Charlie Sorrel - page 147

SkimClip is a very clever, and very handy little Mac app. What it does it this: With one keystroke, you can make a screen grab of any part of your Mac’s desktop and SkimClip saves it and performs OCR.

Thus, any image containing text is instantly cataloged for searching. Sure, you could also roll your own PDF workflow to do the same thing, but as SkimClip also organizes the results into an iTunes-like interface with search, subcategories and quick-look, and only costs $5 on the Mac App Store, then why bother?

Plus, this is yet another way to convert DRM-encumbered e-books into plain old go-anywhere text.

SkimClip v1.0 is available now in the Mac App Store.

Source: Dom Loves Kim Software

It seems that there can be no corner of the niche product universe that can’t be mined and exploited with tasteless “luxury” versions of regular, plain ol’ tools. Today’s example: the Lynktec ArtCloths, which show your “appreciation” for great art in the same way that the tinny ringtone snippet belching from your cellphone shows your appreciation of music.

There’s making things out of Lego, and then there’s making things out of Lego. And H.Y. Leung’s amazing white Leica M8 is firmly in the latter camp. His replica rangefinder might just be the best Lego fake we’ve ever seen (outside of anything to do with Star Wars, of course).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXPWgEcIUI8

Years ago, I worked out a way to remote control my home’s lamps from my iPhone: just record the sound of somebody clapping, and play it back when you want to switch a light on or off.

Now, though, there’s a much higher-tech way to do the same thing. It’s an iPhone-controlled lightbulb from Insteon.

I used to think that Wash & Go – shampoo and conditioner in one bottle – was the greatest combination of all time. That’s until I found out about the Camera Cooler, a camera bag and beer cooler in one. Clearly, the predictions that the Singularity would occur in 2012 were correct.

Think Retina display Macs are a gimmick? Think again: Mac developer Gus Mueller is almost ready to pop out an update to the Acorn image editing app which will use the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro to spectacular (and rather useful) effect.

Instaglasses. What a fantastic idea. Sadly only a concept (and surely destined to remain so), these special specs survey the scene before you and apply your choice of Instagram filter to the real world. You’ve heard the expression “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses”? Well, these are retro-tinted glasses.

CineXPlayer, the excellent, rock-solid, play-anything video player for iOS, had gotten yet another big update. Every time the app is bumped to a new version, I wonder what the developers will be able to add next time. And today’s answer is… Quite a lot.

If you had any doubts that the world of iPhone accessories could grow any stranger or more diverse, then throw them out now. The Shaka Wind Meter proves that there are still plenty of depths yet to plumb.

The Shaka is a simple little gadget: a fan that plugs into the headphone socket of your iPhone and tells you the wind speed. It’s made for surfers, but has many more uses than that.

Who doesn’t love the Drobo? People who like to lose their data, that’s who. For the rest of us, today brings good news: New Thunderbolt-equipped Drobos, one for the desktop and one for taking on the road.

Alphyn Industries’ DELTA415 Wearcom jeans may as well have been called the Dork-O-Tron 3000, for they are nerdy in the extreme. They are also flat-out awesome, and if I was the kind of person who spent $160 on a pair of jeans, then I’d be al over them. Or all in them, I guess.

The Wearcoms are simple: the front right pocket has been replaced by a see-through phone pouch, complete with a protective flap to cover it.

Satechi’s Portable Energy Station is the backup battery you need if you have a new iPad aka iPad 3. Why? Because its 10,000 mAH battery is almost as capacious as the 12,000 mAH (45 watt-hour) battery in the iPad 3 itself.

Magnets. Even if we’ll probably never know how they work, you gotta love them. They let us pin notes to fridges, they lock and unlock your iPad’s screen and now they can even stick your your iPhone to any metal surface. If only they didn’t do that pesky trick of wiping your bak cards, magnets would be pretty much perfect.

