Gear Bits

Use PayPal’s free disposable credit card number to manage recurring charges

UPDATE: This post was written in 2009; at some point in 2010-2011, PayPal stopped offering this service. =( One of my pet peeves is online sites that require payment with a credit card along with a “good until canceled” order to keep charging my card until I notify them to stop. As anyone who has ever dealt with some online sites can attest, the ordeal to STOP a recurring charge can be 100 times more difficult than the two clicks it took to start.

Gear Bits

The HP Mini 1140NR Vivienne Tam Edition Is Here!

This smoking hot little red laptop showed up today, and I figured I ought to share some photos before I got prints from my eager fingers all over it. Have a look at the HP Mini (1140NR) Vivienne Tam edition; possibly the most fashionable netbook ever…

Gear Bits

Study say’s Sharpies can be reused over and over in surgeries without risk of infection – still unsafe to leave inside patient

I just spotted this story over at physorg.org which describes an interesting study. These days it’s standard surgical practice to outline the area being operated on with a magic marker (typically a Sharpie). When I had hernia repair surgery (an impressive hernia according to my doctor) I recall the surgical assistant asking me to take a Sharpie and outline the area. I also briefly think I remember a lot of laughter and some flashbulbs, though I’m not sure if that was the effects of the anesthesia or some practical jokers in the operating room. Apparently these Sharpies are used once…

Gear Bits

TSA Checkpoint Friendly Laptop Bag Procedures, a Tutorial

We’ve mentioned some of the bags that will comply with their “Checkthrough” regulations the past, and now the TSA has finally posted the official procedures for getting through their checkpoints without actually removing your laptop; of course all will hinge on consumers purchasing the proper type of bag… TSA screens laptops to see if the electronics have been tampered with. TSOs know what the inside of a computer should look like, and can recognize irregularities. This is why they need an unobstructed view as the item moves through the X-ray machine. Purchasing one of these bags will not guarantee that…

Gear Bits

Temporarily tattoo emergency or contact info onto your kids – the one thing they can’t lose

File this under “Why didn’t I think of it first”….identity and emergency contact labels that you apply to your children as temporary tattoos. As anyone with younger children knows – they lose just about EVERYTHING. Including any type of stick on label or card that you put on their shirt or (shudder) in their backpack. Enter the Eyedentity Label. This interesting new product allows you to create up to 4 lines of text which is then used to create a tattoo for your child. These are the tattoos that you apply with vegetable oil (parents who’ve used these types of…

Gear Bits

Sweetslap.com offers the Top 20 Things Not to Say During Sex

Here’s an aptly named web site for the romantically clueless. Sweetslap.com bills itself as a site that provides the “refreshing, light slap in the face that all couples need once in a while to stop and remember to appreciate one another”.

Gear Bits

Put some sizzle in your flossing habits – Bacon flavored dental floss

This one’s too bizarre to pass up. Is there really a market for bacon flavored dental floss? Every time I visit my dentist they trot out the “so, do you floss regularly?” question. And every year I duck it by lying about my flossing frequency. I’m not so sure that bacon flavoring would get me to floss any more regularly. If you have a bacon fetish – check out bacon mints, and bacon toothpicks. Good gosh, how I wish I were making this all up.

Gear Bits

Nikon to Nokia – a photographer’s journey

Despite an occasional straying here and there, I have been shooting with Nikon camera gear just about my entire career as a photojournalist. In this millennium many of my duties have been restructured, with tasks added as well as getting a new title – editor. But all along I have been shooting Nikon. Until this week. My first digital Nikon camera was the Coolpix 950, then on to the D1 digital SLR (which I hear is being called the “classic”). A host of other D-SLRs have come and gone and with this most recent Christmas, the Nikon D300 (which I…

Editorials, Gear Bits

Goodbye Blackberry, It’s Not Me – It’s You – Here Are 10 Reasons I Left

On Friday I transferred my Blackberry phone number from T-Mobile over to my Apple iPhone, effectively terminating my contract with T-Mobile and ending a 15+ year practice of taking a Blackberry with me everywhere I went. In January I’d purchased an iPhone (“just to try it out”). Like many iPhone owners, I’d been hauling two phones with me. The Blackberry was my main email phone. The iPhone the web browser, Twitter client, music/video player, and picture taker phone. During the past week I was out at the Sage Software Insights Reseller Conference where they’d asked me to speak about Social…

