The Gadgets Page

Okay, folks. Stop it. Just stop it. Stop trying to play catchup to what Apple is doing. Apple released the Shuffle that clips onto your clothing so long ago that it’s really not productive for Sandisk to release this cute little player.

• SanDisk | Products | Music & Video Players | SanDisk Sansa Clip

Sure, it clips to your clothing. Sure, it is small and technically it’s better than the Apple product because it has a screen where you can read the song titles.

Instead of trying to copy Apple products, please, make something new and unique. Apple isn’t perfect. They aren’t doing everything right, believe me. There is plenty of room for Sandisk to make products without trying to compete with Apple.

Bad form, Sandisk, bad form.

The most frustrating thing for me as a gamer is there are so few games that are appealing. The games that are meant to be for the female market concentrate on things like shopping, talking to friends or being a veterinarian. I’m an adult female. I don’t care about shopping for clothes, choosing a career, or talking to friends at school. I also don’t care about killing enemies or racing fast cars.

Strangely, my favorite game, Animal Crossing: Wild World, IS about shopping, talking to little animals and crossbreeding flowers. How did Nintendo capture my fancy, while the Bratz series just makes me angry?

It’s the writing.

Animal Crossing is one of THE best written games I’ve ever played. I keep playing for the writing. When is the gaming industry going to realize that writing is THE most essential element? It is far more important than realistic graphics or physics. As soon as the gaming industry learns that they need to involve writers BEFORE they start programming the game, they will be able to capture the female market, or at least me.

Here is a list of links that have been sitting for far too long in the slush pile. None of them are worth enough for an entry of their own, but they all deserve a mention:

These Jam Jackets for the iPhone look nice. You can wrap up your earbuds on the back of the jacket. My only problem is they suddenly make the sleek iPhone as fat as the Treo. What’s the point?

• Shiny Shiny: Pink ‘Jam Jacket’ for iPods – other jammy colours also available

Fan boys have been fantasizing about the multi-touch computer ideas that have been patented by Apple recently. Steve Jobs shot them out of the water with his, “Classify that as a research project,” comment. A multi-touch mouse would make things much easier once you learned how to use it. I suspect Steve has more up his sleeve than a tablet PC ripoff.

• Apple applies for multi-touch mouse patent – Engadget

Eye-Fi has suggested that they are creating a card that can upload your photos as soon as you take them to your favorite network (like Flickr). Considering how many of my photos don’t turn out and shouldn’t see the light of day, that sounds like a BAD idea.

• » Take a Picture, Share Immediately » Blog Archive Alice Hill’s Real Tech News – Independent Tech

Did Shiny Shiny really act this excited about the Pink Zune?

• Shiny Shiny: Zune! Pink Zune! Gasp! Pink Zune! Oi! Oi! Oi!

Is Apple TV really the standard by which we should be judging things?

• Xbox 360 Dashboard Update is no AppleTV

I love concept cars. This one is pretty and I like the idea of swiveling backseat so that you can watch the scenery a little easier. It would have made those long road trips my sister and I took as children a tad nicer. She could have turned her seat away from me when I was constantly poking her.

The fact that it’s a hybrid as well is just icing on the cake.

• Shiny Shiny: Toyota Hybrid X Concept hits the showroom

It feels good to clean up the slush pile a little bit. I wanted to remember each of these entries, but I really didn’t have enough to say about them all. It’s funny how different I feel about them when they have been sitting around for a while.

This video isn’t really a fair comparison because she is taking furniture that has been put together and he is taking furniture that needs to be put together. The premise is correct, though. Hatchback vehicles are EXCELLENT for taking home furniture from IKEA, whether it’s a Smart Car, VW Rabbit or a Toyota Prius. Being able to drop those seats and slide in the boxes is the secret weapon of all hatchback cars.

Back when Mike and I were teenagers, we used to judge towns by how many Radio Shacks they had. “That’s a two Radio Shack town,” was our way of saying that the town was too small. In honesty, it was a pretty good judge of how happy we would be in a place.

Now, Radio Shacks are in every mall, but it’s not something we even notice anymore. We haven’t needed a Radio Shack for months and when we did, they didn’t have what we needed (a 1/4-inch male to 1/4-inch male headphone cable). We ended up buying one at Fry’s Electronics when we were traveling.

Sadly, Radio Shacks have become less useful the longer they have been around. It used to be that we could get whatever cables, transistors or other electronic supplies at Radio Shack, but now they are too busy trying to sell me cell phones and turn their nose up at us if we ask for anything technical.

This commercial reminded me how I used to feel about Radio Shack.

