David Pierini is a former newspaper writer and long-time photographer. Considered a luddite by most of his friends, they did not believe him when he broke the news that he would be writing for a technology website. He is fascinated by human nature and would love to cultivate stories about the people driving the tech bus. Reach out to him at [email protected].
You want the iPhone 5?. Your half coming right up. Gif: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac
It’s hard to say whether one man’s eBay page indicates he’s bitter about his divorce or has taken the division of property too literally.
A German man used saws to divide possessions shared with his estrange wife, giving her half and selling his half on eBay.
Everything, from an iPhone and MacBook Pro to dining room chairs, the mailbox, a teddy bear and their car, was subject to his interpretation of splitting things 50-50.
Camera backpacks can be pricey but it's money well spent to protect your investment in equipment. Photo: Lowepro
So your iPhone has you convinced you’re a pretty good photographer and it’s time to raise your game with a dedicated camera and all sorts of lenses. You are going to need something to sling your gear.
There are so many types of camera bags – shoulder, belt packs, roller cases – with designs tailored for various kinds of photography, shooting environments and individual preferences. The bag type that is arguably the most versatile is the camera backpack.
Backpacks are ideal when you are in transit with a lot of gear, whether you’re flying or hiking. They are also versatile to comfortably carry as you shoot, especially if you have to bring with you a laptop or change of clothes.
Three respected manufacturers have new bags to meet a spectrum of needs and demands. Think Tank, Lowepro and long-time Apple product vendor, InCase, bring to their latest lines rugged construction and intelligent storage options. Camera backpacks are one of the more pricey accessories, but it’s money well spent to protect your investment in bodies, lights and lenses.
Darth Vader pushes all of Captain Picard's buttons in this sketch animation from College Humor. Photo: College Humor/YouTube
If the fight card featured the urbane intellect of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard against Darth Vader and his command of the Force’s Dark Side, who would win?
We won’t spoil it for you. One fired the fatal shots, but the other got the last word. To say they fought to a draw would not give anything away.
The hilarious writers at College Humor did an animated sketch with the Next Generation cast rattling sabers with the great Sith Lord from his Death Star. The prize was not a planet or some other galactic real estate. It was to decide which series concept is nerdier?
A British company has developed an emoji-only password option for online banking. Photo: Intelligent Environments/Vimeo
Our friends chuckle when we text them a story using emoji. Fun little pictures rich in context and feeling, especially when we can make use of the smiling poo.
But that funny emoji story could also make a very secure password.
The British company Intelligent Environments has developed emoji security technology the developers say will be easier to remember and offer many more combinations that a four-digit PIN code.
A Bluetooth-enabled button lets you shoot pictures or record video. Photo: Grip Dat
Trying to hold your iPhone like you once did a camera can feel awkward. It’s not designed to fit the hands the same way. A selfie stick can free your hands, but can also get you thrown out of a lot of places.
A photographer has come up with a simple device to give you the grip you need with the shooting range of a selfie stick with no danger of impaling others around you.
Grip Dat is a handle with a tilting smartphone bracket. On the grip’s thumb rest is a Bluetooth-enabled shutter release. The gripper can take a quick selfie or detach the base from the grip to take in more of the scene to snap pictures or record video from as far away as 30 feet.
The Sony RX100 IV will hit shelves next month. Photo: Sony
Your iPhone makes a compelling case to never buy another camera. But Sony seems to understand that the better you get with your photography, the more you will learn that the camera in a smartphone has limitations.
So when you are ready to try a more sophisticated tool, Sony will be waiting with its new RX100 IV.
Don’t let the size, weight and look fool you into thinking this is just another point-and-shoot. Some of the specs in this tiny box rival those of a professional-grade DSLR.
