Charlie Sorrel - page 106

My camera eats batteries. I’m not sure exactly why — maybe it’s because the NP-95 battery it uses is tiny; maybe it’s that its hybrid viewfinder is particularly power hungry; or perhaps it’s just that I refuse to engage any of the performance-slowing power-save modes — but my X100s is thirsty.

I get around this by carry a pocketful of those tiny batteries, but taking the giant Fujifilm charger on vacation is a pain. So I set out to find a USB charger that would do the job without frying the batteries.

Then I realized I was doing it wrong. Instead of a USB-powered battery charger, what I needed was a proper camera battery charger which had a USB port in the side. Thus I could charge everything from one wall socket, in one compact unit.

The device is the Digipower TC–55.

Later.fm is like Instapaper for music. And like Instapaper, it is beginning its life as a web-only app, although it works so well in Mobile Safari that you won’t care about the lack of an actual iOS app right now.

The Mutator is a hardware mute switch for your iPhone. What’s that you say? You already have a hardware mute switch on your iPhone? Well, yes you do. But – as the poor fellow who caused Mahlergate found out – mute doesn’t always mean “mute”.

I have three very good reasons to write this post. One is that the camera lucida is just a kick-ass gadget, the kind of thing that all you creative iOwning folks out there will presumably love. Second, the Kickstarter video which accompanies it is both interesting and educational. And third, I have an idea for a version that will use your iPad and iPhone.

Farensius is a simple menubar app for your Mac which will let you know what the weather is doing outside, should you be too busy to turn your head and steal an unproductive glance through the nearest window. You get a little icon showing you the type of weather you’ll find beyond the confines of your office, and a temperature in – yes – ˚F or ˚C.

I know what you bike nuts are thinking. You’re jealous of all the hue-controlled lighting available to the stay-at-home folks, and you want a little bit of that color-changing action for your ride. Well, the folks at Helios have heard you, and are just about to launch a couple of crazy handlebars with built-in LEDs. And that’s not all they do. Oh no…

Let’s play a game:

You wake up. You’re outside, laying on hard ground. The sky above is blue, with fast moving clouds. You have no memory of falling asleep anywhere but in your own bed, and you have no idea where you are.

You look for hints. The road is dark gray asphalt. The lines running along its center are white and broken into long strips. The dirt off the shoulder is a reddish brown. A car passes. The model looks familiar but the license plate is blurred, offering no clues.

You stand and find yourself uninjured. Where the hell are you? You walk east, keeping the sun out of your eyes as the shadows lengthen, and eventually you spot a road sign. It’s in Spanish. That narrows it down to around 22 countries where Spanish is used.

Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.

Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?

Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.

And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.

Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.

Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.

That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.

UltimateEars Boom is yet another wireless Bluetooth speaker, a category that has gone from a mere sprinkling of spores on the petri dish of consumer gadgets to a veritable mushroom field of musical materiel. However, as is now necessary in this crowded corner of consumerism, there’s a twist: This speaker will annoy everyone equally, wherever they may be.

The obvious thing to say about the XiStera is to call it the "“Swiss Army Knife” of iPhone 5 accessories. Leaving aside for a second the fact that, if all the Swiss Army is bringing to the fight is that little knife, it’s no wonder it refuses to play in any wars, let’s make a better analogy for the Xistera. It’s like a Glif crossed with a Pulltaps corkscrew.

Add the Olloclip accessory lens’s price to the cost of this new Olloclip Quick-Flip case and you get to $120. That used to be the price of an entry-level camera from a fairly decent brand, but I’d recommend you buy the Olloclip gear instead. Your iPhone’s camera way, way better than a $100-200 point-and-shoot, and the Olloclip gear makes it much easier to use.

Waiting for Apple’s iWatch? Good luck with that if you’re expecting anything fancier than a fitness-tracking iPod nano with a wrist strap. You should save your money, your hopes and your time and buy Beloved Crapware Vendor™ Brando’s Fashionable Bluetooth Vibrating Bracelet + Watch instead.

