There’s a good chance I will be the first Pierini to land on Mars. No, I did not win some contest that sends me on a one-way trip to the Red Planet in the name of reality TV.
But I did register my name with NASA to have it embedded on a microchip headed to Mars. Now it’s your turn.
I live in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where life on the water is better-suited for walleye fishing than surfing. Yet places like Minnesota could provide the ideal bodies of water for a new kind of surfing with technology that puts motors and batteries into surfboards.
If you keep track of the ways the iPhone is a revolutionary tool, you can soon add 3-D printing the growing list.
A Microsoft research team has created an app that turns any smartphone camera into a 3-D scanner without the need for extra hardware.
The extra long goatee is part of my look, but the two-toned thicket of coarse chin hairs can be a little jarring in a video call. If a screen’s built-in camera is not angled right and or placed at a proper distance, the beard may be the only thing the person gets on the receiving end. That and a lunch crumb or two.
A Swedish design firm has developed a camera attachment that increases the field of view so you can take in the whole face. The ViW will even illuminate your face in bad lighting.
If you get to a museum to see one of the shuttles that actually flew in space, your jaw may drop. Just don’t mind the guys pulling parts from it.
NASA recently sent engineers to the California Science Center in Los Angeles to dust off the mothballs of the space shuttle Endeavor and remove four water storage tanks for future use aboard the International Space Station.
There are so many ways technology helps us record information. Yet, the analog notebook hangs in there. Paired with a pen, nothing commits information to memory quite like sketching or jotting thoughts and observations by hand on nice paper.
A London design agency, understanding how personal notebooks inspire creativity, has created a platform called Book Block for creatives to design their own notebooks.
In the news business, a story that has legs stays in our heads, conversations and spins off follow-up headlines. Such was this week’s major newspaper expose describing Amazon as a hellish pressure cooker where employees cry at their desks.
Not everyone agreed with The New York Times piece that drew this conclusion after interviews with more than 100 current and former workers. Now even a Times editor is questioning whether the story was fair.
Dust off your father’s Miami Vice suit and start growing a mullet. (Get it permed in back, too.) A new app turns your iPhone’s camera into a 1985-style VHS camcorder, complete with terrible quality and a date stamp.
While some are writing the eulogy for email, Erik Lukas has worked for the last two years trying to make it relevant again.
His mobile app, Geronimo, takes its first public leap Aug. 27 for iPhone and the Apple Watch with an interface that involves gestures and uses the four corners of an iPhone screen for quick and easy management of your email.
The confetti from Apple’s splashy launch of its music streaming service has barely finished falling. Now comes startup Geekin Radio, with a streaming service that debuts today. It seems like odd timing.
How will it ever emerge from the shadows of Apple Music? CEO Gavin McCulley is aware of his timing and likes his company’s chances because Geekin Radio’s mobile app is the only streaming service that is an actual social network, offering a shared listening experience, perfectly synced, with back-and-forth chatting in real time.
When it comes to security and tamper-resistant devices, nothing beats the testimonial of a failed burglary attempt caught on camera.
A robber, who recently rammed his truck into an Australian electronics store, hit a snag when he tried to swipe an iPad encased in a double-lock kiosk made by Maclocks. Security camera footage shows him pulling with all his might and then giving up. With time against him, he wound up leaving the store with empty display boxes.
We love our photo filter apps, especially the ones that deliver the look and quality of classic film stock. These filters will never replicate the rich tonality and texture of film, but given the cost and hassles of using it, the average person probably feels they’re not missing much.
Deepak Mantena believes we’re missing out. The creator of digital studio Stay Kids has developed an iOS photo app called Base that lets you pick from 14 different film styles before you start making pictures.
The cycling helmet is often referred to as a brain bucket. It has kept many a melon in one piece after falls and collisions and there’s no smarter wearable for your ride.
One helmet promises to offer more smarts. It’s called the Bling Helmet by LIVALL and it is aptly named because of how it flashes.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wouldn’t want to toil in the dehumanizing hellhole described in a recent report about work conditions at his company. In a memo to employees responding to the allegations, Bezos painted a picture of caring Amazonians who are “fun” and “brilliant” and “helping to invent the future, and laughing along the way.”
He also said anybody who gets treated badly by Amazon should snitch to HR — or email him directly to air their grievances.
Rock music history is rife with musicians who developed a sort of god complex from money and fame.
