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.


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…


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…


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. 😉


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…


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…


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…


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…


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…


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…


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…