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.
Amazon has officially announced Kindle Unlimited, a $9.99 all-you-can-read monthly ebook subscription. This was leaked earlier in the week, but now we have more details on this ebook and audiobook service!
My name is Carly and I have a very shameful confession: I’ve become hooked on Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. I want to stop, but every time I think it’s over, I duck back in…one more chance to make the A-list. Worse, I’ve dragged Judie into my shame spiral, and now we’re both addicted. At least we both have nice virtual houses.
My Toyota Prius and I hit a major milestone last night-100,000 miles! I have been counting down excitedly for months, and it hit me this morning why this means so much to me. It’s not about the mileage, but about the memories and amazing life changes that so many of those miles mean.
Last week Google rolled out a pretty big update to Google Now. Among those updates was a sneaky trick; if you have an Android 4.4 device, use Google Now to search “Ok Google Everywhere”. Now head to your Google Now settings and select “Ok Google detection”. You now have Google Now everywhere! Judie, Dan and I discovered this fun trick Sunday, and so far I haven’t noticed a major battery hit on my HTC One M8. It has prompted me to discover some very cool tricks that Google Now has up its sleeve. For example, this morning I was driving…
Judie and I were huge fans of eWallet from its earliest days, back when we used Palms; we synced the info on our Palms to the eWallet program on our desktop PCs. Later on we used eWallet on our Pocket PCs. Once the app became available for iOS, we loaded it onto our iPhones and eventually also on our Macs.