Eli Milchman - page 14

The new Timbuk2 Command Messenger 2012 ($140) is nothing like the first Timbuk2 bag I ever owned, some 11 years and 20 pounds ago, back when I was heavily commited to the world of cycling. Timbuk2 called it the Bolo, and it was a real messenger bag — though messengers almost always opted for it’s larger sibling, the Tag Junkie — crafted from a single piece of vinyl and Cordura; just a massive main compartment with not much more than a small pocket sewn on the outer face for coins and maybe a patch kit.

Although it’s just about as tough, the Command Messenger is light years away from my Bolo (and is really as much a messenger bag as a Chevy pickup is an ox cart): It’s sophisticated, uses several advanced materials, has loads of pockets and a trick feature that makes air travel easier for laptop-toting jestsetters. My how you’ve grown, Timbuk2.

Bag-maker STM hails from dehn undah (if you think my Aussie impression sounds bad here, well, it’s even worse in person), where they’re apparently pretty huge. They’re less well-known here in the States — but that’ll likely change thanks to a big marketing push and bags like the fantastic STM Velo ($100), a designed laptop bag stuffed with unusually clever features.

Till January of this year, the Wahoo Key for iPhone ($80) dongle pwned fitness on the iPhone. Why? Because the tiny, ubiquitous dongle gives the iPhone access to dozens of ANT+ sensors, and more fitness apps than any other system — turning your iPhone into a fitness-tracking powerhouse.

Then in January, Wahoo one-upped itself and introduced the Wahoo Blue Bluetooth heart-rate strap, which completely bypasses ANT+ and instead communicates via low-energy Bluetooth v4.0. Does this mean the Key is obsolete? Not by a long shot.

Fashion and photography go together like peanut butter and jelly, or Kentucky and Bourbon. So it’s not surprising that the newest Hipstamatic Pak, Made in America, is influenced by famed fashion photographer Chiun-Kai Shih, and released just ahead of New York Fashion Week. And it’s free throughout the 16th.

Everyone was jamming in the little corner where House of Marley was stashed during the official press event at CES, and a big part of that was due to their Bag of Rhythm dock — the Marley PR people carried it around slung on their shoulders, and it just rocked, man.

Yeah, that spinning beach ball looks all happy and fun, but the diabolical critter’ll make your system slower than the line at the central Los Angeles DMV on a late Friday afternoon. Not to worry — FreeMemory is here to help.

No, the free app won’t kick the little swine out to sea — but at least it’ll let you deflate it somewhat by keeping close tabs on the status of your RAM.

Oh, sure. The idea of being able to reach out from across the room and dramatically direct your mighty will to zap stuff on, off, up, down, or cause the very Air to shimmer with Play is intoxicating — that is, until those nine remotes you’ve been using to control all your magical devices become horribly unruly; perhaps they no longer bow to your commands, or maybe they’re off chasing hobbits under a couch somewhere. Whatever the reason, it’s time to harness the VooMote Zapper ($70), and make them all submit to your will!

(WARNING: Tossing the Zapper into a giant pit of lava under a mountain is not advised and will undoubtedly void the warranty, ‘mkay?)

A few months ago, Days of Wonder released the $2 iPhone version of their overwhelmingly popular, award-winning board game, Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride Pocket amazed everyone by including all the elements of the iPad version in a smaller, tighter, but just as engrossing package — only with one huge hole: While you could play real people around you via a Bluetooth connection, there wasn’t any way to play against people who weren’t in the same room with you. All that changed yesterday, making TTR pocket one of the best board game on the iPhone, right up there with chess and Words with Friends.

If today’s release of Id’s mind-blowing, Wasteland-themed Rage: Campaign Edition first-person shooter on the Mac App Store is any indication, the days of your mouth-breathing PC friends making fun of you because “you can’t play games on your Mac” may be numbered.

We’ve waited patiently for this little gold nugget of a photo processing app to land at the Mac App Store, ever since developer Nevercenter teased us with CamerBag 2‘s beta a few months back. Wait’s over: It’s here. And today only it’s on sale for $19.

Some gadgets love the rugged outdoors; the iPhone, with its sensitive, water-fearing innards, is more of a house gadget. Awww. Then LifeProof stepped in to change that when it launched its $80 water-, dirt-, snow- and shockproof case last summer. Now, the company has unveiled a line of four modular mounts that fit the LifeProof case, turning the iPhone into an electro-Leatherman.

