Charlie Sorrel - page 100

On-camera flash is usually a terrible idea (with just two – maybe three – exceptions I can think of). It lights up your subject, sure, but it totally kills the mood that made you want to take a photo in the dark in the first place.

But if you’re a fan of shiny, overexposed faces, red eyes and disappearing backgrounds then why not grab an iblazr, the world’s first all-lower-case iPhone flash. Kidding. It is all lower cae, but that’s not really its tagline. It’s real tagline is “is the first universal LED flash for smartphones and tablets.”

Lame.

Another supposed holiday; another super-useful tool from Brett “I just built this” Terpstra. This one is called GrabLinks, and it does just that: Fire the bookmarklet off inside your browser and you can quickly grab a bunch of links and save them out in Markdown. Nerdy? Sure. Useful? Hell yes.

Recently on Twitter, our deputy editor John “pipe and slippers” Brownlee posted a picture of his Mac keyboard, with wooden tiles stuck to the keycaps. It was utterly hideous, and yet completely in keeping with John’s fetish for anything made of wood. It was the real-world equivalent green felt or rich Corinthian leather.

This all-wood keyboard, on the other hand, is pretty gorgeous. It comes from French company Orée, it’s called the Orée Board and it costs a steep-ish €150 ($193).

See if you can guess what the app External Flash does. Hopefully you guessed “It’s an app that lets you control the LED lamps from up to 16 other iPhones and fire them in sync with your own iPhone’s camera," because then you’d be correct. If you guessed anything else, then you’re totally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Do you ever stop to think about how many albums your iPhone will hold? Probably not, as you most likely filled your iPhone or iPod up with music from the iTunes Store, or you stream from Spotify or Rdio. And even if you filled up your iTunes with music by ripping actual physical disks, you almost certainly didn’t do it from vinyl records.

I did fill my first 15GB iPod with music from ripped CDs, so I know just how big the stack was that I had to work thorough. But if you head over to ConcertHotels.com and click the little arrow, you’ll be treated to a stack of vinyl big enough to fill a 160GB iPod. That’s 40,000 songs in total.

According to the denizens of the Internet, the Airport Extreme you have sitting in your hallway or – nerd! – in your bedroom might be experiencing dropout. According to Marco “I just sold [x]” Arment of Instapaper fame, this problem might have something to do with the latest 7.6.3 firmware. The good news? Downgrading is stupidly easy.

I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I’m going to admit it to you: I spend far too many brain cycles pondering better ways to carry my camera and other essentials. Worse, I have a box full of bags and straps leftover from my efforts. So i’m not sure whether this tutorial for making a DIY harness is a great idea of the beginning of another foolhardy adventure. I suspect it might be both.

Glui is an antidote for those who think that Evernote’s Skitch has gotten a little too fancy. It’s a Mac app that sits in the Menubar and captures screen shots. It then lets you quickly annotate them and upload them to Dropbox, copying the URL to your clipboard along the way.

And that’s about it.

Did you know that the Mac only got full screen desktop wallpaper in System 8? It sounds amazing until you realize that the first iPhone didn’t have any wallpaper at all – just a black void hanging malevolently behind the home screen icons.

Over at the Egg Freckles blog, Thomas Brand details the history of wallpaper on the Mac. It’s not just a bunch of pictures either. In fact, there are no pictures at all (although there are lots of download links for you). What you get is a neat overview of how the desktop evolved closely along with the hardware it was running on.

And Thomas’ favorite Apple wallpaper of all time? Mavericks’ wave. It’s hard to disagree.

Source: Egg Freckles
Via: TUAW

Hey RSS refugees (RSS-u-gees?). Did you sign up for a Feed Wrangler account so you could import all your Google Reader feeds and keep using them in something like the Excellent Mr. Reader app? Me too. And did you see that Feed Wrangler pretty much just ignored all your carefully thought-out and painstakingly organized folders, instead dumping all your feeds into one big list? So you thought “Screw this” and used the free Feedly instead?

Me too.

But Feed Wrangler has now tweaked its import engine so all your folders will be converted into Smart Feeds. Better still, you just need to re-import your exported Google Reader OPML file and it’ll fix everything up for you.

Grove was last seen on these hallowed pages when I wrote about the SkateBack, an iPhone 5 rear panel fashioned from the offcuts of old skateboards. Now I actually have a skate-derived case in my hands. It’s still for the iPhone 5, but it’s a full case, not just a rear panel, and it comes in the same shape as Grove’s bamboo cases.

