Some people have large hands, sometimes made up of nothing but thumbs… This is a fact of life. And one can only imagine their dismay at the constant miniaturization of today’s electronics. How are they to communicate? How are they to live? They don’t have to remain dyslexic forever. The iDigitip is a simple accessory that fits at the end of a finger and is tipped with a smaller foam nub that works on touchscreens as well as on actual physical buttons (obviously). They come in packs of two, so you can even double-thumb your way through those texts like a tween in no time.
While the company overshot their late October target launch date, the important thing is that iTunes Match is now up and running. If you’ve not been keeping track, this service gives you access to your music library in the cloud. Now if your entire library consists of songs you’ve bought on iTunes, then you have no use for iTunes Match, you can simply use iTunes in the Cloud for free. If that’s not the case… if, say, you got your collection by ripping dozens of physical CDs, then for a $25 yearly fee, iTunes will scan your hard drive, identify everything you own and simply enable your access to matching songs on iCloud. So you don’t have to actually upload a truckload of songs, the software simply identifies the ones you have and lets you listen to a 256kbps version on demand, streamed to or stored in up to 10 devices. If no match is made, only then is the song uploaded to iCloud.
There’s a limit of up to 25,000 non-iTunes purchased songs, and while the songs you decide to download from the cloud will be DRM-free, they’ll be in AAC format.
You’re some kind of star and get a kick out of both looking like an idiot and slightly annoying the paparazzi hounding you? Got just the glasses for you.
They’re $7.50, which isn’t that much for a novelty toy and some short lived giggles.
A $200 rebate can go a long way, especially when it’s applied to a $629 machine, leaving it at a low $429 afterwards. In this case, it’s on a HP Pavilion g7-1260us, which is a large 17.3 inch Core i3-2330M 2.2GHz dual-core laptop. Other specs include “4GB memory, Intel HD graphics, HDMI, 640GB hard drive, SRS Premium Sound with Altec Lansing speakers, 17.3″ LED Backlit 1600×900 display, 802.11n WiFi, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS and more.”
Hitachi has rolled out a few external hard drives that boast business class speed in a consumer form factor. While not as sleek as some other available externals, the Hitachi Touro 3TB USB 3.0 is big enough and fast enough to justify the missing sleek. It does seem to be much improved over the previous versions and many of the aesthetic concerns are explained by the need to dissipate heat on this caliber of drive. The high platter count and 7200-rpm spindle speed require design concerns that supersede fashion.
The Hitachi Touro also tops out most charts for single drive read and write performance. There are better performing drives out there but not at this price point. Besides being a genuinely good buy, the drive shows above average performance with small files. Tiny files, which are what most average users deal with pose a big challenge for hard drives. This drive shows signs of having been tweaked with extra cache to make it handle real world file use much better as opposed to artificially created large test files. If you are in the market for a beefy external drive of the USB 3.0 variety, you can get more details in a review at Everything USB.
Nanotechnology can be awesome, as is awesomely demonstrated in the video above. What you’re seeing is a sneaker coated in a thin layer of Ross Nanotechnologies’ NeverWet superhydrophobic compound repelling chocolate syrup like a boss. We don’t know what it’s made of, really, aside from magic. Its water repellent capabilities are incredible. Water simply does not touch it. A drop of it on its surface forms a nearly spherical bead and unless on a perfectly horizontal surface, simply shoots right off. And it’s not just water but pretty much anything: chocolate syrup, mud, oil… you name it. The applications are endless. NeverWet provides anti-corrosion, anti-bacterial, anti-icing and self-cleaning properties to anything it coats. It even allowed an iPhone 3G to remain completely submerged for 30 minutes before dying.
Hit the jump for a bunch of jaw-dropping videos. If you don’t feel like clicking we will say this out here: we can’t figure out how to get them to take our money!
So the idea here is pretty simple. A group of UK kids claim to have developed a way to give Siri commands by simply… thinking them. Called Project Black Mirror, the way this works is the user hooks himself up with a few EEG pads and proceed to train the custom software. The claim is that by focusing on a particular word, the brain emits a “signature pattern”, which can then be programmed to become associated with that command. Once properly “trained”, these commands are then fed to a SpeakJet speech synthesizer chip and sent to the iPhone via its microphone jack. The video at the end of the article purportedly demonstrates the system in action.
We call BS for a bunch of reasons we’re about to get into. But most of all, this all just reeks of hoax. Hit the jump to hear us out.
Lighting a worn down candle in a deep candle holder: first world problem. You have to lift the thing, tilt it and insert a lit match while trying not to burn yourself. Easier said than done.
You can however simply upgrade your candle holders for these vented ones. A simple slit travels down the side, allowing you to… Well, you can look at the picture and figure things out, right?
What could possibly go wrong? This flame thrower (which you can see in action in the below video) was created by an Instructables user called PDRWLSN. While he titled it “Moose/Bear Repellant”, we’d like to think of it as the most exciting way to burn off some eyebrow hairs while lighting a cigarette*. See, it’s a gun-shaped device that contains “various bits of copper tubing, plywood, some laser-cut acrylic parts, butane, and the pulse-ignitor from his gas grill to start the fire burning.” It throws a flame about a foot and a half in length and could easily be misused in a thousand different ways.
Best part? He was kind enough to give us detailed instructions on how to make our own (Instructables… get it?).
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