The Vacuum Cleaner Museum houses many devices from the 1920s, including this Air-Way, which was the first to use disposable bags. Photo: David Pierini/Cult of Mac
ST. JAMES, Missouri — The first in Tom Gasko’s impressive collection of vacuum cleaners arrived before he was born. It was a summer day in 1962 and his mother, Jean, was pregnant and uncomfortably hot. The Rainbow vacuum salesman in her living room realized she was in no mood to listen to his sales pitch, so he placed ice in the vacuum’s water pan, switched on the machine and blew cool air on her.
Eighteen days later, Mrs. Gasko had a new vacuum and a son who would grow up to collect one of every model of vacuum cleaner ever made in the United States.
Many of his 704 vacuums, including the Rainbow that brought sweet relief to his mother, is on display in a museum he curates in St. James, Missouri.
“If you turned on a vacuum and I couldn’t see it, I could probably tell you the brand just by the pitch of the motor,” Gasko told Cult of Mac. “I’ve always been fascinated by the motors and how subtle changes over the years to design affects the suction.”
Rendering shows what the Lowline park might look like in an underground space in New York City that used to be a trolley station. Photo: Lowline
The world beneath the city is often portrayed in movies as a dark, sinister place with a criminal element and some marginalized segment of society in hiding and fighting to survive.
But one group believes it can bring sunlight and vibrance underground to a one-acre space below a busy neighborhood in New York City.
The Lowline is a proposed subterranean park that would occupy an old trolley station beneath Delancey Street on the city’s Lower East Side. It would use solar technology to not only light and power the park but create the necessary wavelengths that would allow plants and trees to grow.
The Aumeo audio device, right, boosts clarity of sound so that your don't risk hearing loss by increased volume. Photo: Aumeo
The best Beats headphones can’t help you if your ears are unable to hear certain subtle sounds. You can crank up the volume, but that only puts your hearing in peril.
The creators of Aumeo want to change the way you listen to music with an audio device that profiles your hearing – testing it with a smartphone app to find the frequency suited for each level – and offers sound-rich audio that lets you take your thumb off the volume button.
A person’s hearing is as unique as their fingerprints, but electronic audio devices provide more of a “one-size-fits-all” range of volume, according to Aumeo co-founder Paul Lee.
Eddy Cue's pinkish untucked shirt struck a distracting off chord with many on Twitter.
During the part of the WWDC keynote where cool is most required, the Apple Music rollout, Eddy Cue took the stage in an untucked, salmon-colored shirt and proceeded to dance. Twitter gasped, laughed and even threw up a little as Cue extolled a new service that is supposed to be hip enough make us all dump Spotify.
Twitter followers streaming the Worldwide Developers Conference, already grumpy about the drawn-out opening, were tired and hungry when Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine took their turn onstage. Some feasted on Cue’s appearance.
“Eddy Cue is one undone shirt button away from getting kicked out of Margaritaville,” wrote Jessica Misener. “Eddy Cue is like everyone’s dad at a wedding, but if everyone’s dad at a wedding was 10X more excruciating,” wrote Guardian Tech.
Windmills, especialy the ones near the Zaanse schans, look pretty when filmed from a drone. Photo: Voormedia/YouTube
To fly a drone, it can’t be too windy. But a windmill looks its best when wind is spinning its sails.
So the filmmakers at Voormedia in the Netherlands had to be patient for a perfect, cooperative wind — and they were rewarded on a recent sunny afternoon, filming the beautiful windmills near the Zaanse schans from the DJI Inspire drone.
Macphun's new software, Noiseless, makes removing the pixel distortion known as noise easy. Photo: David Pierini/Cult of Mac
You don’t need a formal photography education to make a pretty good snap. But sometimes, it would be nice to have a simple fix for a technical challenge without requiring a textbook or expensive software.
Take noise. In non-scientific terms, it’s the appearance that your pictures were taken in a sandstorm. It generally happens when you are shooting in low light. Lots of microscopic bits of colorful grain across your images.
The team at Macphun has created new software for Mac users with a series of simple sliders that let you take noise out of your photos. The aptly named Noiseless can have photos looking better with just a couple of intuitive steps.
