News & Features | Gear Diary

News & Features, Reviews September 5, 2012

I-Mego Throne Gold Headphones Review

For anyone who reads any of my posts, you know I love me some headphones. Music and podcasts play a huge part in my life and I usually do not like to burden others with what I am listening to. I am probably not an audiophile, but I prefer my audio to be high quality. I have bought and reviewed many earbuds in the past few years and loved many of them, but for some reason I have never owned a pair of over the ear headphones. Many of my athletes have gone to this style of headphones in the…

Gear Bits, News & Features September 4, 2012

Amazon Deal with Epix Brings Thor, Iron Man 2 and More to Prime Instant Videos!

As a member of Amazon Prime, I absolutely love the Prime Instant Video collection, finding it has a great selection that just keeps growing and growing in terms of the depth and breadth of movie and TV offerings. But there is always room for more – so I was thrilled this morning to hit the Amazon home page and see not one but TWO new deals: a movie deal with Epix and a TV deal with NBC Universal. From the Amazon home page, here is what they say about Epix: Great news for Amazon Prime members—we’ve just signed two big…

News & Features September 2, 2012

CVS Mobile App Update Brings Same-Day Photo Printing

Since last year when Walgreens (the pharmacy closest to my house) and my company’s health insurance provider failed to reach an agreement on prescription medication prices, I’ve found myself in a CVS pharmacy a lot more frequently. And you know, they’re pretty good places. I haven’t used them for much other than pharmacy purposes and picking up the odd item or two, but given the improvements they’ve just made to their mobile app, I may just start using them for photo printing. CVS’ updated mobile app will allow customers to print photos directly from their smartphone camera or their CVSphoto.com…

eBooks, News & Features August 30, 2012

Audiobooks.com Gets Download Friendly

Sarah swears by audiobooks as a way to get through her daily commute, but I mainly use them when we are on long road trips. We have flirted with the idea of an audible.com membership, but the library gives us plenty of access for free, and Audible has never struck me as such a great deal. Audiobooks.com, however, has a new service that has me somewhat intrigued. According to Techhive, Audiobooks.com has expanded from streaming only to download as well: Audiobooks.com made its debut earlier this year as a sort of Netflix for bibliophiles who prefer to listen to a…

News & Features August 30, 2012

Introducing Freedom Sprint Premium Bluetooth Buds

I have recently resumed my morning workouts, which has not been easy. Due to a surgery, my workout habits have pretty much been non-existent for a while. One thing I must have when I run is headphones and either some podcasts or playlist. Not sure why, but I must have some audio or I can never get the workout done. My next issue is what headphones to wear. They must fit perfect and stay put even during the movement of running. One solution is to use bluetooth headsets, but they rarely are conducive to exercise. Jay bird has introduced the…

News & Features, Outdoors August 29, 2012

Esoterism Presents the Moat-4 Aroused Comrade Urban Camo iPhone 4S Case

Most of our readers know I am an avid outdoorsman and hunter, but you all should also know I am a huge fan of our military. As a history teacher and patriot, anything that shows support for our troops is OK by me. I have many ex-students/athletes that have defended our nation bravely. One of my athletes gave the ultimate price, and my best friend took multiple rounds during the Battle of Fallujah and lived to tell about it. I also have a recent graduate who has become an Army Ranger. With all of that said, I naturally like all…

News & Features August 29, 2012

Help Combat the Spread of West Nile Virus Mosquito Vectors with Acase’s InaTrap

When my wife and I were married, 13 years ago today, we had plenty of birds flocking to our feeders, including blue jays and an occasional crow or two. A few years later I began to notice significantly fewer of these members of the Corvidae bird family, a harbinger of the West Nile virus insidiously creeping westward. These birds are a reservoir species for the West Nile virus, and are quickly killed off by the virus. The nasty little critters that are the primary vectors of the virus are mosquitoes, and when a human is bitten by a mosquito infected…

