2010 | Gear Diary

So … Even The Government Accounting Office Can’t Estimate the Impact of Piracy?!?

Image courtesy of BoyGeniusReport If you even peripherally follow any news about media piracy – music, movies, video games, TV shows, ebooks, and so on – you would have likely been confused. The media industry would have you believe that the amount of piracy is so massive and devastating that if they could recoup, the taxes would be enough to pay off the deficit, solve world hunger, wipe out disease, and give every child a cute little hypoallergenic kitten. If you believe the pirates, they are actually increasing sales for media and are misunderstood innovators breaking ground with a new…

Reviews

Review: Altec Lansing IMT320 inMotion Compact

I love Altec Lansing products. I have the inMotion Classic iPod Dock and I use it quite a bit. However, sometimes you need a speaker dock that is a little more compact and simpler to use than the inMotion Classic. That’s where the inMotion Compact comes in. The inMotion Compact looks a lot like the Classic, but it lacks the FM Radio, the integrated battery, remote and integrated display. The only controls on it are power and volume; all controls are on the top near the center of the dock. The rear of the dock hides the power cord’s port,…

Reviews

SurvivalStrap Review: Always There When You Need It

As a firefighter, I’m always looking for “gear” that keeps me safe. It’s especially nice to find a piece of equipment that I can carry both at work and at home. My rescue tool, for example, never leaves my pocket. It’s a versatile piece of hardware that I use almost every day, sometime to free an injured patient from their seat belt, other times to cut the blister pack off of one of my daughter’s newest toys. When I saw the SurvivalStraps web site I immediate thought, “now there’s something that might come in handy no matter where I am.”…

eBooks, Editorials

Hey Amazon, Where’s Kindle for Android?

Amazon, it’s time to release a Kindle for Android app. Maybe you’re working on one in secret, but why not let people know? You had a coming soon sign hung for the Blackberry and Mac apps for months before those appeared, but not a peep about Android support. And Amazon MP3 is heavily featured on many Android phones, so it’s not like you’re fighting with Google. This is a subject I’ve ranted on before, but in light of the ebook market changing with the entry of the iPad, it bears a second view. What really perplexes me is that you’re…

News & Features, Reviews

Quick Look: SPB TV for iPhone

SPB has had their SPB TV product out for WIndows Mobile devices for a long time, and it’s always been considered an excellent app. Recently they released it for the iPhone – something many people were eagerly anticipating. Let’s take a quick look at this latest release for the iPhone!

Reviews

Follow Friday App for iPhone

If you use Twitter, chances are you’re familiar with the tradition that is #Follow Friday. For those of you who aren’t, every Friday Twitter users compose a Tweet to their followers which consists of a list of the “cool” people they follow, and it serves to suggest that they follow them too. While I do like the concept it, can become taxing to compose these weekly Tweets, trying to remember who you shouted out the week before, who did for you, etc. The Follow Friday application, available in the iTunes App Store for 99 cents takes all the guess-work out…

Editorials, Game Diary

PSP Charger Conundrum: Sony Reminds Us It is the Leader in User-Unfriendly Design!

As a gamer, gadget-hound and someone who has been a reviewer of games on a variety of platforms for nearly a decade, I frequently get questions about games and gaming systems. These range from ‘what system should I buy my kids’ to ‘how do I get by this boss’. But yesterday I got one that really stopped me in my tracks. Here are the basics: So my next problem is, I went to go play my psp for the first time in a few months and I could not find the charger. I can find the usb wire so I…

You Dropped Your Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It?

News & Features

The ‘5 Second Rule’ Meets Corporate Decision Analysis

If you have spent any time on a project team in a corporation of any size, you have likely used tools such as decision analysis (or DA in Kepner-Tregoe speak), fault-tree, DMAIC, and so on … now you can apply some of those tools to figuring out whether to eat that cupcake that just fell on the floor. Of course, those of you with kids, pets or both know that there are multiple dynamics involved – more than are captured on this diagram, so that perhaps using a PPA (Potential Problem Analysis) or doing a ‘5 Whys’ exercise or filling…

Reviews

Kidz Gear Wireless Car Headphones Review

Inside this bag resides the key to peaceful car trips with the kids. Seriously. If you’ve ever crammed the family into your personal vehicle and driven hundreds of miles you know that the addition of an in-car entertainment system makes all the difference. Something about watching a DVD makes kids able to sit, comfortably. But unless your kids have headphones with which to listen to their movie, you, the driver, is forced to endure hours upon hours of High School Musical, One, Two and yes, even Three. Travis recently reviewed the Kidz Gear Wired Headphones. Kidz Gear was kind enough…

How to Do It Yourself!

iPhone Bluetooth: Flaky but Predictable Corner-Case Problem

Image courtesy of Natalie Jean Lovin Holbrook I find corner-cases. I don’t want to; I don’t try to; I just do. Like last week, right? I was working with some fairly sophisticated online documentation build and publish tools–and they weren’t working right. I was making my co-workers upset. I was making my boss upset. Heck, I was making my wife Sami upset, because I was griping about it so much. Was I missing something? What had I done wrong? Why wasn’t it working? Because there was a bug in the software. I had found a corner-case. Again. How Doug felt…

Game Diary, Reviews

Ragdoll Blaster 2 Lite for iPhone/Touch/iPad App Review

The iPhone has become a great puzzle gaming platform. A style of game I have come to enjoy are physics puzzles. There are many different versions of the genre, but each of them use the amazing physics possibilities on the iPhone to create a unique game. So to carry on the idea of uniqueness, how about firing rag dolls out of a canon to solve the puzzle? Well, that is exactly how Ragdoll Blaster 2 is played. The idea of the game was strange to me at first also. Once you play the game though, the addictiveness of shooting rag…

