2010 July

Archive | July, 2010

Editorials, Gaming July 28, 2010

Nintendo DS News: R4 ‘Piracy Enabling’ Carts Now Illegal In UK

I think by now I’ve made it known that I am frothingly anti-piracy, so the new ruling in the UK that bans the R4 Revolution and similar devices thrills me. The high court set a new precedent by adjusting that it is illegal for the R4 card to circumvent Nintendo’s security systems in order to [...]

Photographer Uses Soda Can Camera to Capture 6 Month Long Exposure

Just check out that image, called ‘Solargraph’. It is from the UK, taken of Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. The lines are the travel of the sun over time, showing the motion of the earth relative to the sun, as well as periods where no sun at all was visible. According to Wired, photographer Justin Quinnell [...]

The Vulkano Is on the Way– World’s “First Universal and Affordable Video Platform for Smartphones, PC/Macs, iPads and TVs”

Vulkano is positioning itself as “the next-generation live TV place shifting, time shifting and streaming device for smartphones and other devices”. The system makes it possible to take the home TV experience anywhere and by anywhere they mean… anywhere. When connected to a set-top box and a TV the Vulkano brings video to a host [...]

Caddyshack Celebrates 30 Years as the Best Golf Movie Ever

… and also the most hated by golfers! I remember when it came out my Uncle who was an avid golfer saw it right away, as did my cousin who was visiting with family from Georgia. Two very different opinions, one from a middle-aged golfer who thought it was stupid and one from a guy [...]

The End of Free Soda Refills?

Last Friday night my family went to a nice downtown Corning pub, and noticed printed signs all around stating that a new policy would permit only one free soda refill, after which guests would have to pay for another full-priced drink. I really didn’t think anything of it until I saw this post on Consumerist: [...]

ECOWRIST: Wearable Art That Helps The Planet

Every year I take one of my daughters on a weekend trip to NYC. This past weekend on our annual excursion we stumbled across ECOWRIST at a street fair in the Soho section of Manhattan. ECOWRIST was founded by husband and wife team David Gandy and MarQuerite Hamden in 2008 and the pair hand-makes watches [...]

EFO’s Solar Toys are Fun and Educational

Solar power has been a promise since I was my son’s age. In the future. we were all supposed to have roofs covered in solar cells and not having to use ugly power lines to power our lives. We were barely able to get to the point of powering calculators. Fast forward 20 years and [...]

Loyalty Card App Cardstar Now Features Foursquare Check-In, Backup and Restore

Cardstar is a popular application that Gear Diary has covered before. Simply put, the application lets you ditch the wallet-busting customer loyalty cards by letting put them all right on your smartphone. Chances are that Cardstar has you covered whether it’s grocery, gas, pet supplies or anything in between. I’ve personally been using the application [...]

Gear Review: Icon’s Solo and Link LED Flashlights

I loved Icon’s Rogue 2 Flashlight. It was the most durable flashlight I have ever had the opportunity to use. It was bright and well designed and will last many years. Paul Kim, the designer of the Icon line of flashlights is a genius at designing flashlights that are not only very good-looking, but very [...]

On Piracy and Copyrights: The Stupidity of Delay and Denial

The folks here at Gear Diary are in lots of different industries: financial, tech, rabbinical, teaching . . . me, I’m a technical writer. I write books and “topics” about technical topics for a living. Computer manuals, network system reference pages, instructions on how to install everything from giant Cisco routers to that teeny 2Wire [...]

Outlaw No More… Jailbreaking in the US Gets the Official Green Light

Well what do we have here? I’ve been buried in meetings all day so I haven’t gotten a chance to keep up on the news but one of my students just emailed me an article from today’s NYTimes (thanks Zack!) that has some great news for iPhone owners. Yup, new government rules have just made [...]

Apple Launches the Magic Trackpad

At long last Apple has released a standalone trackpad that brings the MacBook Pro controller to your iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro but goes one better by almost doubling the size of the trackpad. As the Apple store notes- Magic Trackpad gives you a whole new way to control what’s on your Mac desktop [...]

The Netbook Gamer: Din’s Curse (PC/Mac RPG, 2010)

I have consistently sung the praises of Soldak Entertainment since their first game released in 2007, which they have earned by consistently serving the RPG community with well-made, fun and interesting games. The most recent release from Stephen Peeler and crew is Din’s Curse – but let’s take a quick look at their earlier releases. [...]

iPad Accessory Review: 2 Of Dexim’s New Cases

Dexim is one of the leading manufacturers of accessories for a variety of mobile devices. The company has a wide range of products for the iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, HTC and now the iPad. The company recently launched several cases for the Apple iPad and they were nice enough to send along two of their [...]

Photography in the iPhone era

Let’s finally get to it. Photography in the iPhone (smartphone) era. A couple of years ago I wrote a column of how I was choosing my 5mp Nokia cellphone camera over carrying my Nikon D-SLRs each and every day for my photography needs. In all honesty, I had been leaving my Nikons behind for several [...]

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