News & Features

Nuance Healthcare to Launch Dragon Medical Mobile Search

News & Features August 12, 2010

Nuance Healthcare to Launch Dragon Medical Mobile Search

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Dictation and Dragon NaturallySpeaking has done it again. This time they are going after the medical market with an app that anyone in a healing profession will likely find quite useful. Nuance Healthcare, their medical division, is launching the first of their four iPhone apps for clinicians. Dragon Medical Mobile Search brings speech recognition specifically designed for doctors, PAs and nurses to the smartphone. The Dragon Medical Mobile Search app will give clinicians a smarter way to search for medical information… The voice-enabled medical search app for iPhone is a tool for clinicians to dictate…

eWallet for Mac OS X Now Available

News & Features August 11, 2010

eWallet for Mac OS X Now Available

I am a huge fan of Ilium software’s eWallet for the iPhone and iPad. It is a great way to keep information on my handheld devices in a manner that is safe and secure but also quickly accessible. The only problem I have had with it is that the desktop version of eWallet was only in Beta and the sync functionality was highly limited. Since I use multiple devices that was a bit of an issue for me. Thankfully that is no longer the case. Ilium has just gone live with the news that eWallet for Mac OS X is…

Fake 'Girl Quits Job' Story Hits a Nerve We All Secretly Fantasize About!

News & Features August 11, 2010

Fake ‘Girl Quits Job’ Story Hits a Nerve We All Secretly Fantasize About!

How many emails / texts / whatever did you get yesterday linking to the ‘Girl Quits Job Via Whiteboard’ article at The Chive? Not too surprisingly, the whole thing was a hoax produced by the creators of The Chive, and acted by a young woman (and aspiring actress) named Elyse Porterfield. TechCrunch has the details of the hoax. If you were like me, you enjoyed it and really didn’t apply your critical thinking skills to the now rather obvious likelihood that it was a fabrication. Why? Well … why is it that Office Space remains such a popular movie? Certainly…

Scosche Releases reVIVE II Dual USB Car and Home Chargers for iPad

News & Features August 10, 2010

Scosche Releases reVIVE II Dual USB Car and Home Chargers for iPad

Sosche reVIVE II Dual USB car and home chargers let you charge two devices at the same time from a single power source. There’s one for home and one for the car and both are available now. The company notes that According to the Pew Research Center adults between 18 and 29 own four gadgets on average and those between 30 and 64 average just under three, making the need for a dual USB charger even more important. (Statistics for tech-bloggers weren’t offered since personal experience indicates it would totally skew the stats.) The chargers have both a 2.1 Amp…

Green Diary: Making You Feel Better About All That Energy Your Gadgets Are Sucking

News & Features August 10, 2010

Green Diary: Making You Feel Better About All That Energy Your Gadgets Are Sucking

It’s an interesting dilemma: the readers of this site tend to love their gadgets, but at the same time want to be respectful of the environment.  All of our electronic tools, toys – whatever you want to call them – use resources in their manufacturing, may contain toxic materials that are harmful if not disposed of properly, and require energy to operate.  If you’re like me, you mitigate some of your less environmentally friendly hobbies by making up for them in other ways (I use an electric lawnmower, for crying out loud). With an eye toward balancing our interest in…

The Augen Tablet Does Even More Damage to Android's Brand

News & Features August 9, 2010

The Augen Tablet Does Even More Damage to Android’s Brand

This has been a sore spot with me for some time. We keep hearing about these potentially wonderful Android tablets, and what ends up appearing is something underpowered, with a poor resolution screen and underwhelming built-in software. Augen’s tablet was the darling of the internet world for a few weeks, since it was cheap, being sold at KMart, and promised Google Marketplace! Of course, like all things that sound too good to be true, the Augen tablet didn’t live up to the hype. It was slow, the resistive screen was unimpressive, and Google Marketplace didn’t work. Augen kept promising it…