News & Features

BugMe! Receives Keyboard Support for iPhone and iPad

A few weeks ago, I reviewed BugMe! for the iPhone. Then, last week, Doug posted about the release of BugMe! for the iPad. In my review of BugMe!, one of the items that I noted needed improvement was the ability to use the keyboard for input. Using a finger to write on the iPhone’s small screen just didn’t allow me to write more than a few words. Fortunately, the folks at Electric Pocket, the makers of BugMe! were ahead of me. They have now updated BugMe! for both the iPhone and iPad with support for keyboard text entry, which definitely adds…

News & Features

Vaja’s iPad Cases are Exactly as Expected: Gorgeous and Pricey

ivolution Stripes starting at $ 220 No listing of available iPad cases could ever be complete without showing those offered from the premiere Argentinean leather company, Vaja. Not only have they released four new iPad cases, there is even a leather bag for those of you who aren’t yet sure how to carry the iPad in style. As expected, you’ll pay a premium for all that Vaja goodness, but we’ve grown to expect that and accept it as part of the price for carrying the best, right? ivolution Crystal 2 starting at $ 350 ivolution GT starting at $ 190…

Reviews

Native Union Moshi Moshi 02 Review

I enjoy reviewing gear. I enjoy it even more when the product I’m reviewing just makes sense. Such is the case with the Native Union Moshi Moshi 02. I still have a land line at home, but I know many people do not. With today’s unlimited long distance mobile plans and even more companies offering unlimited everything, more and more people are choosing to rely on their mobile phone’s at home and well as on the road. If’ there’s one thing I’ve always struggled with when using my mobile phone at home for extended periods of time, it’s the comfort…

eBooks, Reviews

Books on the iPad: Comparing the Printed Page to ePub and PDFs

PDF. ePub. Kindle. iBooks. eBooks. Nook. eInk. Web Browser. Laptop. Audiobooks. For over 10 years, I have been trying to move to an all-electronic workflow for reading and consuming books, especially technical books. It started when I was a consultant traveling in planes to a variety of locations all over the US and internationally. Even when I was working locally, I had a 3+ hour commute daily for a number of years. One of the first things I did was switch to listening to audiobooks (via Audible) for my long daily commute via car. It not only kept me more…

Game Diary, Reviews

Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines: GearGames Retrospective

Hello, L.A., you’re up way past your bedtime, aren’t you? That is the line that greets you when you arrive at your apartment ‘haven’ in Santa Monica after a poorly done cutscene and wonderful tutorial, coming from a radio show that is just one of the many delicious undercurrents that make Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines one of the absolute best role-playing games of the past decade. It is hard to think that a mere five years ago releasing a product based on vampires would be considered a commercial liability, and that there hadn’t been a game released based on the…

eBooks, Editorials

The App-ification of eBooks

One of the arguments that has risen out of the “iPad as an ebook reader” debate is the idea that books, as a platform for pure reading, are dead. That’s what Cody Brown argued in a guest column on Techcrunch, riffing off Paul Carr’s NSFW post. This concept that “everything is better as an app, with pictures and videos and SHINY HAPPYS” is, in my opinion, totally wrong. Are books going to change? Absolutely, and there are many ways in which they will continue to evolve and grow. However, the basic root of a book is going to remain the…

Reviews

Review: Kidz Gear Wired Headphones

My wife recently had to replace her car and bought our first real family vehicle. My 5-year-old son said he did not care what kind of car she got as long as it had a DVD player. Well, the vehicle she purchased did not have an installed player, so we bought a portable unit that includes a screen for each seat (one for each boy). We were all really happy! They can now watch movies when we travel, while keeping the chances of fights and “are we there yet” questions to a minimum. So we set out on a trip…

Reviews

Otterbox Commuter Case for the Motorola Droid Review

I take my phone everywhere. During work and everyday life I don’t worry much about it; I work in an office and live in suburban New Jersey. It’s not really a rough life for a smartphone. I do, however, take it when I go hiking, biking and running as a GPS tracker, plus it rides along in my pocket when I walk the dog, rain or shine. So I’m always on the lookout for a solid case that can protect my phone during outdoors-y times, and still look good for everyday use. Needless to say, I was VERY excited when…

How to Do It Yourself!

How To View PDF Files on iPad

When Apple announced the iPad, I immediately imagined that it would be a superior way to read PDF books in a tablet-style format. On the Apple iPad Specs page, there is a single mention of PDF support for the iPad – in the Mail application as an attachment. However, there must be a way to view PDF files on the iPad natively, right? Let’s walk through two main ways currently available to view PDF files on the iPad. Built-In PDF Viewing Mail Application – The iPad supports viewing PDF files that are sent as attachments via email in the Mail…

News & Features

Element Case Introduces the Joule for iPad

This has certainly got to be one of the most elegant iPad stands I’ve yet seen! Element Case has just released news and images on their new Joule iPad Stand, and it’s a stunner. Crafted from solid aluminum, the Joule “has an adjustable tilt angle with three settings and provides one of the most solid bases for an unsheathed iPad in the home, office or at work.” Designed With Both Landscape and Portrait Modes in mind. Introducing the new “Joule” work stand for your iPad. It’s stable solid base has a simple, clean, and elegant design that enhances your iPad…