The bedside alarm clock is just one of many devices made obsolete by smartphones. But with their puny speakers it's not impossible to sleep through a phone's alarm. Unless you've got this questionable iBell Mini accessory that merges tried and tested old-fashioned alarm clock technology with new.
Instead of an electronic beep, or even your favorite song, it wakes you from your slumber with the ear-piercing sound of a metal hammer pounding away at a pair of metal bells. It's $38 and doesn't require any batteries, but that's because it leeches off your iPhone's power source. And since it's designed for the old dock connector, you'll want to factor in the cost of Apple's Lightning adapter too if you've upgraded to the iPhone 5. More here.
The Swedish web host PeRiQuito AB, PRQ, is one of the most controversial web hosts on the planet, valuing free speech so highly that it serves up web content for Pirate Bay, WikiLeaks. Yesterday, though, Swedish police paid a visit.
Forbes reports that Stockholm police raided the company yesterday. The process brought about technical issues for PQR, which shut down its own website and a swathe of torrent sites like Pirate Bay, but the police also seized a number of servers.
It's currently not clear which servers were taken. There're certainly plenty to choose from: among PQR's 2,000-or-so customers are WikiLeaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central, and the defamation-accused Italian blog known as Perugia Shock.
PQR was founded by Pirate Bay members back in 2004, and has been raided by police twice before: in 2006 to gain evidence about Pirate Bay and 2010 during a more general file sharing investigation. The nature of the PQR business—a no-questions-asked set-up where clients often remain anonymous—means that even it doesn't know why the raid happened yet. More here.
Cruise lines will keep spending billions of dollars on ocean-going monstrosities that promise to be the most relaxing way to spend your vacation. But they can't hold a candle to this tiny seaworthy hot tub that's warmed with a simple wood burning stove and propelled with a quiet electric motor.
The HotTug will easily ferry six to eight passengers whether or not the glass fiber-reinforced polyester hull is filled with water. It works as both a floating hot tub or a regular boat, but presumably gets far better mileage when drained. A wood stove safely heats the water to whatever temperature you desire, and you can add a gas outboard motor if the built-in electric option doesn't have enough range or speed for your liking. The boat itself, stripped of motors and the stove, will set you back around $11,600. But fully equipped you're looking at spending upwards of $21,300 for what has to be the most relaxing way to enjoy the water. More here.
Adapting its military-grade gear for the consumer market, Fraser-Volpe's STEDI-EYE Mariner binoculars promise to remove up to 98 percent of unwanted motion from shaky hands, or vibrations from a moving vehicle. It's weatherproof and packs night vision too, making it an uber-expensive accessory for serious bird watchers.
Just how expensive you might ask? Try just north of $5,400. You could build your own private aviary with that much money. But the binoculars do seem to deliver impressive features for their high-end price tag. Besides being completely waterproof, buoyant, and working even in the dark, the Mariners feature a set of gyroscope-stabilized prisms sitting between its 14X magnifying lenses. The system is capable of instantly cancelling out vertical movements as drastic as 50 degrees, so even while running through the woods you're guaranteed a perfect view of that rare Green-breasted Mango. More here.
You go to a rocky beach, you dig for a few seashells, skip a few stones on the water, and make a couch. Wait, what? Ok beach rocks might not be the first inspiration that comes to mind when crafting new furniture, but in the case of GumDesign's Isola couch, the finished result came out quite well.
Comprised of multiple, modular pieces, the seating is designed so that no two pieces look quite the same when arranged (just like a real pile of rocks), and even works in a few current design trends, such as the use of solid neon colors and marble table tops. Depending on your tastes, you may not like the men's suit inspired fabrics, but all in all, it's a pretty fun take on furniture. More here.
ThinkGeek's adorable iCade is genius. It turns your iPad into a little arcade! Asteroids forever! If it has a drawback, it's that, well, it kind of destroys the iPad's portability. Meet the Bluetooth Duo Gamer controller, which sheds the cabinet for a dock that'll fit in your backpack.
The Duo Gamer looks familiar, like a 6-button controller you use with some consoles. What sets it apart from other mobile controllers, the iCade (Atari's joystick arcade) is its flexibility. The Duo Gamer can be used as a handheld controller, yes, but thanks to its cartoonishly large proportions you can set it down on a surface and use it arcade style. In addition to working with the iPad, it will also work with your iPhone or iPod Touch. (It plugs into the 30-pin dock, so you'll need Apple's adapter to use it with your iPhone 5.)
