(You're reading all posts by Eli Milchman)
About Eli Milchman
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path — which explains why he's Cult of Mac's test editor-at-large. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others. Hang with him on Twitter.(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)
Sound for Disasters: Eton’s Tough New Rukus Bluetooth Speaker is Solar-Powered, Splashproof
Today Eton added the Rugged Rukus to their Rukus line of Bluetooth speakers. Like most of its Rukus siblings, the Rugged is solar-powered; unlike its siblings, the Rugged is splashproof. A great addition for our all-hell-has-broken-loose list.
Lit Activity Tracker Has a Secret Ingredient That Makes it Perfect for Action Sports
I know what you’re asking: Yet another activity tracker? But LIT tracker from NZN Labs has a big secret ingredient that most others don’t — and that special ingredient makes it perfect for action sports like snowboarding, surfing and mountain biking.
The Dock is Not Dead: iLuv’s New Lightning-Equipped Aud 5
One word cropped up over and over at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it wasn’t “speakerdock” (yes, that may be two words; but I’m merging them here because that’s what I’m doing). In fact, the word was “Bluetooth” — a word discordant with the very idea of a dock-equipped speaker.
And yet, amid the tsunami of Bluetooth-equipped speakers at CES, there were holdouts — adherers to the Old Way of doing things, of physically connecting a device to its speaker.
One such holdout is the Aud 5, iLuv’s first speaker dock to harbor a Lightning connector.
Can Knockdown 3, One of the Most Fun Ways to Spend a Buck [First Look]
Polish-based Infinite Dreams has seen pretty sizable success with their iOS games. Can Knockdown, a physics game that gives the player a row of balls with which to virtually smash stacks of cans, is so popular that the second game in the series (Can Knockdown 2) was even super-sized into a coin-op arcade game.
Now the third game in the series has arrived for iPad and iPhone, Can Knockdown 3. And just like its predecessors, it’s beautifully engineered, gobs of fun and horribly, horribly addictive.
‘Snapshots’ Lets Everyone at an Event Pool Their iPhone Photos and Videos [Daily Freebie]
Snapshots is a fantastic idea, and one I can see being used pretty heavily at weddings — or by, say, a gaggle of journalists who shoot an event and might need to pool their images.
Take Closeup iPhone 5 Photos With This Pair of Carson LensMag Macro Lenses
Microscope-like macro lenses are super neat — and not just because they let you see the little hairs on a ladybug’s leg. No, macro lenses can show you a whole new world. Or macro lenses can spark (or rekindle) a love affair with photography. Heck, at the very least, they’re good for hours of amusement.
There’s no shortage of macro lenses for the iPhone: There’s the high-end Olloclip, which also comes with a fisheye and a wide-angle lens; then there’s also this rubber-band macro from Photojojo, and these magnetic specimens.
Add to the list the new Carson ML-515 LensMag, a pair of iPhone macro lenses that clip magnetically onto the iPhone 5 — pretty standard fare. Only there is something different.
Easily (Really Easily) Make Storyboards on Your iPhone with Disney Story [Daily Freebie]
So far, it’s been an interesting few weeks for digital publishing. Late last month saw the introduction of Flowboard, a digital publishing platform centered around an iPad app.
Now Disney has come out with their (highly simplified) take. Disney Story is a free iPhone app that lets you easily create a storyboard from photos on your iPhone, with accompanying text, which you can then share via email or on Facebook.
The Boa Squeeze, Yet Another Bag from Booq That Looks Like it Was Designed by Aliens (The Space Kind)
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether space aliens actually had a hand in designing the Booq Boa Squeeze. I ran into a couple of Booq bigwigs in an elevator at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas once, and they seemed pretty cheery, completely normal, and not at all alien-like — too not-alien-like, considering Booq is based in Southern California (I consider myself a Southern Californian; we’re all weirdos). And Booq’s Sierra Madre HQ is suspiciously close to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories…
Anyway, whether or not of alien origin, what’s clear is that Booq’s bags are unlike any others on this planet — and their new lightweight, zillion-pocketed Boa Squeeze laptop backpack is no different.
‘Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol’ Miniature Dogfight Strategy Game is Here, It’s Free, and It’s Fantastic [Daily Freebie]
If you didn’t catch our post the other day about the newest game from living legend Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization and a heap of other ground-breaking games, here’s the nitty-gritty.
Meier’s newest masterpiece is called Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol; it’s a sort of turn-based tabletop miniatures game of whirling World War I dogfights, digitized for an iPad’s (or iPhone’s screen). It’s also partially free, looks amazing and is bound to be an instant classic.
These Beautiful Scosche RH1060 Cans Are Completely Wire-Free
If there was one concept I came away with from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, it’s this: Bluetooth has quickly seeped into everything audio.
Nowhere was this more evident than with higher-end headphones; it felt like every manufacturer we visited that week had an obligatory wireless Bluetooth headphone on display.
One booth I didn’t get to stop by was Scosche’s, so I missed a chance to get ears-on with their new Bluetooth-enabled RH1060; but the details about these cans have my interest piqued.