MakeDoc is a single-serve iOS app which costs just $3. That’s a lot less than the app it might replace for many of you: Microsoft Word. MarkDoc does (mostly) one thing: it takes a clipboard filled with Markdown text and turns it into a DOCX file. That’s it.

To be honest, I’m writing this post based solely on the awesome name of this iOS-compatible headphone amp: the Mobile Music Pump. What is it? An amp to boost the puny output from your iPhone’s headphone jack to make big headphones sound better.

You know how all your photos have a ton of extras tucked inside? Like – to pick a completely random example – the GPS data. And yet, whenever you send your vacation photos to your mom, she mails back to ask “where is that cool restaurant with the camel and the statue of Elvis outside?” or somesuch thing. Of course, you want to scream “Just look in the EXIF data, you idiot!” but, bring a good son/daughter, you just tell her. Again.

Well, a new app for the iPad and iPhone will help you make the implicit explicit. It’s called Map Camera.

Apparently the OLPC cemented the colors green and white as the color scheme of choice for the education market, because now the new Logitech Wired Keyboard for iPad is similarly hued.

I have no problem with that: the combo is so ugly that it’ll seriously diminish the resale value should light-fingered pupils decide to earn a little extra pocket money.

Two new iPad mini keyboard cases from Zagg today: A super-thin magnetic cover and a thicker stick-on “folio” case, similar to the Pro Plus case for the regular-sized iPad only with a top cover too. And both, amazingly, are backlit.

Wallets: I hate them, but having loose coins in your pocket which fall out every time you sit down is worse. Especially in a country where the coins are actually worth something. Right now I have a typically over-engineered German wallet which will probably last me forever, but I like the look of SF Bags’ new Finn. It’s flat, it holds cash and cars and – if you pick the bigger model – it also has space for your iPhone.

PhotoExif is an app that lets you add EXIF data to photos shot with a film camera. You can dial in aperture, shutter speed, focus distance and focal length, along with notes about your photo, and when you get the photos back, freshly scanned from the lab, you can add the info to the digital images.

Haunting Melissa is a horror "movie" which is dripped into your real, everyday life by your iPad or your iPhone. Instead of sitting down for an hour and a half and watching the story unfold, the story comes in episodes.

The twist is that the snippets are delivered at unexpected times, and you’re told about them through push notifications sent to your iDevice.

I quite like the dark linen texture that sits behind the elements of the iOS (and recently OS X) interface, but I’m pretty sure that Jony Ive’s upcoming Great Purge will consign it to the same tomb as brushed aluminum – after all, this is a designer so minimalist that he even removed a superfluous “n” from his own name.

So this wraparound case from Plus Motif might be my last chance at linen.

I just got back from a week-long vacation. We were staying in Tel Aviv, Israel, which meant lots of walking and cycling (I took my Brompton), plus day trips. Which in turn meant traveling light.

The iPad is perfect traveling companion, and the iPad mini is even better. But if you want to take lots of photos with an actual camera, or – worse still – a camera that shoots huge RAW images, you need to plan ahead. And as I didn’t want to take a Mac with me, I needed a few tricks to help out.

This post isn’t about how I managed my photos on the trip (although I will mention that side of things a little in terms of the hardware I used). It’s about the gadgets and apps that help you work around the limitations of the iPad when you’re relying on it away from home.

I’m strictly a cash-only kind of guy. I like my purchases to be anonymous, I like to deprive the credit-card companies their slice of the transaction, and above all I like the feel of the greasy, germ-laden slips of paper in my fingers. ¹

However, I recognize that sometimes you just don’t have any cash. Like when you’re supposed to be splitting the dinner bill and your friend ends up paying yet again because you “don’t want to split this fifty.” Well now your sorry payment-dodging days are coming to an end, my friend. Why? Square Cash.