Gear Bits

Unboxing the HTC Advantage 7510

This is going to be a much quicker unboxing than I usually like to do, mainly because it is almost 3am Texas time, and I have to be up in 5 hours to get ready for the next Mobius session. Anyway! After our dinner tonight, Matt Miller, Ed Hardy, Joel Evans and I met up in Matt’s suite to geek out with our new HTC Advantage 7510s. I managed to capture the unboxing photos, which I wanted to take and post before I really started using the device tomorrow… This picture of Matt is specifically for Mike Cane. 😉

Gear Bits

CAMiLEON Heels: Exercising a Woman’s Perogative to Change Her Mind

I first saw a post regarding a concept shoe with convertible heels on Book of Joe back in 2005, and now it looks like an easier to operate variation of the same idea has actually come to pass. Say hello to CAMiLEON, a company which produces women’s shoes with heels that can adjust from a pratical walking height of 1½” to a sassy 3¼”. CAMiLEON’s heels contain “mechanisms that hold it into place for both the high heel and low heel positions and a stainless steel rod, which runs through the entire length of the heel. The portion of our…

Gear Bits, Health and Fitness

Add 10 calories, 3G Sugar, and 50 Mg Caffeine to Water and What Do You Get? TrimWater??

When I see products like TrimWater I wonder how any of it gets sold except through slick marketing. The company, the same one that makes TrimSpa diet products, used to market this through a now expired agreement with the TrimSpa diet folks, appears to have taken …. water … added flavoring and sweetener (10 calories per drink plus 3 G sugar) – and then marketed it as TrimWater. Since when is ADDING 10 calories, 50 mg of caffeine (12 oz Diet Pepsi has 35 mg for comparison), and 3 grams of sugar (no matter how small an amount) to water…

Gear Bits

Tazz Virtual Makeovers Make (almost) Anyone Look Good

Tazz is an online makeover site that does an admirable job of recognizing your facial features from an uploaded photograph. You experiment in real time with different hairstyles, eye color (different contact lenses) makeup (colors and shades). There’s an easy way to compare before and after photos and share them with friends. Thinking this would improve my self-portrait that I used in the reader contest a month ago – I decided to give the service a shot. The results aren’t pretty – so you may want to skip them and just use the link below to upload and try the…

Gear Bits

The BMW Isetta 600 – the Cutest Eggmobile

While perusing eBay Motors, I stumbled upon a gem of a vehicle, one I just had to share. Have you ever seen such a cutie? Meet the BMW Isetta 600, circa 1959. This auction is for the larger model, not the more commonly seen little egg-shaped version. Well, “commonly seen” is said tongue in cheek, because I think the last time I remember seeing an Isetta was in the late 80s Depeche Mode videos “Behind the Wheel” … … and “Never Let Me Down Again“. According to an auction I found on eBay, this Isetta 600 has been “meticulously restored…

Gear Bits

My First Nokia, the Nokia N95

My name is Judie, and I have never owned a Nokia mobile phone; I’m not exactly sure why I haven’t, it just never happened. It’s not that I haven’t been curious, especially with the release of some of Nokia’s newer models – such as the N81, the N92, N93, and yes – the N95, but I just never took the plunge. Why is it that I feel like I should be admitting this glaring error of my gadget repertoire in the confines of a 12-step program meeting? Probably because until today I was one of, oh…maybe fifteen people in the…

Gear Bits, How to Do It Yourself!

A Palm Treo cradle – LEGO style

I was looking around for a charging cradle that would allow me to store my Palm Treo 650 or 680 in an upright position. Most of the ones that I’ve seen advertised range in price from $29 to $49 USD. While esthetically useful, the practicality of obtaining a cradle meant having yet another spare power cable and sync cable stored away in a shoebox of miscellaneous wires and USB cables. The ancient Greek phillospher Plato is quoted as saying Necessity is the mother of invention, which means that a need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need or…

Gear Bits

Guard Against Fraud With the ID Vault

Many people are?getting down to crunch time this gift-giving season, and it is easy to imagine that in the midst of all?of the legitimate purchases, there will be more than a few that are fraudulent.? If you are like me, then you like to do as much of your purchasing online as is possible, and you are probably aware that online fraud is rampant. Between the phishing scams and the outright stolen account numbers and passwords, shopping online can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the solutions being bandied around by credit card companies and banks…

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