Health and Fitness, News & Features August 28, 2012

Garmin Introduces the Entry-Level Forerunner 10 GPS Watch for Runners

When Carly and I went for our run at GearFest in July, something that came with each of us was our GPS watch. We compared and contrasted the features and results in a video here, but the bottom line is this: we both firmly believe that using a GPS watch has made us better runners. Two of the problems with GPS watches are that they are bulky and expensive. More recently watches have dropped below $200, which is the range both of our watches cost. But the bulky part has only somewhat diminished from the Garmin 305 days to current…

News & Features August 27, 2012

Before There Was Google Latitude, Foursquare or Facebook, There Was APRS

Hello! W3RAZ again here on Gear Diary, for some more amateur radio goodness. Today I am writing about APRS. APRS? What’s that? We’ll it’s in many ways the precursor to Google Latitude and all of these apps on phones that have you checking into places, but it was invented 20 years ago by WB4APR, Bob Bruninga. It uses one of the most commonly used digital modes in Amateur Radio, Packet. APRS or Automatic Position Reporting System is a system for using a GPS, where a Terminal Node Controller (similar to a modem) and a radio are used to report your…

Gear Bits, News & Features August 27, 2012

George Lucas and Seth Green Debut New “Star Wars” Cartoon

Through the Star Wars movies and Clone Wars cartoons, we got to know the main and side characters through their major exploits across the galaxy. But what about “what the daily life is like in a galaxy far, far away”? Well, now producers George Lucas and Seth Green are going to let us see that, in the form of a new cartoon series called ‘Star Wars Detours’. Here is what their YouTube description for the trailer had to say: Star Wars Detours™ is an animated comedy that explores what daily life is like in a galaxy far, far away. There…

News & Features August 26, 2012

Apple’s Big Patent Win, and What It Means for Smartphones

The Apple/Samsung patent trial’s jury shocked everyone by returning a verdict extremely quickly on Friday afternoon. Once we had the full details, I asked the team here at Gear Diary what they thought. Was this a game changer for Android and smartphones in general, or just another chapter in “lawyers gone wild”? Bryan: Yeah but remember, some of us don’t want to hear it: 😉 (Sorry, couldn’t help myself! :)) Dan: Agreed. Not surprised but I do think people will debate the issue for a long time. After all, as we learn in the Jobs bio, much of what Apple did initially…

News & Features August 26, 2012

Evernote Page Camera Turns Your Smartphone into a Scanner

Evernote has long let you snap a picture of a page of handwritten text and save it to your Evernote account. That has always been my fallback position when I was taking notes but had left my Livescribe smartpen at home. In addition, when I was in Washington last week I didn’t bring my Livescribe pen. Instead, I typed out notes during the sessions using my iPad and Apple keyboard while the voice note recorder in Evernote was also active. It worked great and I didn’t really miss the Livescribe pen. Last week Evernote went one better and, in the process,…

Gear Bits, News & Features August 25, 2012

‘Hands Off Crazy’ Is a Tribute to This Week’s Political Wingnuts

Image courtesy CoochWatch There are plenty of crazies on both sides of the political aisle, but as a scientist what REALLY bugs me is total misinformation and the perpetuation of blatantly incorrect information. Again, there are plenty of examples on both sides, but the amazing thing recently is the extent to which anti-abortion legislators will resort to misinformation and lies to push their agenda rather than simply standing on their values and principles. By now most folks have heard about Todd Akin, who said: First of all, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare… If…

News & Features August 24, 2012

Tell Time with the Help of a Nuclear Watch and Watch Tritium Decay in Action

Imagine a college party with around 100 quadrillion (a one hundred with fifteen zeroes behind it) students binge drinking, with all exceedingly inebriated. Ignoring the noise and mayhem for a moment, imagine a quarter billion of them getting sick every second for the next 25 years or so. However, instead of the usual stomach material, the students, all members of the Tritium fraternity, are emitting beta particles that hit the windows of their apartment and cause the windows to glow green. The formerly stick students settle down and feel much more stable afterwards, with no apparent hangover (but are no…