Photo books created with apps Mosaic, Cleen and ZOOMBOOK. Photo: David Pierini/Cult of Mac
There is a slight soapbox on which I stand sometimes when I write about photography. Nothing too high-minded, but when the topic allows, I will gently remind people to print out their pictures from their iPhones and computers.
Today, I stand before you, not on a soapbox, but on a short stack of photo books. The books are designed with iPad apps from pictures I made on my smartphone. I chose three companies I liked for ease of design and the final product.
All three – Cleen, Mosaic and ZOOMBOOK – have apps that allow you to quickly design a 20-page book from your mobile device and have a tracking number for shipping all within 10 minutes. In four to 10 business days, a hardcover book arrives in the mail that you can neatly shelve.
A test of a bulletproof vest in Washington D.C. in 1923. Photo: Wikipedia
Casimir Zeglen was truly a man of the cloth. He was a Catholic priest — with an obsession for silk underwear — but the pleasure he got from silk touching skin was because it stopped bullets.
The Chicago priest is credited with inventing the first bulletproof vest, a calling he answered in 1893 after the city’s mayor was gunned down.
The vests worn today by soldiers, police officers and marked men are made with lightweight armor and sophisticated, bullet-resistant fibers like Kevlar that evolved as weapons got more powerful. Yet they work much the same way as Zeglen’s silk invention: The material catches and deforms slugs, then spreads the force of the strike over a larger area of the vest.
An artist's rendering shows the wobbble and oblong shape of Pluto's moon, Nix. Illustration: NASA
Just because Pluto lost its planetary status doesn’t mean it’s any less interesting to astronomers.
NASA on Wednesday reported two football-shaped moons that wobble so unpredictably that the sun could rise in a different direction every day from either of the moons.
The Hubble Telescope recorded the oddball orbits of the oblong moons Nix and Hydra, which wobble because they are embedded in a constantly shifting gravitational field created by dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. Pluto and Charon share a common center of gravity.
Take photos unobtrusively with people around you thinking you're checking your messages. Photo: COVR
Stop taking pictures of your “stupid face,” Thomas Hurst says. Think history, legacy and every day, unposed moments.
Hurst believes he has the tool to help you make more meaningful photos and the veteran photojournalist is trying to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter to bring the COVR you need to snap candid photos with your iPhone 6.
The designers of the Agua bag say it will keep a camera and small lens dry in any weather. Photo: miggo
When a camera bag claims to be water resistant, it feels a little like the brand is hedging its bets. It will protect your gear up to a point.
But the designers at miggo have a bag they declare confidently is storm-proof and all-weather. They even say with certainty the ironically named Agua will remain protective for five minutes in rain falling at 10 liters a minute with up to 22,000 pounds of force.
If you’re in a Biblical hard rain, you may have bigger problems then keeping your camera dry. miggo just wants you to feel comfortable with Agua if you’re out on a typical rainy day.
Sherish is a simple app that automatically backs up your photos and lets you be selective on who sees your photos. Photo: Sherish
The best camera is the one that is with you, so the saying goes. But if that is indeed your iPhone, what is the best photo app? You have several thousand from which to choose.
This can be particularly maddening to older generations, for whom robust digital living seems foreign and frightening. They like the ease of the smartphone camera, but they just want to share their pictures with a few people and store securely without all the extras, like locators, timelines or random followers.
Sherish – an iOS app whose name combines the words share and cherish – was developed for the older user who just wants a few functions, a couple of screens, easy album management and, of course, privacy.
This photograph was made in the early 1900s using the Autochrome process, which starts with dyed potato starch. Photo: Mervyn O’Gorman
The potato is one of the least colorful of the good Lord’s creations. But somehow, two French inventors figured out how the dud spud could help put color in our photographs using a process they called Autochrome.
Before brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere tinkered with taters, photographers were shooting three different pictures of the same scene through colored filters — red, blue and green — and then sandwiching the images for projection.