The Duo Gamer is available now for $80. It's immediately compatible with 10 games, including Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD, Brothers In Arms 2: Global Front Free, Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation, NOVA 3, and Order & Chaos. More here.
Last year's floods in Thailand caused hard drive shortages after wreaking havoc on a number of electronics manufacturers, but new stats from IHS iSuppli indicate that the HDD market for PCs has fully recovered and is poised to hit an all time high. The firm expects 524 million units for internal use in PCs to ship this year, besting the previous record by 4.3 percent. What's giving the recovery an added boost? According to the analytics group, the extra demand comes courtesy of Windows 8 and Ultrabooks. Unfortunately for deal hounds, the company noted in a report earlier this year that prices aren't expected to dip below the pre-flood range until 2014. More here.
You may remember the Steve Jobs action figures that were introduced and then canceled earlier this year. Now there's a new Steve Jobs figure on the horizon, one that supposedly contains a weird and creepy ingredient: trash stolen from Jobs himself.
The sculpture, made by XVALA, is due to be shown at a gallery in Los Angeles starting early in October. As for the trash thing, Cory Allen Contemporary Art described it this way in the announcement of the piece:
Coated in an "Apple White finish," the sculpture is cast in the artist's patented plastic porcelain, mixed with a recycled resin made up of Steve Job's residential trash which the artist collected from the tech icon's home several months before his death.
The plan, apparently, is to mass-produce the sculptures in "an appropriate work environment" as a shot at Apple's Foxconn production facilities and a limited number will come in black, as a reminder of Foxconn suicides. According to Cory Allen, production will continue with or without (read: without) Apple's approval. The sculptures, entitled "Think Different" will be unveiled on October 13th. More here.
Following Apple CEO Tim Cook's candid admission that Apple Maps might not be so great, and his suggestion that users turn to competing services, Apple has cleaned up one final detail: they aren't calling their maps the most powerful any more.
Previously, Apple's website suggested iOS 6 maps were not only the most beautiful, but also the most powerful maps out there saying "All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever." Granted, the statement was hedged a bit with that "may just" part, but apparently not enough because now they've removed the word "powerful" all together. The new description reads "All in a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease."
After Cook's apology, and pointing users toward the likes of Bing and MapQuest in the app store, this last bit of language-changing definitely seems fitting. And accurate. More here.
If you ever try to use a power bar anywhere but on the floor, you'll quickly realize that gravity will do everything it can to drag it off a table, a ladder, or anything not at ground level. That's not the case with Quirky's new Prop Power extension cord, though. Its six-foot cable is made with flexible wiring and a conforming plastic sleeve, so it holds its shape.
That means you can wrap it around table legs, or snake it through the steps of a ladder, and it will hold on for dear life. Unfortunately the business end of the Prop Power is limited to just three grounded outlets, but there's nothing stopping you from daisy chaining another power bar on the end when you run out. And while Quirky promises the Prop Power is going into production, there's no estimate on how much it will cost or when it will be available until they start actually churning them out. More here.
If you're wondering how you can breathe life into that old TV set, the FAVI SmartStick might be what you're looking for. For $50, you get a dongle that provides your TV with Android and access to streaming movies and music.
The stick, which runs Jelly Bean and packs 4GB of storage, plugs into any HDMI port and uses baked-in Wi-Fi to provide access to the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Epix, YouTube, and Pandora. It comes as standard with a full internet browser, but because it runs Android you can download anything from the Play store, too.
The stick also lets you stream media wirelessly from another computer elsewhere in your pad, though you have to use a proprietary MediaSHARE app. And it does only cost $50. More here.
ADATA is touting its new HE720 as the world's thinnest external hard drive. The company has managed to squeeze 500 GB of storage and a speedy USB 3.0 connection into a brushed metal enclosure measuring in at a mere 8.9 millimeters thick—or just over a third of an inch.
Just a few days ago Toshiba claimed its new Canvio external drive—boasting similar specs—was the world's thinnest. But it measures in at a portly nine millimeters meaning ADATA's got it beat by a hair—literally. So if you've already transitioned to a thin ultrabook, this will easily squeeze alongside it in your bag. The new HE720 of course includes the requisite mediocre backup software that comes standard on most external drives these days, and is available right now with a matching svelte price tag of just $90. More here.