It’s pretty good. It’s also $150.

Amaziograph really is amazio-ing. Do you remember the Spirograph, the plastic, cog-based drawing tool that lets you come up with all kinds of psychedelic geometric designs using paper and pens? Or the kaleidoscope, the favorite freakout kids toy of bong-smokers the world over?

Well, imagine that you could somehow combine the two into a smoke-free, drug-free (and more importantly, paper-free) app for the iPad. That app would be Amaziograph, a $1 drawing tool developed by 15-year-old Bulgarian high-schooler Hristo Staykov.

If you ever walked around Las Vegas’ Strip, you’ll be familiar with its drunken-theme-park aesthetic. Every hedge and lawn is watered and trimmed to Disney-esque perfection. Every sidewalk is swept. The only difference is that the pedestrians carry three-foot-long plastic tubes of some sickly pink liquor.

And of course, there are hidden speakers everywhere. Now, those speakers could be replaced with Anakondas.

Remember Pixa? You should, because it’s awesome. Pixa was my pick, sir[1], to replace iPhoto on your Mac with a non-sluggish, non-horrible photo organizing app. And now it has added extensions for popular Online Web Browsers Safari and Chrome.

People love to moan about the slimline MagSafe 2 adapter that was launched to match the skinny (current) MacBook Air. It falls out, they say. It’s too easy to knock from its magnet-hole. I’ve never had any trouble with it. In fact, I like it more than the original because not only does it stay firmly in place, but it also snaps in properly in to begin with. I often found the old fat MagSafe would fail to engage, leaving me with a dead battery when I left the house (not that I ever actually leave the house).

Anyhow, you whiners now have something else to waste your money on: the Snuglet.

Quick quiz – How do you hold your iPhone when you’re taking video? And when you’re shooting photos? If your answer is “Uhhhh…. Depends? I don’t know…” then you are just like me. I never quite know which way up it is, or whether my finger is on the shutter release (volume switch), or whether the app I’m using even lets me use the volume switch to take a picture (cough Instagram cough).

The ShoulderPod is designed to fix that, adding a stand and a fat grip to the iPhone.

Capsule is another “save your place” app, where by “place” I mean “actual location” and not your current page in a book. This one has a beautiful UI and ties in with Foursquare’s database to let you search and pinpoint locations quickly.

You just know Al Gore is going to order up three of these bad boys and hook them up to his new trashcan Mac Pro – just for checking the weather reports (spoiler – getting warmer). And the good news is that you can too: these 31.5-inch 4K displays from Asus are now available for pre-order at the low, low (?) price of $3,500. A shame. If Asus had added another $500 to the price my headline could have been “4K Monitor For $4K.”

After last week’s Mac update, Skitch for iOS has gotten the same neat new features. Now you can use the new arrows, add white space around pictures for clearer notes, and enjoy the new smallness of smaller shapes.

TeeVee 2 is a great iPhone app that tells you when your favorite TV shows are airing. I’ve tried a bunch of these apps in the past, and TeeVee wins out for a couple of reasons – it’s fast, it’s simple and it looks gorgeous.

You can read about the full spec rundown of the new Canon 70D SLR elsewhere (DP Review is a good bet). Here we’ll just take a look at the big (and it is big) new feature – the fancy video-friendly autofocus.

Pure is an iPhone Flickr app which looks ready for iOS 7 already. As the name suggests, there’s a focus on plain and simple design, and the lack of button-shaped buttons makes even the cleanly-designed official Flickr app look cluttered. However, you mightn’t be switching to Pure just yet, as it lacks a fair bit of basic functionality.

Meet the DSPTCH case, the perfect vowel-free traveling companion for your iPad mini. It’s a simple envelope-style sleeve, only it has a bunch of unobtrusive straps and pockets on the outside to wrangle your on-the-road essentials.

You should probably have a smoke detector in every room, and you should also test it regularly, thus making a mockery of Nina Simone’s song Don’t Smoke in Bed. However, some of us live in apartments in which the landlord can’t even provide a toilet that flushes properly, and so the hope of him fitting smoke detectors is a distant one.

For us, the SENSE+ was invented.

Exif Manager for iPhone and iPad does one thing – it lets you view and sort your photos by various metadata attributes. Want to see all your pictures in descending order of shutter speed used? You can do that.