Autodesk makes industry-leading software for animators, architects and industrial designers, so maybe the fact their Pixlr-o-matic  app is a stunning, gasp-worthy photo-effects tool for the iPhone (and iPad) shouldn’t be surprising; what is a surprise, though, is that it’s free.

Fitness buffs love Runkeeper (and its accompanying iPhone app) for its ability to gather data from a wide variety of cloud-based services and gadgets they might use, so it can be stored and viewed in a central location; we haven’t exactly counted, but it’s a good bet that the all-knowing fitness service can import data from more fitness apps, services and gadgets than any other cloud-based fitness service on the planet. But with the nine more they added today, well, now it’s just getting ridiculous.

There are those faithful who will never surrender their little white Apple earbuds. To them we say: Wear proudly. But for the rest, for those who don’t want to deal with sub-par sound, earbuds flopping around and having to hunt for foam covers, come with us — and we’ll show you a world of possibilities.

I distinctly recall a bit of maneuvering when Joe Daileda, head of sales and marketing at MEElectronics, contacted us about reviewing some of their earphones. Joe seemed particularly keen on getting a pair of their ceramic CC51Ps in our hands, but I wanted none of it — being the armature junkie I am, I was fixated on their armature-powered A151s ($75). Joe eventually ended up sending us three models (impressions of the unique, modular SP51 coming soon to a review near you).

Joe’s favoritism may have been entirely in my head — I get like that sometimes; but true enough, the CC51Ps turned out to be a stunning revelation. The A151s? Not so much.

If you need information from Wikipedia, you’d best get it very quickly; in just a few hours, at 9 P.M. PST (5:00 UTC for our European readers), a coalition of sites across the web — including Wikipedia’s English site, Boing Boing and Reddit — will go dark for a day, displaying this page instead of their usual home pages.

My colleagues here at Cult of Mac, PR reps completely unrelated to Fuji or anything photographic, random showgoers whose snippets of conversation I intercepted — everyone seemed to be talking about it. Even the very air at CES seemed to be pulsating with the word “Fuji.” Of course, they were all talking about the enigmatic, neo-retro Fuji X-Pro1.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Or maybe it’s that they’re pretending even less. The amount of bling at the Monster “booth” — it was actually more of a compound, complete with a super-secret inner sanctum — would make Snooki (who was at the show) blush. Their three newly released headphones seemed far more focused on fashion than sound; even Monster founder Nole Lee’s Segway (was it a Segway?) rolled around on gold-rimmed wheels. Then there were the booth fashion shows…

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Amazing to think Sony has never offered an armature-driven earphone before; now that they are, they’re diving in huge time with eleven models. Aussie new kid on the block Audiofly just have one in their new lineup, but it’s a doozy, and it sounded absolutely stunning; we fully expect these to be a huge hit.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Taking a cue from their cutting-edge Command Messenger laptop bag, Timbuk2 have taken their popular, almost decade-old Commute Messenger and finally given it a major overhaul.

ddd

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — The last Altec Lansing dock we reviewed, the Bluetooth-equipped InMotion Air, left us with a weird taste — it was just too funky. AL’s new LIVE 5000 more than makes up for this: It looks *really* stunning up close — and sounds fantastic to boot.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Those studly hex bolts, that rubberized exterior, the thick mass of battery — Mophie’s new Power Station Pro was obviously designed with one idea in mind: keeping your iDevice-laden butt juiced out in the middle of nowhere.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — I’ve personally been waiting a very long time for this sort of thing, disappointed by idle promises and vaporware. This set of LEDs paired with audible announcements isn’t exactly what I’ve been waiting for, but I’ll take it. Question is, does Lance already have a pair?

The same company that brought top-shelf game titles to the Mac is soon planning to bring many of those same games to the iPad. Today, though, OnLive has announced an app that lets you view and use Windows 7 applications on your iPad. It’s free, and it’ll hit the App Store this Thursday.

The Looxcie camera is a neat little gadget by itself, able to clip onto an ear and record 30-second video bursts of your life. Now it has a fantastic little streaming app that you can use to stream those clips and even allows two-way voice communication. Hello, ultra-portable broadcast team.