gadgets - page 24

If there’s one thing in your office that is likely immune to spills and dirt its the surface of your desk. Likely made from foil-covered MDF, or – if you’re fancy – from polished hardwood or glass or steel, the tough worktop will shrug of stains and liquids without even noticing them.

But if your “workstation” consists of a couple of upturned cardboard boxes, then Satechi’s waterproof faux-leather Desk Mat & Mate may be for you. And while you’re renovating it, it might pay you to read this random orbital sander review, for you could stand a chance of making your worktop more visually-appealing.

The Cocoon Grid-It, every geek’s favorite slightly-too-heavy travel organizer, has now been turned into a bag. It’s called the Slim, and it has enough straps and nooks to keep even a roomful of OCD freaks relaxed and happy.

The DB60 speaker looks a lot like the tip of an airliner’s wing, ripped off, shrunken, polished and hung on the wall. And it might well be – who knows where the designers got their materials? But once mounted on your wall and hooked up to power, it becomes a Bluetooth speaker of uncommon practicality.

Apple’s Earbuds and EarPods mightn’t be the best-sounding headphones around, but they come with every iPhone, and they’re tough enough to wrap up and keep conveniently in your back, unnoticed until you need them. And I would do exactly that, if the ’pods didn’t just drop out of my giant ears no matter how hard I jam them in.

What I need are some EarSkinz. Yes, that’s with a “Z.”

Juice Up is a super-smart concept design with one big flaw: it relies on the kindness of strangers to actually work. Still, with a little modification it could be just about the best bumper you could buy.

It might be hard to remember during this absurdly hot summer, but there’s this thing called rain. And rain hates gadgets. Or rather, it seems to love gadgets, but they hate it. The obvious answer is an umbrella, but then you have to kind of squeeze its shaft between your shoulder and your ear so you can use both hands to operate your camera/iPhone/iPad.

What you need is the Brolly umbrella.

USB thumb drives are fast becoming useless, simply because we have nothing to plug them into. I used to get excited when PR folks gave me a 1GB stick instead of a DVD containing their press info, but how am I supposed to stick it into my iPad?

SanDisk’s new Connect Wireless Flash Drive fixes that. It’s a 16GB or 32GB thumb drive, only it has a Wi-Fi radio inside

The Filip is a smart watch for kids, complete with a built-in cellphone, a tracker so you can keep an eye on them wherever they are, and messaging so you can continue to harass and berate them even as they try to build their own sense of independence.

I kind of hate it.

Apparently, the hot new thing is to stick your iPad to the kitchen wall and then immediately start chopping red peppers. Luckily for those new to this emerging fashion, there is both a product and an instructional video available to help out. The product is the MagBak, and it consists of a pair of rubbery, magnetized pads that stick onto the back of the iPad.

Dumb phones had a few advantages over today’s smartphones. First, their batteries lasted for what seemed like weeks between charges. And second, if the battery did die, all you lost was the ability to call and SMS people. You didn’t lose your e-mail, your camera, your iPod, the book you’re reading or the movie you were planning to watch on the train home.

So you carry a spare battery. But what if you could eliminate the need for that spare, and also ditch that creepy wrist-strengthener you insist on pumping all the time like some hyperactive pervert?

Good news! With the Mipwr Dynamo Case, you can do both.

This is the Cambridge Camera Bag, and it is supposedly inspired by the schoolbags of English children. Perhaps this was the case in past years, when only the privileged offspring of royalty and wealthy industrialists attended school, because these days English schoolkids drag their crap around in the same battered Eastpak backpacks as anyone else.

Not that this makes the Cambridge Camera Bag any less desirable. Quite the opposite, in fact, if you’ve ever met a genuine English hooligan.

A new experimental add-on for DSLRs brings Lytro-like refocus-able photos to any camera, and tosses in a few extra clever features for good measure. The KaleidoCamera, as it’s called, is a unit that sits between your lens and your camera and performs some clever magic on the light that streams into it.