News & Features August 23, 2012

Roamz 2.5 Makes Smart Social Search Smarter

Last month we shared our interview with Roamz CEO Jonathan Baruch. (Read it.) We also noted that an update to the ‘Social Goggles for the Real World’ app would be coming soon. Well Roamz 2.5 has launched and it brings some neat new features. As Baruch notes, “The new version of Roamz takes local discovery to the next level helping people find, discover and share great places and events around them.” The release goes on to explain that… Roamz’ new features make learning about exciting local events even easier. The update has a revamped interface with new search tiles, which…

Health and Fitness, News & Features August 23, 2012

Wait … That Drink Has HOW Much Caffeine?

The tremors have already shaken us – Judie quit diet coke cold turkey (and yesterday — three days in — the massive headaches started). Last week the guy at my office who picks up the recycling noted that my intake of Diet Mountain Dew was way down (to at MOST one per day), and I haven’t had any coffee at work in more than four months (and I stick to one cup in the morning at home). In other words, we here at Gear Diary are much less caffeinated than we were earlier this year. But that same trend is certainly…

Music Diary, News & Features August 23, 2012

RIP Brilliant Young Jazz Pianist Shimrit Shoshan at 29

While I always talk about how I love getting to hear so much great music that people share with me, but what is even better is getting to known and chat with so many great artists. People like Jason Parker, Dave Chisholm, and many more are just wonderful people as well as great artists with tremendous creative vision. And so it is with great sadness that I report the passing of one of the kindest and warmest artists I have gotten to know through reviewing music for Gear Diary – Shimrit Shoshan. In terms of music, Shimmy had released a…

eBooks, Music Diary, News & Features, Reviews August 22, 2012

Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, Book Review of Ken Scott’s Memoir

What is it that you want from reading a music industry legend’s memoir? If what you are looking for is basically an expanded Wikipedia entry with a more detailed listing of events and characters … then stop reading now and just stay away from Ken Scott’s Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust. If on the other hand you are looking for something that has you diving for your vinyl record collection, trolling through your MP3 library, and hitting up places like Slacker and Spotify to provide the musical soundtrack to the stuff you are reading … then check this out. The…

News & Features August 21, 2012

The Nokia Lumia 900 Gets Updated in US

This has been a busy and bumpy year for the Nokia Lumia 900. Just released this spring, it was already declared a dead-end device by Microsoft shortly after its arrival as Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 7.5 phones wouldn’t be updated to Windows Phone 8. Although this wasn’t a complete surprise (due to the hardware limitations of the current devices), many of us hoped some of the features of Windows Phone 8 would eventually make it to Windows Phone 7.5 devices. As of this writing thought, it looks like a rather limited set of features will eventually appears in the…

Music Diary, News & Features August 20, 2012

Frank Zappa Now on iTunes, and Coming Soon to Streaming Services!

I have had an affinity for the music of Frank Zappa for as long as I can remember. The combination of humor, advanced compositional techniques, extreme musicianship, apathy towards genre boundaries and more has always caught my ear. I own about 30 CDs of Zappa’s music from the Mothers of Invention right up through some of his final releases. This past week we got word that more than 50 Zappa albums had been added to iTunes, with several of them remastered versions. This goes along with an earlier report of a great remastering effort including a list of the first…

News & Features, Travel August 20, 2012

SteriPEN, a Handy Tool in a Variety of Models for Water Purification on the Go

Quite a few years back when I was in high school, I enrolled in a “primitive” two-week hiking trip to the Smoky Mountains/Shining Rock Wilderness area with a group called Wilderness Southeast. It was quite an education for a young greenhorn like myself far from civilization…hiking boots, heavy backpacks and open to the elements (no tents), and no food except what we carried and rehydrated with water from mountain streams. Water…that was key, you see, because back in those days we used chlorine tablets to sterilize the water…and most of you who ever spent time in a swimming pool know…