Apple's always publishing patents, but here's one that sounds rather fun: imagine an iPhone or iPad with a flexible display that has speakers built in to it, to provide surround sound.
The patent describes a flexible display with all manner of built-in features: a tactile keyboard, laser mics and speakers. Much of this is made possible by the idea of a flexible display—which is some way off but by no means impossible to achieve. Once you can manage that, according to this patent, the world's your oysters.
For instance, shove an array of transducers behind the screen and you turn the whole thing into a giant speaker, which would go some way to sounding like a proper set of speakers. Vibration may be a problem, but that might be tolerable compared to the tinny sound you squeeze out of most mobile and tablet speakers. Unlikely to exist any time soon, of course, but we can dream. More here.
The Mars Curiosity Rover has touched a Martian rock for the first time. And, in the process, it gave us the closest, most detailed view of the Red Planet (a tiny part of it) yet, using her Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at ten, two and one inches from the rock.
The target was the pyramid-shaped rock of unknown origin, named Jake Matijevic in honor of the Mars Rover surface operations systems chief engineer who recently passed away.
The origin and composition will be known soon: the rover examined Jake Matijevic with its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), one of the instruments at the end of its multi-use robotic arm. Then it used its ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera instrument) to shoot laser pulses to determine the rock's chemical composition.
According to NASA, the dark, relatively smooth rock "was selected as a desirable target because it allowed the science team to compare results of the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument and the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument, both of which provide information about the chemical elements in a target." More here.
When you're involved in a sting operation, or just trying to collect some incriminating evidence, the last thing you want is the perps realizing you've been recording everything. And since the days of sneakily recording a conversation with a phone in your pocket are long gone, this ridiculously tiny voice recorder could be the next best thing.
The Edic-mini Tiny B22 is just over an inch in size and weighs roughly the same as a large coin. But its built-in ultra sensitive microphone can record sounds up to 30 feet away, and the company claims that with a fresh cell-sized battery it can record for up to 24 hours, non-stop. And if you're planning a particularly long stakeout, a voice-activated mode is promised to almost triple that to 70 hours. It's just too bad it's crippled with a USB 1.1 port which makes offloading files incredibly slow, and a $440 price tag that will probably have most people just risking their lives with a cheap smartphone app. More here.
In a hilarious court ruling, Apple got denied a trademark on its orange music icon (the one that's on iOS devices) because trademark judges said consumers might confuse the logo with one owned by MySpace. Hah!
Yes, My_____ or ____space or whatever it's going to be these days, is screwing with Apple's plans. Take a look at the two logos to see if there are similarities beyond being orange
Backstory on the MySpace logo: It was issued to a music service called iLike in 2008 and was acquired by MySpace in 2009 before being shuttered earlier this year. Apple tried to argue that no one has ever confused the two logos (which is probably true) but the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board disagreed saying:
In view of the facts that the marks are similar, the goods and services are related and are encountered by the same classes of consumers, we find that applicant's double musical note and design for "computer software [..]" is likely to cause confusion with the registered mark comprising a double musical note and design [..] for listening to MP3's and for sharing MP3's and music playlists with others.
In some ways, it's a cardinal sin. In other ways, it's understandable. There's a whole world of difference between tweeting between sets to try and inflame your friends' jealousy, and holding your gargantuan phablet above your head for three or four songs at a time, blocking the view of those behind you, and capturing video that is so low quality that no one will want to watch it. Ever. You might wish you'd never even bothered to shoot it in the first place.
What's OK according to your personal smartphone concert etiquette? One quick shot as the headliner comes out on stage? No pictures, but texts, tweets, and Facebooking between sets? Unconditional and violent death to all phone-wielders?
A lot of business is done on the Internet, but the model for making money there isn't as straightforward as "sell a thing, make a profit." So how do the web services you use every day make money? The aptly named "How Do They Make Money" has some answers.
Often, the answer is subscribers, advertising, and freemium, but other factors are in the mix too. Even with all those options, a lot of these services aren't profitable. Which ones aren't might surprise you. How Do They Make Money has a breakdown of revenue type and profitability of nearly 50 different prominent Internet companies, and lets you arrange them by the kind of income they have, or the service they provide.
It's a neat little distraction, but it's worth noting that the site doesn't cite its sources, so if you're in this for anything more than mild amusement, you're going to have to go vet the facts yourself see here
How Do They Make Money
