The Gadgets Page

I love this commercial! I’m that person who faithfully waited for the iPhone 4S. I am one of those people who waited in a line (a virtual online, line the very moment they were available for pre-order). This commercial makes fun of me, yet I LOVE it!

I love the snotty guy waiting in line:

Hipster: “I could never get a Samsung. I’m creative.”

Other Hipster: “Dude, you’re a barista.”

Personally, I decided against the Samsung phone because I wanted my stuff to WORK. With my iPhone, I have a little grocery list that Mike can add to and edit. With my iPhone, I have my music and playlists that easily sync to my phone. I’m sure I could get all those cool things with a Samsung phone, but I’d have to learn how to do it and go to the trouble of making it work. I’ve already done that work with my iPhone, so the thought of going to that effort again with a different ecosystem is unpleasant to me.

I could never get a Samsung. I’m too freakin’ lazy.

Apple products have the momentum to keep me for a while. Things will have to get pretty dang bad before I’m willing to move to a Samsung phone.

Via: Samsung Mocks iPhone Fans in New Galaxy S II Ad – Mac Rumors

When I used to browse the web and find something I wanted to remember, I’d bookmark it with a description of what it was. I’m crafty, so I would do this with crafts. I also have three kids so I’d bookmark an educational site or ideas for decorating.

This worked great for me, until the hubby decided I needed an iPad upgrade (okay, I wanted it too). I’m not super technical and he is, so I let him do it for me. Everything went great until tried to go to a bookmark on the new iPad – everything was gone, and the bookmarks on my old computer had been wiped clean. I no longer knew where that cute headband idea was, or the great site for math games, it was all gone. I was able to remember some of the sites that had catchy names but for the most part I was back to ground zero.

I knew there had to be a better way, and stumbled upon it a few days later, when my sister-in-law was telling me about her new favorite site – Pinterest.com. This site lets you pin pictures from the web and categorize them by whatever you choose. Not only that, but you can find other people with similar tastes or friends and follow them to see what they have pinned. You can also browse Pinterest to see what has been pinned lately.

I have to warn you though – it can become addicting. To pin your own stuff, you add a “pin it” button to your toolbar. Then, if you’re on a site you want to save, click the “pin it” button and it will display all the pictures on that page. Select the picture you want to save, select a board (like a folder) and give it a description or note. Viola! It is saved into your account on Pinterest land. You can have your pins posted on Facebook if you want also.

There are different kinds of pinners, those who pin everything and do nothing and those who pin and do. I fall somewhere in the middle. So far I have made a ton of projects:

• Bracelets and rings
• Halloween treats
• Beaded spiders
• Cookie dough dip out of hummus (not recommend – and I went back and commented on my pin to that effect so my “followers” wouldn’t be led astray)
• Jewelry holder out of an art canvas
• Energy balls (these were good)
• Spelling game for my kids
• Felt flowers
• Repurposed a t-shirt into a shrug
• Dish washer detergent from scratch
• 72 hour emergency kits
• Foot scrub
• Crafts for the kids

As you can see there is a wide variety of crafts to choose from.

You can also pin travel ideas, books, gadgets, humor, etc. Pinterest has a list of 32 categories for you to browse, and assign your pins to, for others to browse, but you can create as many boards as you want and name them whatever you want.

Additionally, Pinterest has created an iPhone app to work with their website. You can download it here:

• Pinterest iPhone App – Cold Brew Labs [iTunes link]

A few tips and tricks I’ve found:

• The Pinterest app is a little crashy. When it starts acting strangely, restart the app, or if that doesn’t work, restart the device.
• On Pinterest.com if you click on the pinterest logo at the top it will take you back to the home screen.
• You can search for friends to follow by name in the search box, and everyone who has signed in with their Facebook account will have their profile pic so you can see who it is.
• If the Pinterest web site is too much information for you, try the app. It gives you the top pins for that category and you can pin from there. Here is a picture (above right) of what the DIY & Craft board has on my phone.

So happy pinning, and I’ll see you on Pinterest.

Update 06-21-12 from Laura Moncur: I had avoided Pinterest when Christy reviewed it because it was so difficult to find the original link to the photos on their site. I’m happy to announce that they have fixed that, so I can easily see WHERE the pins came from, no matter how many times it has been repined. I’m happily pinning along with Christy now and I love it!

Today, Apple’s iTunes Match service went live. For a small yearly fee, iTunes Match allows you to keep all of your music online. Apple stores it in their iCloud servers, and you can play or download it from your computer, iPhone, or iPad. To save you the trouble of uploading your 100GB of music, Apple’s service conveniently scans your MP3s. If iCloud already has a copy of the song—quite likely given Apple’s user base—it will simply “match” the song rather than uploading it. Thus, you can have access to your entire music library from all of your devices in a very short time.

Thanks to iTunes Match, you have a backup of all of your music, instant access from anywhere, and the chance to upgrade your MP3s to a higher quality.

Sounds like progress? To me it sounds like a blast from the past.

Remembering My.MP3.Com

January 2000. Google was only a couple of years old. Facebook didn’t exist. Apple was a company that sold funny-looking computers. They wouldn’t introduce the iPod for another year. The most sophisticated smartphone looked like this.

This was when MP3.com, originally a site for musicians to share their own music, launched a feature called My.MP3.com. This was a cloud-based music service that let you stream your entire music collection from any computer. It used a matching algorithm so that you wouldn’t have to upload a track if they already had a copy. Does that sound familiar?

Unfortunately, MP3.com didn’t ask for permission from record labels. They were sued by Universal Music Group for copyright infringement, lost to the tune of $53 million, and went out of business.

