I had knee surgery last week. I am fine, but part of the recovery included a prescription for Vicodin. My one year old thought the Vicodin bottle was an awesome rattle, so now that I am finished with the pain pills I have disposed of them safely using the Pill Terminator!
This has been a roller coaster week for eBook fans. If you’re an Amazon Kindle fan, it’s been a positive coaster; there are new Kindles galore! On the other hand, if you’re a Barnes and Noble NOOK fan, you just lost the ability to download NOOK books directly to your computer. Disappointed? Happy? Unsure? Read on for more details!
When we moved into our house, the seller’s realtor presented us with a small remote for the blinds in the living room; the prior owners had installed electronic blinds there. We thought it was a silly gimmick, but we have found it quite useful. Now you can automate your blinds, too! Just back Tilt My Blinds on Kickstarter!
If you have an HTC One M8 on Verizon, here’s great news: the Android 4.4.3 “KitKat” update is out today, and it brings two excellent goodies with it! First, we’re finally getting Extreme Power Saving mode, designed to eke every drop out of a dying battery. Second, they’ve tweaked the lockscreen security app to prevent accidental resets!
I have a pretty great Pandora playlist curated for myself, and one of my favorites that comes up is Goldfinger’s cover of Nena’s “99 Red Balloons”. I like the original too, but my new favorite way to hear the song is definitely this very creative version using literal red balloons as instruments. This takes some serious creativity and talent!
We rarely let our one year old son play with our iPads. It’s not just that he’s little and tends to be rough on objects, it’s that he’s OBSESSED with Siri and loves pressing the home button over and over, rendering attempts to play games and watch videos impossible. However, it turns out there’s an easy solution-Guided Access in iOS!
Are you an artist looking for “a nu start”? Skip the Skyping with your Phoenix advisor and head to ArrestedFanArt.com, where you can enter your design for the 4th season DVDS of “Arrested Development“. There’s a $1,000 prize plus your design on the DVD cover. But you only have until 9/16; sadly, you can’t wait for Cinqo de Quatro for this contest.
I have a coworker who just had an awful experience with Chrysler over her Jeep. We joked that she should have called Fiat directly, but after seeing this ad, courtesy of Jalopnik, I think I’m just going to avoid making eye contact with my local Fiat dealer at all. And I won’t look at forest animals the same way again.
My wife Sarah’s phone died a watery death this week. You might feel a slight sense of deja vu, and that’s because this already happened a few weeks ago. We’re having a rough month for phones in our house. As a result, we’ve been FaceTiming a fair amount while I am at work, and we’ve concluded FaceTime really needs voicemail.
The stroller is probably the most important items you own when you have a baby (besides maybe the crib). It is a means to transport the baby, but it’s also a gateway to getting outside, especially if you have a jogging stroller. There’s no shortage of choices, and today we are looking at the Chicco Activ3 Jogging Stroller.
The HTC One M8 has a double tap to wake feature, which is great. The One also has a security feature where 10 failed password attempts resets the phone. These two features came crashing together disastrously for me yesterday afternoon, so for now I’ve turned off the ‘double tap to wake‘ feature as a result.
I began my technology love back in the days of Palm OS, so I have a soft spot in my heart for the lowly stylus. The Dart Stylus brings back some of that old-school nostalgia, since it features a 2mm tip instead of a large rounded one, but will this “active stylus” replace my finger for precision work?
Last week I mentioned that Sarah’s iPhone 5C had briefly and tragically became a water table toy. While it did miraculously boot up, the speakers tended to drift in and out of functionality, and we feared there might be further issues down the road, so we initiated an insurance replacement, and discovered Asurion‘s excellent customer service!
“Kindle Unlimited” has a nice ring to it. That’s probably why Amazon uses that name and not, say, “Kindle 10-at-a-time”, which is the more accurate assessment of the service. If you plan to load up before a vacation, bear in mind, you’re capped at 10 books before you have to “return” one!
I love my HTC One M8; the Boomsound speakers, sharp screen, fast processor, and excellent Sense UI skin all make for a fabulous experience. If you’re looking for a similar phone on prepaid services at a reasonable price, then you should check out the new HTC Desire 610 and 816!
When our son was an infant, we toted him around in a baby carrier. It worked great when he was tiny, but as he grew, it became too uncomfortable. We wanted to be able to carry him on hikes and other outdoor adventures, so with that goal in mind, we recently put the Chicco Smart Support backpack to the test.
Our son has a water activity table that he LOVES. Every toy gets a dunk in the water table, and today that included Sarah’s iPhone 5C. We currently have it in a bag of rice, so we will see. The Gear Diary team is pretty pessimistic, with most putting the odds of survival at 20/80 or 30/70. What’s your bet? How discouraging were my “nay-saying friends”? Read onto see their comments on Sarah’s iPhone Disaster: Travis Ehrlich 20/80. Survival/finished. Carly Zektzer What about the likelood the phone works but the speakers are fried? Travis Ehrlich Plausible. In still going…
Fitness watches are enjoying a very sudden surge in popularity. People are buzzing about Fitbit, and Nike Fuel, and quantifying their movements and sleep for optimal health. Magellan is entering that market with the new Echo Fit, a “smart sports watch” that uses Bluetooth to sync to various fitness apps, from Runkeeper to Strava and plenty others.
It's been said for a very long time that the digital camera as a standalone gadget is a dying business. Smartphones are getting better as cameras, and as apps improve shooting and sharing photos, it has become less and less important to have a standalone camera. This past week I had two experiences that really sealed that message for me.
We are on vacation in Woodstock, NY, and the local bookstore had a very entertaining comic in the window. If the picture isn’t clear, it shows a 90lb weakling getting stronger from reading the complete works of Plato in hardcover, then smacking for using an ebook reader on the beach. Certainly one advantage to hardcover!
We were using a generic LL Bean backpack as a diaper bag, but when sent the Case Logic Berkeley Plus to review, we switched to it as our main backpack and never looked back. This is a backpack meant for a 15.6″ laptop, but we found it does an amazing job holding kiddo stuff PLUS delicate electronics; it’s only $59.99.