See that Dad, reminiscing about getting his first short wave radio at Radio Shack? That’s me, reminiscing about ogling the Tandy computers at Radio Shack.

I live in a town without a Fry’s. I want to move to a two-Fry’s town. Hmm… It just doesn’t sound the same. Maybe I should start judging towns by how many IKEAs they have.

Mike A. has this great Nike+ Hack with his Adidas shoes:

“Having just bought the Nike+ Sport Kit and 4GB Silver Nano, I didn’t really want to drop another $100 or so on new shoes. Thus, I got out a Swiss Army knife and did some reconstructive surgery on my old Adidas running shoes.”

I thought of doing this with my Ryka shoes, but after a year of owning the Nike+, I finally acquiesced and bought a pair of Nike Zoom. I have to admit that the Nike+ reads a tad more accurately INSIDE the shoe than outside with a Shoe Wallet.

I had no idea that the Rocket Belt was real. I sincerely thought it was the product of science fiction. Every time I’ve seen a man flying on television with one of these, I’ve assumed that they were on wires and that something like this couldn’t possibly work because his legs would be burned by heat of jet fuel burning.

They weren’t using jet fuel, though. They were using compressed gas. Apparently, the conversion of a liquid to gas has quite a thrust.

Here is a video from The History Channel about the Bell Rocket Belt and its place in history:

You can find out more technical information here:

• Bell Rocket Belt – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Rocketbelt Convention 2007

• Bell Rocket Belt

I’m kind of angry that my flying cars haven’t shown up, but finding out that jet packs are REAL is almost enough to make me feel better about it. My only question is where can I buy one.

Via: Drink. Drive. Go To Jail. – Jumpin’ Jetpacks

The Smart Car Road Show came to Park City, Utah, so we took a drive up there to test drive the new Smart Cars that will be available here in the United States soon. You can see the video here:

Embed this video on your website – Download this video for your iPod

Driving the Smart Car felt a lot like driving a Mini Cooper. It had that go-cart feel. Even though we only stayed within the parking lot, I could really feel the road, so that makes me wonder what it would feel like to go 65 mph in it. Would the little car just vibrate so much that I wouldn’t be able to feel my extremities?

No matter, this is NOT a car for long road trips unless you’re going alone. There’s barely room for one suitcase in the trunk. The sun roof is large, however. You can’t open it, but it makes you feel like there is more room in the car than there actually is.

Despite all that, it was a FUN car to drive. I thought it was a manual transmission, but it is a strange mixture between manual and automatic. When I drove it, I used the automatic mode, but there is supposed to be a manual mode as well (but no clutch to contend with).

For being such a small car, there was plenty of room for me. When the seat was all the way back, I could barely touch the pedals, so for a taller person, there should be plenty of room. Of course, there’s no room for more than one friend, but most of the time, we’re alone in our cars, aren’t we?

The big question for me is cup holders. Does the Smart Car have cup holders? Yes, they have two good sized cup holders within easy reach. This feature alone puts the Smart Car head and shoulders above every Volkswagen I have ever owned.

The car I drove did not have a glove box, but the guy driving with me assured me that there would be a glove box in the final models released in the USA. The Passion and Cabrio models come with air conditioning, but it’s not available on the base model. None of them have cruise control.

The Smart Car feels like a movie star because it has been used as a joke in so many movies. Seeing it close up is a lot like seeing a real movie star close up. It’s not quite as pretty or tall as you remember it, but it’s exciting to tell your friends about it anyway.

Here is a great video of the interior of the Smart Car. This unit has the glove box and if you look carefully, you can see the two cup holders on the floor in front of the gear shift.

Here is a quick project you can do to wrap up your earbuds:

• Instructables Earbud cord wrapper in 5 minutes or less!

It’s so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.

Via: Twitter / Wendy Yao: might be useful: Instructab…

Since the Nike+ has been so helpful to my running, I was planning on bringing it with me on my next race. Looks like I need to read the rules first. According to Wendy, there are many races that ban iPods and headphones.

• About.com – Races That Ban iPods by Wendy Bumgardner

They say that it’s for safety precautions:

“Last weekend, my walking team did the Rock ‘n Relay marathon. As we were going through the race info right before the start, we saw that they banned wearing headphones or earphones during the event, for safety purposes… The stats don’t bear out that pedestrian accidents happen more often to walkers distracted by being on the cell phone or wearing headphones. Instead, in 40% of pedestrian fatalities the victim was imbibing alcohol. It is of interest that we got a ticket for a free beer at the beer tent to have at any time during the event.”

Real healthy, Rock ‘n Relay. You can have beer, but you can’t listen to your tunes while you run. Technophobia strikes again.