If a picture is worth a thousand words, a smell has to be worth at least a few hundred. And the next time you're chatting and come across a thought or sentiment that can't be expressed with an emoticon, maybe a specific scent could translate your feelings. At least that's what the creators of the ChatPerf are hoping.
Created by the Chaku Perfume company, ChatPerf is an iPhone accessory and accompanying app that lets you remotely trigger a small puff of fragrance, or really any smell, on someone else's iPhone. So imagine sending the smell of fresh popcorn to lure a friend to a movie, or your favorite perfume to secure a date. The possibilities are endless, except that the atomizer accessory can only hold one scent at a time. And asking someone else to refill it takes all of the surprise out of the equation. So for $63 it's kind of a tough sell when that winky emoji actually sums up how you're feeling about 95 percent of the time anyways. More here.
Tokyo Flash is the go-to watch brand for people who don't care what time it is. Here's its latest creation, which hides the time in the negative space of a maze.
The Kisai Maze is labyrinthine in its complexity. It takes some patience to work out what the hell time it is—but once you've cracked it, it's actually quite satisfying. The watch is available in stainless steel or black, and is on sale for $99 until Thursday, when the price jumps to $139. More here.
9to5mac is reporting that Apple is going to announce a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro alongside the iPad Mini at a forthcoming product announcement event.
The website cites a "consistently reliable source at a high-profile U.S. retailer", who has learned of a new, smaller version of the current 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. According to the source, a 13-inch version of the Retina MacBoook will share the thinner, lighter style of enclosure of the 15-inch version, and will be sold in two configurations—with differing processor and storage options. The source also claims that the 13-inch Retina MacBook will be sold alongside the standard 13-inch MacBook.
The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro was launched back in June to dropped jaws, and hinted at the future of Apple's laptop line: slim, hi-res displays, SSD-only storage and no optical drives. While a 13-inch version seemed inevitable, it remains to be seen with certainty if now is the time.
Still, chances are that the reason a 13-inch version wasn't launched alongside the 15-inch computer was that Apple was taking it easy on suppliers. Whether a six-month window provides enough breathing room—and whether we'll hear of a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro in the coming weeks—well, we'll just have to wait and see. More here.
Street View is good and getting better—and that's thanks to Google's massive fleet of cars, kitted out to capture the world around us in all its panoramic glory. This is what a parking lot full of them looks like.
Google's own Masrur Odinaev posted this picture of one of the company's holding pens: the fleet of Subaru Imprezas looks like an army of camera-equipped automatons, ready and waiting to do whatever Larry Page orders them to. Which, really, isn't far off the mark. Across the world, Odinaev estimates there are in fact 250 cars buzzing around. More here.
Microsoft's already opened up the floodgates with Windows 8 pre-orders, and it looks as if those still on the fence now have a sandbox to goof off in. Pictured above is a trio of Windows 8 notebooks from a Best Buy located in St. Cloud, Minnesota. More here.
A huge part of human history revolved around tying stones to sticks. We don't do it much any more, but if we did, we'd be super good at it. These modern stone tools prove it.
Designed by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow, each tool is specially engineered to fit the piece of stone or flint its paired with. Digital scans taken of the flint stones let each handle account for its blade's subtlest nook and cranny, resulting in some stylish hatchets and daggers cavemen could only dream of, if that.
The tools were put on display at the recent Budapest Design Week in Hungary. No Neanderthals were around to comment, but you can imagine what they might have said: something along the lines of "oogh!" More here.
Lions and tigers and bears, join models of sharks and gorillas and gators—all the best animals, in desk tool form for $78 each. Even better? All of these creatures' teeth are properly proportioned to their bodies. More here.
We're almost there. Just a few more days until the big reveal. But that doesn't mean there aren't still a few final Windows 8 secrets to be disclosed. Two of those are the price and the packaging, which online retailer Newegg has just let slip. There are four packages listed: Windows 8 Professional Upgrade ($69), Windows 8 Pro Pack ($69, product key card only), Windows 8 OEM ($99) and Windows 8 Professional ($139), with the latter two being available in both 32- and 64-bit versions (for the same price).
If you go into the product page, however, we can see that the original price for the upgrade and product key card only versions is listed as "$199" suggesting that this might either be a launch offer, or subject to change. Don't forget though, there's still the chance to upgrade for an even lower price, for those who qualify. You can officially reserve your copy of Pro from today for $69.99 at all the main retailers, but if you can hold back on that impulse purchase for just a little longer, you'll be able to upgrade to Pro online for $39 (until January 31st). More here.
