February 2011

Scion and XLR8R Update City Guide App

Here is a bit of info Gear Diary received recently regarding a Scion-related app update. It is not a Scion owner-specific app, rather it’s one that seeks to enhance the lifestyle of the Scion demographic. The City Guide app now offers more than 15 locales in the database, but Dallas/Fort Worth, who is hosting the big game this weekend, is not among them. I did check out the Austin guide as I was visiting the capital city recently, but the place we had dinner and drinks at (The Highball) was not listed. It was a cool restaurant/bar/nightclub/bowling alley complete with…


GD Quickie: Can You Guess Who Is Buying Google’s Priorities?

When I first heard that Google wasn’t going to auto-complete searches for Bit-torrents and other file sharing methods I was pleased. But then it became clear that it was less a matter of taking an anti-piracy stance, and more about satisfying the corporate interests of those who feed Google loads of cash. So this image was very telling – and it also shows where the priorities are at Google … if you have the cash, you get to set the moral compass. Source: Techi via Buzzfeed


GD Quickie: Yeah, it IS That Kind of Day!

For a large part of the country, this image pretty much sums things up. It is from the stretch of I-93 on the New Hampshire side – 93 runs from Southern NH straight into downtown Boston and is one of those infamously clogged highways. For more images, check out page at BuzzFeed!


Guns Don’t Save Lives; Skin Guns Save Lives

Now THIS is an amazing use of technology for good. Did you know that the current method of helping burn victims through skin grafts takes weeks or months to heal but that can be brought down to literally an hour? It’s true and a National Geographic program will focus on the innovation that makes it possible. The “Skin Gun” takes stem cells from a burn victim’s healthy skin (not the controversial kind) and mixes them with a solution that then allows doctors to literally spray new skin on. Apparently it is LITERALLY like spray painting but with a far more…


Arctic Gear Review Pt 1: P531 USB Powered 5.1 Surround Sound Headset

I’m pretty particular when picking out my PC gaming gear. I have been through a pretty good amount of hardware over the years and keep up my life cycle of gaming gear. Arctic sent us out some gear to check out and review a few weeks ago. I had a chance to check it all out and see how it fared on a few solid hours of Call of Duty Black Ops for the PC. I had a chance to check out some gaming oriented hardware including 2 headsets, a mouse, and a standard slim profile keyboard. Arctic offers some…


Kindle Singles

Kindle singles have been available for about a week, and my household has been brave enough to give them a try. Not only did I read one, but I convinced my dear wife and non-ebook fan Sarah to try one as well! I read a non-fiction title (Lifted, by Evan Ratliff), while Sarah read Leaving Home: Short Pieces by Jodi Picoult, who is one of her favorite authors. I enjoyed Lifted immensely. It was quick-paced, interesting, and read like a longer magazine article. What I really enjoyed was that it cut right to the important bits. If Lifted had been…


This Chair is More Comfortable Than a Barrel of Monkeys

What do you do when an old whiskey barrel has served it’s purpose and come to the end of life? Why, give it a new life of course. And that’s what the wine barrel chair. Over 99% of the chair comes from recycled/reused wine barrels. In fact, they even use the barrel straps in construction. How cool is that? As the designers explain, a work of art, each piece of the planet rooth barrelly made it line of furnishings is made by hand, by working artisians. every work of art is signed and numbered. Yes, for just $985 this chair CAN…


Apple Discovers the Key to iBooks Success — iBooting the Competition?

Earlier today Mike brought us the news that Sony’s Reader app was rejected from the App Store, and he did a great job of explaining how murky the whole story really is. Whether Apple purposely rejected the Reader app as part of a longer plan to cull all ebook readers from the App Store, or whether Sony brought the issue upon themselves by breaking the rules remains to be determined. What’s more disturbing is the news from Techcrunch that Apple didn’t directly deny the possibility of cracking down on the ebook app “browser trick”, where book purchases are done by…


Music Diary Reviews: Trey Gunn and Nik Bartsch Produce Two of My Favorite 2010 Recordings

Welcome to another edition of Music Diary Reviews! Since I started doing these reviews I have simply collected up stuff from a time period and reviewed it all. For the last few I have separated Jazz, Pop and Re-issues. But still it is just whatever comes along reviewed as it comes along. Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome releases in there like Mary Halverson’s Saturn Sings. But there were also a couple of recent releases that struck me so much for one reason or other that I simply needed to look at them apart from everything else. So,…


2011 Mitsubishi Outlander GT Super This Week

What a difference a year makes. It was February, 2010 that we received a record snowfall here in North Texas and almost one year later we get socked in with ice and sleet just as teams arrive here for the big football game. I hope they feel right at home. For me, I am just thankful that this time around for the frozen weather I can actually get out of my driveway. No roadsters or performance cars this year, no sir – sitting in the front drive is the 2011 Mitsubishi Outlander GT with Super All-Wheel Control (S-AWC) complete with…


Tough Call: Is Apple Being Draconian & Greedy … or Is Sony Trying to Pull a Fast One?

If you track technology, you have likely seen the NYTimes article or one of the echo-articles declaring a shift in how Apple operates the app store, citing the rejection of the Sony Reader app and a vague quote from a Sony Rep as evidence. There is a lot of speculation there, but it ultimately comes down to the interpretation of two sections of a single sentence: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App…


Samsung Tab Afterglow Reality Check: ‘Quite Small’ Sales, Quite Large Returns

If you are like me, you love the iPad but were thrilled to see Samsung doing well with the Galaxy Tab. I wrote back at the beginning of December how the Galaxy Tab had sold 1 million units in two months, and Doug wrote about more mainstream attention being paid to the wonderful little Tablet. Personally I think we all benefit from competition – just look at the huge things Nintendo has done in 6 years with the DS in the face of competition from Sony and Apple compared to the tiny changes they made to the GameBoy over 15…


iPhone App Quickie: DropVox Lets You Record Voice Notes and Auto-Save to DropBox

I’m always searching for new ways to use my iPhone to create voice notes and turn them into text. I have found a number of good solutions — primary among them Dragon Dictation. But I’ve always wanted to be able to record a long voice note on the iPhone (Dragon is limited to just 60 seconds at a time) and then 0nce I’m back at my desk, apply the application MacSpeech Scribe to transcribe a long audio recording. The problem I’ve always run into is the fact that many voice note applications don’t record with a quality or a format…


Gatekeeper’s Post – the Huffington Post for Books?

There’s ample evidence that we’re at a crossroads in book history. Borders is struggling to survive, and publishers, editors, authors, and consumers are working to find their place in the brave new world of ebooks. Luckily, they don’t have to do it alone, thanks to the launch of Gatekeeper’s Post! I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Rivera, Editor in Chief of Gatekeeper’s Post, about the launch of the site and what he hopes to accomplish with it. Effectively, they’re looking to create a place where everyone from librarians to authors to agents to readers can keep up on…