What if there were no legal objections? I’m still not sure MP3.com would have succeeded. It was limited to music you bought in CD form at a store—there was no way to buy music from their site. It’s hard to scale servers to support this kind of load, and their service was limited by the technology of the time—you had to use a computer to access your music, and few people had broadband Internet access.

Progress Takes More Than Technology

This is an important lesson in how technical innovation is only a small part of progress. MP3.com had the cloud servers 12 years ago, and they had the same matching concept as iTunes Match. They even had a great domain name. But they didn’t have the industry connections to make it legal or the infrastructure to make it practically useful.

Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, along with the first version of the iTunes music store. While the iPod and later Apple products are mainly praised for their design and technical features, Apple also made amazing progress in doing all of the legal wheeling and dealing necessary to make the whole thing legitimate. It took years for iTunes to reach the point where it had licensed music from all of the major publishers, with some popular bands like the Beatles taking 10 years. Finally, after a ton of work from Steve Jobs and Apple, iTunes Match brought the same features as My.MP3.com to the real world. The service is much more useful, too, since you can play music from your phone over a 3G network.

My point here is not to complain that copyright law needs to change (which it does) or that we live in an overly litigious society (which we do). But if you’re wondering why a new feature hasn’t been released yet on your favorite gadget, or if you’re considering selling something yourself, remember that a great idea and a technical innovation always have the potential to bring progress. But if the company doesn’t deal with the legal issues and the infrastructure, It just might take 12 years to arrive… and it might be a different company that succeeds with the idea.

I hate camera straps. But I love my camera and frankly its got to be strapped to me if I’m going to use it, and so like everyone else I just lived with the fact that the strap constantly gets twisted, chaffs the back of my neck, and that the camera hangs from it at an awkward angle any time there’s a heavier zoom lens on it.

I had already given up on efforts to find “a better way” to deal with the camera strap when Custom SLR sent me one of their clever C-Loops.

The C-Loop is an ingenious little device—essentially it’s two camera strap loops on a standard mount screw that attaches to the tripod mount on the bottom of your camera. Because the loops swivel round the thumbscrew easily, the strap doesn’t become twisted.

When using the C-Loop, the camera hangs now from the bottom of the camera, so lenses always point down—the way I think cameras should hang. You can easily take the strap off the camera by simply unscrewing it, which makes packing the camera away much easier and allows me to avoid having the strap hanging off the camera when its on a tripod or attached to my telescope.

But the best thing about the C-Loop is that it makes it possible to use an adjustable camera strap to carry the camera over the shoulder messenger bag style—pointing down as it should, conveniently out of the way, and not chaffing my neck. For this reason alone I think the C-Loop is a keeper.

The C-Loop is a little bit awkward with the portrait extended battery adapter because the center of gravity is higher, causing the camera to carry upside-down. This will likely be the case on professional full-frame cameras that have a built-in portrait mode as well, and is something you should consider before buying a C-Loop. It doesn’t bother me, but you might not like it.

If camera straps bug you, the C-Loop is a simple solution! More photos after the break: (Continue Reading…)

I absolutely ADORE this advertising campaign from Toyota. It’s for their Yaris, which is the bottom of the line car for them and they have decided to highlight features usually overlooked by car manufacturers.

Do you go places sometimes and leave places other times? Maybe you need a Yaris. It’s a car!

Ironically, my VW Beetle didn’t have this feature. The windows broke so often that I eventually just stopped rolling them down at all.

My Beetle wasn’t very good in this department either. It had two cup holders that couldn’t hold anything larger than a can of soda and even that was a tight squeeze.

Yellow? No! I guess I’ll just have to go with Other Other Blue…

Nine airbags! I AM PROTECTED!

Personally, I don’t care for the “soft dash” features. I have them in certain spots on my Prius and they are grime magnets. I’d rather just have plastic, I think.

It’s handy to have a USB port to plug in your iPod or iPhone. I wonder how it works with the stereo. I DO know that you can upgrade the Yaris stereo to one that has integrated Bluetooth.

They don’t even mention the best part of the Yaris. The gas mileage is 30 mpg in the city and 35 mpg on the freeway. I get 45 mpg in my Prius, but it cost me TEN THOUSAND dollars more than the Yaris. In the end, these Yaris commercials are just silly fun, but they got me to seriously look at a car that I might not have even considered.

This supercut video plays every superlative used in the original iPad keynote.

It’s no wonder that by the time a keynote is over, I end up wanting whatever it is that they are showcasing. Not only do they create amazing, wonderful, beautiful, magical and awesome products, they aren’t afraid to say so.

Via: Supercut.org — Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote: Every superlative

I had heard of Shadow of the Colossus and decided to get it about two or three years ago. Once I started playing, it became one of my favorite games for the PlayStation 2 for many reasons.

In Shadow of the Colossus there is very little speaking because the plot is very simple, but the game is complicated in its own way. The nameless main character wants to bring a girl back to life, but to do this he must venture into forbidden land and slay all sixteen colossi. He must slay them with his ancient sword, bow, and horse. His sword is magical and can find the colossi, their weak points, and kill them.

This video is showing actual gameplay rather than just an animation like in some trailers.

The graphics are beautiful in Shadow of the Colossus. I found myself being really excited to see the next colossus. With each colossus you’ll find yourself looking for how to beat it by trying new things until you find what works. For example, when fighting the first colossus you must stab his ankle to get him to fall over so you can get to his head. With each colossus it gets more and more complicated to kill them. It is like an exciting puzzle figuring out what the next step is.

Shadow of the Colossus is one of the best games on the PlayStation 2, because of the graphics, the gameplay, and the creativity of the game. It is like nothing I have seen before. This game is one of the best.