Kitchenware might be practical, but it isn't nearly enough fun. Fortunately, cookware company Lodge has decided to change that by creating a seasoned guitar-shaped cast iron skillet at its Tennessee foundry.
Lodge refers to it as a mini skillet, and it isn't wrong: at a mere 11 inches, end-to-end, you'll struggle to fit a family's worth of steaks in the pan. But who cares about that when you pretend to play audacious guitar solos as you cook. The best bit? It only costs $18. More here.
Designed to accomodate kids of any age and height, this Grow Table drawing desk features a sloped work surface so at one end it's low enough for little tikes, while the other is high enough for teenagers.
Made from marine plywood with Douglas Fir accents, the Growth Table encourages both young and old to work and play together at the same desk. And its simple design means the table can keep up with a growing kid without the need for complicated adjustment mechanisms. Just be careful not to misplace a pencil when you're older because it has a long way to roll. More here.
It's a famous question among academic philosophers: how can we be sure we're not living in a gigantic computer simulation? Fortunately, researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany think they've cracked it.
Their reasoning is pretty straightforward, according to Technology Review: if the cosmos is just a numerical simulation, calculated on some insanely powerful supercomputer tucked away in another world, there should be clues around us that can reveal the truth. Glitches in the system, if you like, that give the game away.
Moving from that reasoning to the science required to find those clues isn't quite so easy. To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.
So the researchers started looking at some physics they understood—in this instance high energy processes that become smaller as they get more energetic. Interestingly, they found that the idea of a world-as-computer-simulation would impose limits on the absolute amount of energy any particle can have, a result rooted in the fact that nothing could ever exist in a simulation which is smaller than the 3D grid it's represented on.
Weirdly enough, turns out such a limit actually does exist here in our world, and dictates the amount of energy cosmic ray particles can have. But the idea of the lattices add a further complication, because it would theoretically mean that we wouldn't see cosmic rays traveling equally in all directions across the imposed 3D grid.
To finish off by blowing your mind: that's a measurement that current technology could be used to make. Of course, if the findings were negative it wouldn't rule out the fact that our world was a silicon simulation, because it might just be more complex than we could ever imagine—but if results came out positive it could mean we're all made of code. More here.
If you've been wanting an extra iPhone 5 cable, but haven't wanted to pay the full $40 for one, help might be on the way: a Chinese company called iPhone5mod says it has cracked the authentication chip found in the lightning connector and is now selling the cables for $20 apiece.
According to TG Daily, the company also has a supply of real authentication chips from an official Apple supplier as well:
"We are the first company to release a different Lightning Cable from Apple that fully supports the iPhone 5 (also works with iPod Touch 5th Gen and upcoming mini iPad too). It works independently or together with the iPhone 5 Dock," says the company.
[...]
According to the company, it's got two sources of appropriate chips: a supply of the genuine article from Apple's own supplier, and cracked chips that bypass Apple's authentication functions. Both work equally well, it says.
While these aren't yet cheaper, the fact that the authentication chip has been cloned opens the doors for a wave of other manufacturers. But though the knockoff lightning cables are said to do everything the official cables do, word has it that Apple will try and block the version of this cable that iPhone5mod is peddling. More here.
Motorola had said its dearest RAZR HD LTE would be coming "later this fall" as an exclusive to Rogers, and today's the day that relatively thin and powerful Android handset hits shelves across the border. Available now for $100 (with the obligatory three-year commitment, of course), the RAZR HD LTE will hand interested Canadians a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich (sorry, no Jelly Bean for now), a 4.7-inch Super AMOLED HD, 720p display and a 1.5GHz, dual-core S4 CPU -- not to mention the ability to surf on Rogers' LTE waves in areas where the network's live.
Meanwhile, those who would like to go the "outright" way will have to spend a cool $600 on Moto's Kevlar-sporting slab, but, needless to say, that's the price folks have to pay for walking out the door with a bit of leeway. More here.
A bicycle is already pretty damn simple. Two wheels, a frame, a seat, pedals and a chain. What happens if you remove the chains though? That would give you the Bicymple—a bicycle that's even more simple than you could ever imagine.
