, a great thing happened. My battery life went WAY up. Instead of having to charge the phone every two days or so, I could go an entire week without a charge. I had heard rumors of increased battery life, but I was REALLY impressed with this update.
There was a side effect, however. My email icon stopped working. When I turned on my phone, it wouldn’t automatically know how many emails I had. The number on the icon was almost always WRONG. It kind of pissed me off, but then my faith in the almighty Apple kicked in and I thought, “They’ll fix it.”
They didn’t. Over the last few weeks, I kept getting angrier and angrier at Apple because my stupid email icon was NEVER right. In order to know how many emails I had, I basically had to load the stupid mail program EVERY time. It was like the program wasn’t checking unless I loaded it.
And then it hit me. Maybe it wasn’t.
When I looked at my settings, the Push feature had been turned on. I don’t know if I did it or if it was reset with the last update, but Push means that my mail server would PUSH the emails to me. Instead of my mail program checking for mail every fifteen minutes like it used to before the update, it was dutifully waiting for my mail server to send the email to it, just like the settings told it.
If you have been frustrated with the mail program on your iPhone, check the settings for Push. Turn Push off and it will FETCH your mail every fifteen minutes (or whatever time frame you choose), just like it used to before the last update.
Now, I’m only embarrassed that I was so angry at the almighty Apple for “breaking” my mail.
I had previously talked about MillionHeir and how fun it is to play. You can see that review here:
After a few weeks of playing, I have enjoyed many quiet hours playing. It’s a wonderful and relaxing way to end my day. Finding a few objects in a picture right before I go to sleep may make for interesting dreams, but they ARE relaxing ones.
The other day, I was watching House on USA and this commercial for the game came on:
This is exactly how it was playing the game with my sister. The first few games, we played against each other, but we really enjoyed the cooperative mode where we found objects together.
It’s such a quiet and relaxing little commercial that it caught my eye and it portrayed the game perfectly. It’s not about the story of a lost millionaire. It’s about finding the celery before your sister does.
Powered by WordPress
(c) 2003-2017 Michael Moncur, Laura Moncur, Matthew Strebe, and The Gadgets Page