In 1904, the Lumieres pulverized potatoes into a starchy powder, which they then divided into three separate batches for dying violet-blue, green and orange-red. When mixed together and applied to a glass plate, the microscopic grains of potato filtered the light, creating a negative that could produce a color photo. That was Autochrome.
Apple's Eddy Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine discuss the Beats acquisition shortly after the announcement last year. Photo: Pete Mall/Re/code
The rumor mill continues to churn about what the hell Apple is going to do with Beats Music. It’s been a year since Apple paid $3 billion to acquire the upstart music service and headphone maker, but we are no closer to understanding why Cupertino laid out the cash.
When Apple purchased Beats Music and Beats Electronics, it did so with a splash it generally reserves for the unveiling of a game-changing product like the Apple Watch. Since then, it’s basically been crickets.
It is clear Apple has a way to go to compete in the streaming music game against Spotify, Pandora and the other services scrambling to get a piece of the music industry pie. But what form will Apple’s next music play take?
Richard Prince sold Instagram screenshots for thousands of dollars, but the original owner will sell it on a deep discount. Photo: SuicideGirls
You can spend $90,000 on a Richard Prince “piece of art.” Or you can get the same thing from the original source he ripped off at a 99 percent discount.
Prince used screenshots of people he followed on Instagram and converted them into a large inkjet paintings he then sold for thousands of dollars. Prince did not alert the subjects their Instagram shares were being displayed and sold.
Some of the images were from the popular trend-setting SuicideGirls, whose founder has offered the same pictures printed in the same way for sale for $90 on its website.
"Do. Or do not. There is no try," at Madam Tussauds wax museum. Photo: Madam Tussauds/YouTube
Voltaire was the first. Now Vader is a wax figure.
Madame Tussauds has been in the business of meticulously sculpting lifelike models of the famous since 1777. Now, in a gallery far, far away (well, London), the wax museum has produced 11 famous sets featuring 16 Star Wars characters. And a new video shows the tedious, behind-the-scenes creative process, which involves much more than just pouring hot wax into molds.
Inkjet "paintings" from a body of work by Richard Prince from Instagram. Photo: Collector Daily
Instagram users, adjust your privacy setting and remember the name Richard Prince.
Should he request to follow you, he could one day “appropriate” your pictures and make thousands of dollars off you.
Prince featured 38 screenshots from his Instagram feed in a show in New York City last fall and at the Frieze Art Fair earlier this month, and some of the people featured are just now finding out about their pictures appearing in giant form on gallery walls.
Fields of flowers in the Netherlands as seen from a drone. Photo: Voormedia
If flowers are your photographic muse, you use a macro lens to create pictures from a bee’s-eye view.
But consider what a bee sees when it flies. Voormedia in the Netherlands did, flying a drone and filming over breath-taking flower fields in bloom that may have you wanting to give your macro the day off.
Shooting is easy in Keukenhof or Noordwijkerhout in the spring where acres and acres of vibrant pinks and purples bloom at once. Watch the short YouTube video below and you’ll make room in your bag for a quadcopter and GoPro camera.
Jacques Plante made history in 1959 when he refused to play hockey without a protective mask after suffering a facial injury. Photo: National Hockey League
In hockey’s early days, if you took a puck to the kisser you got stitched up and put back on the ice. No goalie would dare wear a protective mask — fans considered it unmanly. Coaches worried their netminders would lose their courage. Reporters echoed these judgments in their stories.
But after stopping a hard wrist shot with his face early in the first period of a game against the Rangers in 1959, Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante refused to return without the crude, flesh-toned fiberglass mask he used in practice.
The press fussed at him, but Plante believed playing without a mask was like a skydiver jumping without a parachute. Plante’s ghoulish face cover went on to win over goalies, became an enduring symbol of the game and even evolved into a high-tech artistic statement for today’s goaltenders.