The Braven 855s is pretty good for barbecues, or what some folks call “grills.” How do I know? I tried it last night. And even when I spilled cow’s blood on my un-dyed leather loafers, the music kept on going. And it sounds pretty good too.

Oh Hasselblad. As if your absurd and hideous Lunar wasn’t bad enough, you’re about to compound the embarrassment with the Stellar compact, yet another Sony NEX camera dressed up with a stupid wooden grip and a huge markup. What happened to you?

If you’re already wearing a backpack, then the best place to hang your camera might be from one of its straps. That’s the idea behind the Capture Camera Clip v2, a follow up to the runaway success that was the Capture Camera Clip.

Remember those cool, ultra-light wooden iPhone 5 cases from Kubxlab? Now they’re available with the skins of exotic animals replacing the slivers of rare-tree flesh on the back panel. They’re called “Exotics” and “Elegance.” Let’s see if they live up to that.

You just have to love the TurtleCell. First there’s the name, which conjures up images of hard-to-empty bowels. Then there’s the website, which manages to pack in plenty of Standard Infomercial Tropes: the cheesy, grinning model (usually either a family member or just the most photogenic person on the team, but never, ever a professional model), the overplayed example of the problem the product solves (in this case, an absurdly-tangled pair of earbuds) and even – yes, really – a sunglasses-wearing animal mascot in the product video.

It’s almost deliberately ridiculous. Oh, and the product is an iPhone case with built-in headphones.

PowerCycle is a hip-flask-shaped USB battery pack which is designed to be charged by your bike. You’ll need to be running a dynamo hub with an electrical output to actually charge it, so this is more a bike-friendly design than a bike-only one.

Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.

I hate the beach: It’s full of dirty sand, sweaty half-naked men and polluted with the sound of bad radio stations. It’s exactly like your average building site in fact, and we don’t go and lie in the sun on those.

But in July in Barcelona, the beach is one of the few places you can go to cool down and feel a breeze. It’s also just about the most dangerous place to take your electronic gadgets.

And that’s where these Cloudcover weatherproof cases come in.

Muku Shuttr is a tiny, keychain-sized (and keychain-mountable) remote shutter release for your iPhone. OR your iPad. Or your giant Android “phablet.” For just $29, you’l never have to see another “selfie arm” disappearing from the side of your self portraits ever again.

I love the look of OWC’s Envoy Pro EX. It’s a tiny external USB 3 drive which makes even a pocket HDD look bulky, and it packs a 240GB or a 480GB SSD, making it as fast as you’ll ever need.

But there’s one small problem: even the little one is $315, and the 480-gigger is almost $600. Ouch.

You gotta love the destruction of the point-and-shoot camera industry at the hands of the cellphone. After years of trying to woo us with more and more hard-drive-filling megapixels, camera makers are finally being forced to give us what we actually want. And it doesn’t hurt that these features are exactly those things that are difficult to put into phones: Big sensors and – now – viewfinders.

The latest convert looks like it’ll be Panasonic, with the newly-leaked GX7.

Ever thrown your camera up in the air in self-timer mode in order to catch a shot from a new angle? No, me neither – I’m no dummy when it comes to using-and-not-abusing my gadgets. But with the Squito, you don’t have to worry about breaking anything – it’s rugged ball with a panoramic camera inside, and it’s designed to be thrown.

Bleed that rust hones peripheral of mark of apple

I Kakaru peeling layer of red rust is cracking. split.

It becomes the two works realistic that utilizes the transparent cover.

This incredible piece of poetry is not in fact a finely-honed chunk of verse, but just a clumsy machine translation from Google. Or is it? Perhaps Google’s vast and distributed computer brain has attained consciousness and turned itself into a soft, wooly-brained artist? If so, the nerds at Google are gonna be pissed.

The text above is also the description of a set of rusty cases for the iPad Mini, straight from the Bird Online Shop.