Google Has Quantified the Number of Books in the World

eBooks, News & Features August 9, 2010

Google Has Quantified the Number of Books in the World

I pity whoever had to sit down and do all the work, but the Google Books project has calculated there’s something in the range of 129,864,880 books. They must be fairly certain if they felt comfortable nailing it down (as opposed to just rounding and saying 129,000,000+, since I for one am not quibbling over a few thousand). It’s sort of an awe-inspiring number! Personally, this means I really need to get cracking if I want to read as many as possible. Sadly, unless I find the fountain of youth, it’s unlikely I’ll get through them all. At a book…

iPhone Accessory Review- Sena Argyle for iPhone 4

News & Features August 8, 2010

iPhone Accessory Review- Sena Argyle for iPhone 4

The Sena cases I have used over the years have come in either black or… no actually that’s it, all of the Sena cases I have bought over the years have been made from black leather. The reason? Leather protects delicate electronics beautifully and a black case for a phone or similar device always looks appropriate whether at work or at play. (That and the fact that I tend to be drawn to the simpler (read “boring” styles in cloths and cases.) Maybe that’s why I was initially drawn to Sena since their early cases were fairly conservative in style….

Philo Social Network Launches "Save Teresa" Campaign

News & Features August 8, 2010

Philo Social Network Launches “Save Teresa” Campaign

Who says social networking doesn’t do anything good for the world? Philo, a social network designed around sharing your television addiction habits, has launched a “Save Teresa” campaign. Don’t know who Teresa is? Read on… Teresa Guidice is one of the “stars” of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. While I try to avoid tv trash, it’s a train wreck of a show I can’t stop watching. I keep justifying it as keeping up with the various ways people can make fun of me for being from New Jersey, even if I can shamefully explain the “plot” of each episode….

iPad Accessory Review- The JustMobile UpStand

News & Features August 7, 2010

iPad Accessory Review- The JustMobile UpStand

The iPad is incredibly versatile. Much of the time when you use it you want to hold it in your hands but there are times when you want to put it down but have it stay at a particular angle. This is especially the case if you are watching a movie or using it to type when connected to Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. That’s why cases with built-in stands such as the Case-Mate Venture and Sena Folio are so incredibly useful. There are times, however, when you want the iPad sans case but still held in a particular position. That’s why…

Random Cool Video: Every Star Wars Lightsaber On/Off!

News & Features August 6, 2010

Random Cool Video: Every Star Wars Lightsaber On/Off!

I remember reading something several years ago about the reasoning behind the different sounds made by various lightsabers in the original Star Wars movies. It seemed pretty cool that Luke had Anakin’s old lightsaber and based on crystals and power sources it was blue and made one sound, whereas when he constructed his own it was a different color and made a different sound. Of course, back then there was no YouTube (or DVD), and for the majority of years the movies were not available outside of theaters or TV re-runs … so you rarely got to dig into such…

Fable III PC Version Delayed, Silly Open Cinematic Released!

Game Diary, News & Features August 6, 2010

Fable III PC Version Delayed, Silly Open Cinematic Released!

Fable III is the upcoming entry in the action-RPG series by Lionhead Studios (part of Microsoft Game Studios), headed up by Peter Molyneux, the designer who is famous for spouting off pie-in-the-sky features about his next ‘best game ever’ that are eventually cut way back … only to repeat the process for the next game! The original Fable was released in 2004 for XBOX360 first, followed up by an extended version for PC called ‘Fable: The Lost Chapters’. The game was originally going to be the ‘all-RPG’, taking you from birth to death in a ever-growing world in which you…

Graffiti for Android Gets Updated but Has a Bug

News & Features August 5, 2010

Graffiti for Android Gets Updated but Has a Bug

I sang the praises of Graffiti for Android when it first came out. It was solid and easy for quick text entry. Now Access has released an updated with the following improvements: Autocorrect Auto-capitalization Word prediction Input word learning Japanese input Effectively it goes from being a simple text entry system to a very full-featured one. It works great…except for one bug. Most text entry programs recognize if your device has a hard keyboard, and they don’t “pop up” if the keyboard is engaged. Graffiti, unfortunately, does appear even if the keyboard is extended. It makes for a difficult typing…

Rolling Stone and Zinio Launch Interactive New Issue and Subscription Bundle Deal

eBooks, News & Features August 5, 2010

Rolling Stone and Zinio Launch Interactive New Issue and Subscription Bundle Deal