A recent posting on Instagram indicates fame is unlikely to corrupt Brittany Howard, lead singer and guitarist for Alabama Shakes, who used the photo- and video-sharing platform to give a fan a guitar lesson.
Vacation films used to be something to fear. The blurry Super 8 home movie from the lake or the two-hour slide show of the neighbor’s trip to the Badlands would quickly put us to sleep (although we might have preferred death).
But these days, anyone can shoot and edit their vacation films with cinematic flair thanks to the latest smartphones and software that gives us tools that once required a film school degree. Just look at these stunning videos and you’ll see state-of-the-art summer memories, circa 2015.
Each of our devices needs a mothership so to speak, that place where, at the end of a long day with the battery in the red, they can all return to one place and dock to recharge. This thought occurs to me every time I go to leave the house and must first round up my phone, iPad, computer and camera batteries from the various outlets I left them at the night before.
The accessories company Satechi has built the International Space Station of power strips.
There was no selfie stick, no hashtags and no sharing with his BFF. In fact, when Robert Cornelius took his historic selfie, he sat still as a stone for 15 minutes, then watched the photo slowly appear on a silver-plated sheet of copper as he breathed in dangerous mercury fumes.
That was instant gratification in 1839.
Cornelius, using a wooden box fitted with an opera glass, likely deserves credit for taking the world’s first selfie. He didn’t make the picture out of vanity, but as an experiment to test a silver-plating method for the daguerreotype photographic process, which had been introduced worldwide just three months before Cornelius’ self-portrait.
While Apple doesn’t recommend submerging the Apple Watch in water, there have been a number of swimmers who say their watches have held up to workouts in the pool.
But since Apple probably won’t honor a warranty for a Watch that stopped after a shower, why risk it? Catalyst, whose waterproof iPhone cases come highly rated by customers and tech journalists, has introduced a line of waterproof cases for the Apple Watch.
Few of us have ever given much thought to the building of a better lightbulb. But technology has forced us away from the incandescent bulb to LED lights which are more efficient, last longer and, in some cases, provide a variety of color.
The design and engineering team behind the Aerelight isn’t riding the LED wave. They are instead coming in on the wave after that with OLED lighting technology for its elegant razor-thin table lamp.
The snobby photographer inside me is offended whenever someone suggests that good photography is the result of owning “a really good camera.” Give me a little credit for anticipating and recognizing the good light, composition and human dynamics unfolding before me.
Your iPhone can help you find a good brunch place, with reviews on Yelp that indicate a restaurant’s best dishes. But there really isn’t any real-time help, except maybe calling or taking your chances and just showing up, to find out if you and your friends can get a table at a local hot spot.
A company called Density has developed a door-frame sensor that monitors the coming and going of people and then reports to an iPhone app whether your favorite place is full. It collects data on people’s movement at various hours of the day and recommends windows of time when you can get right in.
For better or worse and depending on your political leanings, Donald Trump is said to have won Thursday night’s debate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump also scored a bit of a victory on social media. Whether celebrated or reviled, he was talked about more than the other candidates. Compare the buzz to the professional wrestling term known as heat. Heat can mean cheers for the heroes, but also represent the boos for the heels. Heat in any form is the measure of popularity.
Is it the kind of heat you can warm to or is it just hot air? Either way, the commentary on Twitter and Instagram is entertaining and with a record 24 million viewers watching the debate, the Teflon Don will take all the heat he can get.
Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.
Mobile photography’s most mobile photographer was on the Skeleton Coast in Namibia and didn’t want to be weighted down.
Jen Pollack Bianco traveled with her usual DSLR equipment — all 26 pounds of it — but when the time came to go on an elephant safari, she left the heavy gear behind. This was a bold choice, considering such encounters rarely happen more than once in a lifetime.
The travel blogger carried her new iPhone 6 and the camera inside proved it could handle a charging elephant.
If you close your eyes, the iPad drummer known as Appleman sounds like he is tearing up a real set of skins. What you see in his YouTube videos, in which he covers the drumming parts of rock classics like Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People,” contradicts what the ears hear.
But how would he do against a drummer on an analog kit? Fast fingers met fast sticks recently as the anonymous Appleman went mano a mano with 17-year-old drumming phenom Yamachika Takuto.
By the sounds of the exchange of solos and the cheers from the audience, the two battled to a draw.