Apple is generally known not just for the minimal design of its products, but also for the minimal design of its packaging. But when it comes to the new MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter, the box is not only huge in comparison to its payload, it also consists of a frankly ridiculous number of individual parts. And Paul Kafasis, boss of Rogue Amoeba software, has the photos to prove it.

It used to be that video came to our homes in one of two ways: through the TV, or through a VHS tape. Then came DVD, then came the internet, and then came mediageddon.

Now we can get anything we want, any time we like. That’s the simple part, because now we also have to decide how we want to watch it. Luckily, we have put together a list of neat video hardware that will help you convert and push your media around the home, and even outside.

You’re on a bike. You’re carrying your MacBook Air and your iPad with you, when it starts to rain. Do you: a.) duck under the nearest bridge to wait it out (and maybe play a few quick levels of Angry Birds); b.) Panic a little, but carry on, hoping that your crappy messenger bag holds up; or c.) laugh out loud, and turn left instead of right at the next stop and add another few kilometers to your trip. After all, riding in the rain is fun, right?

If your answer was “c”, then you probably already own the new Chrome Lieutenant Rolltop Messenger Bag.

Almost nightly I scrabble around in the dark trying to find the 30-pin dock connector dangling from my desk so I can plug it onto my depleted iPad without disturbing the Lady, sleeping beside me. I say “almost” as sometimes I fall into a drunken sleep with my spectacles askew and the iPad still in my lap or – more often – the Lady refuses to sleep with me and goes to her own room.

And every time I struggle to find the plug, I wish for something like the illuminated CordLite cable.

Some people complain – quite wrongly – that Apple’s design team is there solely to fight with the engineers. The thinking goes that Jony Ive spends his days doodling beautiful, thin boxes with no ports, and the engineering team then argues to get things like screens, batteries and data ports put back in.

Utter nonsense, of course, but at Sonos, it appears that this is just the way things work: The shape of its new $700 Sonos Sub was picked by customers (customers!) and then the Sonos engineers had to make a speaker to fit inside.

BBC has added “Live Restart” to its iPlayer app. This will let Brits hit a button to rewind live TV up to two hours. Thus, if you miss the beginning of a live show you can just skip back to the beginning.

This handily closes the gap between live streaming and the watch-later service that lets you go back and catch TV shows aired in the past two weeks.

Quick! If you have any need for an iOS screen-recording app, and you don’t mind wasting $2, then go download Display Recorder right now. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.

The Motive Stylus solves one of the most annoying problems of carrying a stylus for your iPad: Where do you put it? We have seen magnetic styluses which snap onto the Smart Cover before, but none does it quite so securely and unobtrusively as the Motive, which actually folds flat.

The iPhone’s camera app is pretty good for shooting stills, and I consistently get sharper pictures with better white balance than I do in any other apps. But for shooting video, it just plain sucks: the crop factor (which lets image stabilization do its stuff) makes indoor shooting hard, and you have almost no control over anything but focus.

So do yourself a favor and go spend a buck on CinePro, a video-shooting app that gives you all the control you need.

Want to take your iPhone to the beach? Fancy taking it with you for a swim and snapping some sweet underwater snaps? Or are you just a friendless loser who is so repulsive that they can’t even find somebody to look after their stuff while they go for a quick dip?

If any of these apply to you, then you might like to take a look at Photojojo’s new iPhone Scuba Suit. And if the last applies to you, then go ahead and buy this waterproof case, but just stay away if you see me by the ocean, OK?

Bluetooth 4 is proving to be quite a lot more than just an incremental spec bump to the wireless protocol. Thanks to its super low power needs, Bluetooth 4 is finding all sorts of clever uses.

Example: The Hone, a key fob which can talk to your iPhone whenever you lose your keys, and yet still remain functional for up to six month between charges.

Sasser, co-founder of Panic software, has had a fantastic idea to make stealing iPhones pretty useless. Most savvy thieves know that when you find or steal a smartphone, you shut it down immediately. This stops it being tracked by the carrier and – in the case of the iPhone – it stops the user from tracking it, or wiping it from afar.

Cabel’s incredibly simple idea would stop this from happening.