Thanks to the iPad I have moved further than ever away from using paper. When I want a new book I buy it to read with my Kindle app. When I want to take notes in a meeting I use one of a few different iPad apps. When I am doing serious writing I use the app Notebooks and then sync it to my MobileMe account so that it is available everywhere. When I need to create a voice note I do it in Evernote. That way it is available to me everywhere and, thanks to new integration with the…

Experience the Newport Jazz Festival Live Via Webcast

Music Diary, News & Features August 3, 2010

Experience the Newport Jazz Festival Live Via Webcast

The Newport Jazz Festival at gorgeous Fort Adams state park in Newport, RI is the granddaddy of music festivals – the one that kicked off the trend of having jazz music in festivals, which of course can then be linked to the development of festivals such as Woodstock and Lollapalooza and so on. On Saturday you’ll be able to access all of the music live as it plays at NPR’s Newport Jazz Site! They will do more than just dump the music – there will be historical news, sounds, videos and more available for the whole weekend. Here are some…

Just In Case You Missed It: Sprint & HTC Bring Froyo to the EVO 4G

News & Features August 3, 2010

Just In Case You Missed It: Sprint & HTC Bring Froyo to the EVO 4G

If you’ve got a Sprint HTC EVO 4G, then today you have yet another reason to feel vastly superior to all other Android Device users … Today HTC marked yet another “first” in its long history of bringing innovation to the mobile arena. Ahead of the pack, Sprint has started to make available the latest version of the Android platform, version 2.2, otherwise known as Froyo, for HTC EVO 4G. Not only is HTC EVO 4G the first Froyo device with HTC’s Sense user experience, it’s also the first mass-market Froyo handset period. In addition to bringing a number of…

MTV Celebrates 29 Years Since Lift-Off ... Older Fans Wonder When Music Videos Were Sent to Space

News & Features August 2, 2010

MTV Celebrates 29 Years Since Lift-Off … Older Fans Wonder When Music Videos Were Sent to Space

On August 1st 1981 MTV launched, creating a major new outlet for music as a visual art form as well as a new place for artists to get their material promoted. In commemoration of this milestone one YouTube user has pieced together then entire first 24 hours of the station. While we did have cable at that time, but I was too busy between school, job, friends, music, whatever else to care about the launch of the station. Of course, over the next several years leaving MTV on in the fraternity house was as common as leaving on the radio,…

Home Tech Review: Setting Up the Cisco Valet... How Simple is It?

News & Features August 1, 2010

Home Tech Review: Setting Up the Cisco Valet… How Simple is It?

Cisco recently released a new family of Valet routers. The new routers are stylish and, more importantly, they offer easy setup via their “Easy Setup Key” and Cisco Connect software”. The Valet has an MSRP of $99.99, the Valet Plus an MSRP of $149.99 and the Valet Connector, a wireless adapter, has an MSRP of $69.99. Cisco sent on of the Valet routers for review and I decided to see just how easy it is to set up. How did I do that? I gave the unit to my college-age neighbor Chase. Chase knows almost nothing about computers so I…

The WowWee Roboscooper Wants Wall-E's Job

News & Features July 31, 2010

The WowWee Roboscooper Wants Wall-E’s Job

Show me a person who could watch the Pixar movie Wall-E without getting a little bit misty, and I’ll show you a person with a heart of stone. The premise was that Earth, long inhabited by wasteful humans was eventually rendered unusable, and there was a mass exodus to a fleet of spaceships provided for by the Buy N Large corporation, which the company that had sold the products which helped contribute to all of the waste on Earth in the first place. Are you with me? So Buy N Large tells the Earthlings that they will only be on the…

UpStand iPad Stand Looks OutStanding

News & Features July 31, 2010

UpStand iPad Stand Looks OutStanding

The iPad is a runaway hit. We all know that. We use it at our desks. We use it in the kitchen. We use it in the living room. We use it everywhere. And it’s lack of a built-in stand is, at times, a pain. Let’s face it, you don’t want, or can’t, always hold the 1 1/2 pound device. Fortunately there are a growing number of excellent options out there. And those ranks just grew by one with the announcement of the UpStand from Just Mobile. As The Company Explains- The UpStand™ will float your iPad at just the…