Why would you make a bicycle without a chain? Well, aside from the answer of why not, the folks behind Bicymple explain:
By removing the chain, the number of moving parts and overall complexity is significantly reduced. A direct-drive, freewheeling hub joins the crank arm axis with the rear-wheel axis, shortening the wheelbase and minimizing the design.
More than just a stylish concept bike, the bicymple is comfortable, easy to ride, and brilliantly simple to maintain. The lightweight design and short wheelbase make for a nimble ride. The optional rear-steer mode is reminiscent of custom "swing bikes" and allows tighter turns and "crab-riding".
Western Digital is really getting in bed with Thunderbolt. It already has a 2TB 10,000RPM monster, and now it's got an 8TB external drive with Thunderbolt.
The MyBook 8TB is the largest consumer level Thunderbolt drive, and it works with RAID 0 and RAID 1. It comes with a Thunderbolt cable, too, which is nice. On the downside, it doesn't have a USB 3.0 alternative, so if you have to work with an alternative machine that doesn't have a Thunderbolt port, well, you're screwed. It's $850, and available now at WD'sonline store.
Multi-tools pack everything you need into a small, convenient device. Sometimes they can go a little overboard. But this thing takes it to a whole new level.
The 9-in-1 Emergency Light stores a knife, scissors, Phillips-head screwdriver, bottle opener, carabiner, and a hammer all into the base of a flashlight/latern that also has a blinking red flasher mode.
Some multi-tools have much larger arsenals, sure. But this one's particular mix looks questionable—how impossibly difficult would it be to use a knife with a gigantic handle like that? There can't be a single way that allows you to make accurate and precise cuts. More here.
Rovio teased a certain film-inspired Angry Birds picture last week, and as expected, it's another new game -- Angry Birds Star Wars. Our furious feathered friends are assuming the likenesses of characters from the epic saga, with the trusty Red Bird taking on Luke Skywalker's role.
It wouldn't be the Rebel Alliance without a dark side to fight, which is where the Pigs fit into the storyline; even the music and levels for gravity-based play will hark back to the film franchise. In addition to the software, details of related merchandise have also been uncovered, including table games, toys and costumes. The game is out on November 8th for iOS, Android and computers, and if it follows the original storyline, we wonder how Red Bird's going to feel about his porcine family history. More here.
Everybody wants a better Captcha. Trying to type in those distorted words can be a serious pain, and it's becoming less and less of an impedance to ever-more-intelligent spam bots. The Civil Rights Captcha takes a different approach; you've got to have a little empathy.
Instead of your run-of-the-mill alphanumeric gibberish, or random selection of words, the Civil Rights Captcha presents you with a short blurb about a Civil Rights violation and asks you how you feel about it. Ostensibly robots (and trolls) won't make it through because they'll remark that a human rights activist's murder makes them feel "aroused" instead of "upset." And bots will still have to make it past standard Captcha hurdles before they can even pick one of the choices.
Code for the Civil Rights Captcha is freely available, so anyone who wants to can pick it up. It definitely makes better use of Captcha space than most traditional systems do, and it's an interesting take on a system; isn't empathy more exclusively human than text recognition? And so what if the robots learn to fake that. It could make the robopocalypse so much more comfortable for all of us. More here.
Apple has issued a support document about the “purple lens flare” issue on the iPhone 5, but don’t expect any type of recall or fix ad it is considered a common occurrence.
Following up on an email, Apple has now released a support document about the purple lens flare issue. As the document states, Apple feels this is an issue that happens in most small cameras, and has even been present in previous generations of the iPhone. The fix is fairly simply according to the statement:
Most small cameras, including those in every generation of iPhone, may exhibit some form of flare at the edge of the frame when capturing an image with out-of-scene light sources. This can happen when a light source is positioned at an angle (usually just outside the field of view) so that it causes a reflection off the surfaces inside the camera module and onto the camera sensor. Moving the camera slightly to change the position at which the bright light is entering the lens, or shielding the lens with your hand, should minimize or eliminate the effect.
Of course the issue is that you won’t normally see the problem until you look at the picture, and by then most moments are gone. More here.
The iPhone 5 may not be ready for sale unlocked officially just yet, but that doesn't mean T-Mobile isn't ready to be your service provider. As evidenced by the photo above, the folks at TmoNews and YouTuber BigRicksChannel have confirmed that the service provider is now selling iPhone 5-compatible Nano-SIMs. Of course, these'll work just fine with the Verizon-variant of the the 4-inch device, as it's technically unlocked out of the box. More here.
