gadgets - page 53

I have mixed thoughts on home-monitoring systems. On the one hand, you get some peace of mind knowing when the house is empty. But on the other, if the worst does happen, you get to watch the burglar burglarize your home, live, as it happens. I guess at the very least, you do have a warning not to use that toothbrush ever again. Not after the burglar stuck it in his [That’s enough! -Ed].

Still, if you’re going to add cameras to the house, then Logitech’s new “Alert 750n Indoor Master System – with Night Vision” looks pretty good. It uses your home’s powerlines to both power the camera and connect it to the network, and you can monitor it from an iOS app.

The Limb.al is a very simple yet very clever idea. It’s a USB charging cable for your iPhone (or micro-USB device) which is stiff enough to work as a dock. Plug the Limb.al into a USB port on the side of your MacBook or monitor and it will be held, hovering in space, by the bendable, pose-able cable.

Apple’s Smart Cover is about as minimal as minimal gets, but recently mine has been getting a little slack — literally. Meanwhile, Miniot’s Mk2 wooden iPad cover looks like it may match Apple’s minimalism while actually working a lot better.

What if I told you that you could buy a Bluetooth speaker than you would never need to charge again? “Charlie!” you would say, “Have you lost your mind? Have you been drinking again?” To which I would answer “No” and “Yes” respectively. Because such a speaker does indeed exist. It’s called the Rukus Solar, and it gets its power from the 620 million metric tons of hydrogen fused each second by the Sun’s nuclear furnace.

I’m not a big fan of music processing. As a child of the 1980s, I spent more time tweaking graphic equalizers than I did listening to actual music. And now, I figure if my iPad can’t manage to make an over-compressed MP3 sound good, then not much will help.

But those who prefer their music to be all big bass and punchy highs might find the SRS iWOW-U to be a compelling purchase. The dongle dangles between your iDevice’s jack socket and your headphones, and “will make you say ‘WOW’ within 10 seconds of turning it on,” according to the blurb. Then again, that same blurb also claims that the iWOW-U offers “an amazing HD-quality listening experience,” so take from that what you will.

Meet iCandy, a device with one, simple purpose: distracting children. The iCandy is a bracket that screws into the bottom of your SLR camera and holds your iPhone out in front of it, ready to entertain children and stop them from getting bored during portrait sessions. Think of it as a kind of digital version of the plush Mickey Mouses held up by ambidextrous photographers of the past.

[This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Scosche’s reVOLT charger only comes with two ports]

There seems to be some discrepancy in talent between the naming and the product departments at Scosche: the former can come up with a product name like “reVOLT pro h2,” and the latter with a product like, well, the product inside the package with “reVOLT pro h4” written on the outside. Revolting nomenclature aside, the pro h2 is a charger which can juice up to two iPads at the same time, via its duo of 10W (2.1A) USB ports.

BlackRapid’s new LensBling is a product that could be emulated with 100% efficacy in just seconds, using nothing but a whiteout marker. However, thanks to the biases of customers who look down upon anything appearing even vaguely home made, pro photographers can instead spend $8.50 per lens.

Remember the Glif? It was probably the first Kickstarter project to take off, and of course it was an iPhone photography accessory. The original Glif probably went on to make its creators — Studio Neat –billionaires, and now it’s back, in the form of the Glif Plus. And what’s more, it comes with a bunch of bad new typography-based puns.

Custom molded headphones are — it turns out — pretty great. But what a pain to visit an audiologist and get silicone injected into your ear-holes. What if there was a fun, geeky way to do it yourself, in the comfort of your own home?

Thanks to SonoFit Eers, there is. I tested out the $300 PC250 headphones and found the fitting process to be kind of freaky and fun, and the results to be quite excellent. Read on to see just how they work, and how good they sound.

Incase’s Box Case for the iPhone is just that: a boxy, sharp-cornered rubber case with a brutalist minimalism that wouldn’t look out of place on London’s South Bank. And not only does the thing look awesome, it also offers quite a bit of protection thanks to all the extra rubber at the corners. It’s probably not a good idea to start tossing your iPhone on the floor, but if it does accidentally drop, then it might at least bounce to a safe end.

At last, here’s the Apple TV everyone is waiting for. Well, kinda. Bang & Olufsen’s new V1 is a 32 or 40-inch 1080p TV with a hole in the back where you can hide your little puck-sized Apple TV. This, combined with a remote that can be used to control Apple’s set-top box, means that the V1 is the closest you’ll get to an actual HDTV from Apple.

How do you like the idea of a solar-powered iPad keyboard case? Sounds pretty neat, right? What’s even better is that it comes from Logitech, a company that already makes some great iPad keyboards, so at least we know that the keyboard itself won’t be marred by mushiness.

