The Gadgets Page

Patrick Norton at Tekzilla Daily had an EXCELLENT guide on how to organize your life with your digital camera. These are some great ideas and you can check them out here:

Here is a quick list of their ideas:

• Travel Companion: If you’re visiting an unfamiliar country or city and don’t want to get lost, take pictures of your hotel building as well as the nearby street signs. If you end up getting lost or turned around, try showing these pictures to a friendly local who can point you in the right direction to get back home.

• Use Your Camera As A Scanner: If you see important information that you need to jot down like a business card, a white board or a document. With today’s mega-pixel cameras, that image is going to be big and legible enough for you to read all that detailed information from.

• History Viewer: Say you’re working on a complex project like repairing a car or remodeling a room with lots of steps and pieces. It can be insanely easy to forget how it goes back together. As you start, take a picture of every step along the way to see how things come apart. Keep doing it as you progress in your work. Take pictures every step of the way. If you get confused about how things go back together, you have a trail of photos that have the answer for you.

In addition to those ideas, I have a couple others:

• Use your camera to keep track of your diet: When you are eating throughout the day, take a picture of everything you eat. You can use the photos as a food journal or just as a reminder so that you can keep your written food journal honest and accurate. This works especially well with a camera phone because it’s more likely to be with you at all times.

• Comparison Shopping: Sometimes it’s hard to remember which store had the best deal, especially when you are looking for high price items. When you are shopping, take pictures of your favorite choices at each store along with the price tag. When you are at a different store, you’ll have a good idea what the same item cost at the store down the street. Be careful, some stores have policies against taking photos of their merchandise, so either ask permission or be discreet.

There are so many different ways to use your camera to organize your life. How do you use your camera? Leave us your tips in the comment field.

How did this gorgeous little USB hub escape my attention? Just take a moment to enjoy the beauty of it.

Seriously, look at it, will ya?

You don’t think it’s that beautiful?

This is how the Belkin Travel Swivel USB Hub is shown on Belkin’s website. This is how it is shown on Amazon. It just looks like a piece of plastic and some USB ports. Not very sexy.

How about now?

It’s not sexy just because it’s plugged into a MacBook Pro. It’s sexy because it is showing off its best feature. See how the hub swivels away from the ports? THAT is a killer feature! Slim, easy to carry and gets the heck out of the way. How did I miss this one?

I spent a lot of time at the Belkin booth at CES and I didn’t see this little guy once.

Via: Belkin Travel Hub on Nicole Lee’s Flickr

I’ve talked before about the idea of Car Sharing. You don’t actually own a car, you own a membership in a car sharing program, so you can pick up a car when you need one, but not have to deal with all the ownership problems of autos.

MIT has taken the idea one step further with these stackable City Cars.

MIT is working in conjunction with GM on these cars:

The City Car is a stackable electric two-passenger city vehicle. The one-way sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. Vehicle Stacks will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them. Similar to luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle at the front of the stack. The City car is NOT a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a NEW vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility.

You can see a video of how they might work here:

I LOVE new ideas for transportation and I’m sure Walt Disney would be just giddy with excitement if he was alive to see this video today.

Via: Popgadget Personal Technology for Women: CityCar paves the way for smart parking

I LOVE these commercials that interact with the New York Times’ webpage:

This advertisement couldn’t have been done with newspaper, television or radio. It only makes sense on the computer. I love the inventive advertising that is showing up for the computer age. It makes me WANT to click on the ad.

Thanks to Mahalo Daily, here is the 2008 Macworld Keynote in 60 seconds.

You might have to watch it two or three times, but all of the details are there. You just don’t get the cool demonstrations and the nervous CEOs of other companies trying to act cool next to Steve Jobs.

Via: Macworld 2008: 90 minutes of Steve in 60 seconds — but zero “booms”

Hi,

I just read your very informative article: Understanding SD Flash Memory Card Speeds.

One thing I’m still confused about is memory card readers — what are they and are they required? Would I be able to copy to my computer, delete, print, etc. just with a USB cable connecting to my computer directly or will I need a memory card reader?

Specifically, I’m thinking of getting a Lexar Platinum II 60x 2GB SD card for my Canon PowerShot a720.

Thank you very much,

Felix

Felix,

Your computer might already have a card reader. If it doesn’t, you can always connect your camera to your computer with the included USB cable. If you want to download your photos directly from your SD card, however, you need a “slot” to put it in. If your computer doesn’t have a SD card reader, you’ll have to buy one.

Best,
Laura Moncur

So if my computer doesn’t have a card reader, I can just use the camera as a sort of card reader by connecting the camera to the computer via USB, and then copying stuff from the SD card? What’s the advantage of getting a card reader?

Thank you

Felix,

The advantages of a card reader are a little nebulous.

Firstly, you don’t have to hunt down the USB cable that came with your camera. Most of those cables are proprietary, so if you lose it, you can’t just find another cable easily.

Secondly, some card readers download the photos a lot faster than your camera will. I’ve never tested your Canon camera, but with my old Canon (6 years ago), the compact flash card reader was MUCH faster.

Finally, sometimes the cameras make it difficult to download the photos by requiring software to be installed. If you have a Mac, I’ve heard that it’s MUCH easier, but sometimes things are a little difficult on a PC.

The most important thing is to download your photos to a computer and make a backup by burning a CD or DVD. That way you won’t lose your most important pictures.

Best,
Laura Moncur

Guitar Hero was featured heavily on the main floor and was in many booths not sponsored by Harmonix or Red Octane. Guitar Hero already gets me off the couch and pretending I’m a Rock Goddess, but if you didn’t think Guitar Hero made you look silly enough, welcome to Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker.

Download this video for your iPod

The Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker comes with a magic belt buckle, an amplifier, two guitar picks and an air cartridge of songs.

The belt buckle reads your hand movements and starts the music playing on the amplifier. Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker is a dream come true for the professional air guitar fanatic!

The biggest problem with huge International conferences like CES is that you are suddenly exposed to EVERY virus and bacteria on the planet. I am finally back home, nursing a sore throat and trying desperately not to lose my voice. While I’m sick, I won’t be posting.

I have SO much to write about CES and everything I saw there that this comic from Ballard Street really rings true for me today. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make my way out of the dark forest and show you the things I found along the way!

As a child, I loved Barbie, but lately I have felt betrayed by Mattel. When I walked up to the Barbie Girls booth at CES this year, this betrayal was seething right on the surface:

“Oh, you’re a blogger. Are you going to write about this?” She pointed at the Barbie Girls MP3 Players. I had seen them in the store.

“No, because they’re lame.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Well, those might be lame, but this isn’t.” She held up the Barbie iDesign box and lead me over to the computer running it.

I immediately fell in love with Barbie all over again.

Fashion Plate Redeux

Barbie iDesign is the kind of toy that I would have LOVED as a kid. In fact, I had a toy that was very similar as a child called Fashion Plates. It was a coloring fashion toy that used plates to create outfits. I created a million outfits with that game and Barbie iDesign is a totally awesome update to that toy.

Gameplay

The Barbie iDesign is a computer program that runs on Windows and comes with a barcode scanner (called the Style Swiper and conveniently colored in Barbie pink). The Style Swiper reads the fashion plates that are included with the toy. Each plate represents a doll, a background, or a piece of clothing.

You scan in the doll and she shows up on the screen. Then you take a different plate to scan in her outfit and it shows up on the doll. Pants, skirts, tops and footwear are all different kinds of plates that you can choose from. You get a total of 60 cards with the Barbie iDesign, but there are a total of 200 available for separate purchase to augment your collection.

Once you’ve chosen a few outfits and dolls, you can have them walk down the catwalk in an Uncanny Valley extravaganza!

Download this video for your iPod

The strange little girl that I was would have systematically created every possible outfit and showcased it on the catwalk. Boots with swimming suits? YES… I must create each and every combination and walk it down the red carpet! I can even feel the adult in me wanting to play this game just so I can create every outfit. Quick, what is 60 factorial?! How many permutations are there?!

The additional card packs add even more permutations and are organized by style of dress. For the younger girls in your family, there is a princess pack with enough frilly dresses and crowns to please.

The fun doesn’t end with the fashion show, though. There were other games to play with the cards. You can play them against a friend or you can fight the clock alone. They were mostly games in which you were frantically searching through the cards trying to find the correct one to scan to get a good score. They didn’t look like they were intellectually taxing. Just fun.

The pieces of the iDesign looked pretty sturdy. I tried scraping off the barcode on the side of the cards to see if they were easily damaged, but they are printed well, so you won’t have to worry about your little girl breaking her toy. The worst you have to worry about is losing the cards.

Hacking

The most exciting idea I had was hacking this game. Trying out different bar codes to see what they create in the game was the first idea I had when I saw the iDesign. The easiest hack you can do is to photocopy the bar codes on the back of your friend’s cards so you don’t have to buy the additional packs. The only negative to that is that there is a lot of real world play that you do with the cards and since they are transparent, a picture of them isn’t good enough.

There is some hacking fun to be had with this game and I can’t wait to see what the girls of today do with their iDesign toys.

Complete 180

I walked up to the Barbie Girls booth feeling betrayed by Mattel and Barbie and walked away wishing I knew a little girl who I could buy iDesign for. I guess I’ll just have to buy it for myself…

Wow… The narrator couldn’t have sounded MORE bored with Toshiba’s booth tour:

What the heck does this sentence MEAN?!

“Our passion is to empower users to expand their interests and passions by adding the convenience and capability to connect to all the devices that enrich their lives.”

It’s stuff like this that makes the big companies BORING. I like Toshiba. I like their products, but this booth tour is the kind of marketing that makes me HATE them.

Your passion is to empower me to expand my interests and passions? How? By adding the convenience and capability to connect to all my devices that enrich my life? Come again?

What Toshiba needs to do is let their fans loose on their booth and film them as they play with the new laptops and other toys. This booth tour shows some cool stuff. Show REAL people playing with it and you’ve got REAL people who want to see it in real life.

This video is for stockholders, not human beings.