If you have been thinking about dipping a photographic toe into the contrasty, blurred waters of Lensbaby’s lenses, and you happen to have $750 (but not $805) lying around the house with nothing to spend it on, then perhaps you might consider the Pro Effects Kit, a bundle of some of Lensbaby’s funnest gear, all in its own special bag.

I can’t be sure, as I was a brainless, sieve-memoried child at the time, but I’m pretty sure that our family’s first portable (B&W) TV had a screen that wasn’t much bigger than the screen of my iPad. Still, the crappy picture and bulbous, almost circular screen didn’t stop my brother and I laying belly-down on the end of our parent’s bed and watching Monkey roll up the screen in a fuzz of snow and bad reception.

Now I can relive those dark days by putting my iPad into the Handmade Natural Stained Wood Retro TV iPad Dock, an Etsy product whose name is as good as a description.

Take a look under your desk at that power-strip. My guess is that, even though it is probably overloaded with another power-strip plugged into it, there are at least a couple of spare sockets. It’s not that you don’t need them — it’s that you can use them thanks to all the awkward-shaped adapters jammed into it. If only you could bend and twist your power-strip to get better access to its hard-to-reach holes…

Remember the IKEA cardboard camera that popped up in a Milan press goody-bag last week? It turns out that it was actually a thing — IKEA is billing it as the “world’s cheapest digital camera,” and it should be going on sale in the Swedish giant’s labyrinthine stores soon.

Going camping this spring? And by “camping” I mean hiking or biking with your home on your back, and heading out into the wilderness. I don’t mean loading up your SUV and dragging a grill, a tent the size of a European house and enough ball games to keep an entire schools-worth of kids occupied for a month.

So, if you’re heading out under your own power, how about taking a stove that a) requires no liquid fuel, b) burns fast and hot and c) charges your iPhone? What’s not to like?

Who says iPad keyboards have to run on Bluetooth? Not MacAlly, that’s for sure. The iKey30 is a good ol’ USB keyboard which sports a 30-pin dock connector on the end of its cable, and comes with an almost ridiculous number of special function keys.

Jean Michel Jarre might be laying off the lasers, the lightshows and the spectacular outdoor concerts, but he’s not letting his 63 years catch up with him: he has simply switched his ostentatious attentions to high-end iPhone and iPad docks.

The latest is the AeroPad Two, a 30-pin dock connector-equipped behemoth of a home stereo which could probably shake your house to pieces.

Warning. I’m about to write about yet another iPhone camera rig adapter. I will continue to do this, over and over, until somebody makes a case which makes it easy for me to shoot photos with the iPad 3. If you want me to stop, then all you need to do is whip something up on Kickstarter.

Today’s adapter is the iSupport, a heavy-duty (yet light at 6 ounces) case which covers the iPhone 4/S and makes it a whole lot easier to use for shooting video.

Let’s play a quick game of word association. I’ll write a word, and you say whatever pops into your head (feel free to put on a Bluetooth headset and yell out your answers if you are in a public place — everyone will be totally impressed):

iPhone.

Curtain.

Wood.

Tripod.

iPad.

If your response to the last word — iPad — was “large-format camera,” then what we have ourselves here, ladies and gentlemen, is a segue. An awkward, forced segue that leads us right to this video showing just how a large format camera is made.

We’re nosey as anyone here at Cult of Mac. We are also complete nerds, which means that we’re always peeking into people’s bags at conferences, or checking out what gear people use.

And we figured that you all might be just as bad, so we figured we’d rip open our man bags, handbags and purses and show you what’s inside, and why we carry what we do.

We’ll be doing this periodically from time to time. This week, we’ll be checking out what’s usually in the three (!) separate gadget bags of Cult of Mac Deputy Editor John Brownlee, and he’ll be filling us in on what everything is and why he carries it.

Oh, man. Today is totally turning into Kickstarter day here on Cult of Mac. The latest accessory from everybody’s favorite crowd-funded idea factory is the Brydge, another keyboard case which will turn your iPad into a miniature MacBook Air-a-like.

This case has a little twist, though. Instead of offering an entire laptop-shaped shell into which you can drop the tablet, it has a clever hinge which holds the iPad and uses it as the entire lid of the clamshell case.

I don’t hate the iPad’s speaker as much as I used to. The rear-firing grille on the iPads 2 and 3 doesn’t sound that bad if you lay the iPad face down and let it blast its vibrations straight at you. But as most of us use the iPad to watch movies, or to listen to music while reading, this adequate-sounding speaker simply sends its sound off into the nothingness, hoping that a nearby wall might reflect a little of it back to your ears.

My current answer is a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker, but that’s battery powered. And heavy. The Amplifiear, on the other hand, is lightweight and requires no power.