A new gadget hopes to help you keep tabs on your important items before you lose them.
The O is a small, electronic tracker that pairs with an app on your iPhone. You place it on (or attach it to) something you don’t want to leave behind, and you’ll get alerts if you do. It’s kind of the same “You forgot your phone” feature that we were hoping to get out of the Apple Watch when it strays out of range of its paired handset, but these little pucks are cool, too.
Two things about me as a photographer: I hate tripods and I will never tell another photographer what they must carry with them. Both changed when the Pakpod arrived in the mail.
Weighing 15 ounces, the PakPod has legs that can quickly extend and lock in crazy asymmetrical positions with the turn of a single knob. Legs extend and lock with the push of a button or can be anchored to the ground or even the ocean floor with flip-out stakes at the feet.
When a man in Australia created a service where you could pay him to send glitter bombs to unsuspecting enemies, his story went viral and a crushing number of requests shut down his website.
Jesse Weinberg wonders if what worked for vengeance might also work with kindness.
From the 1st century to today, you could say the magnet is one component of technology that has stuck around.
With that bad pun out of the way (two if you count the headline), a Hong Kong company is using the simple magnet to make the charging of our smartphones easier and faster. The MagCable is a USB cable with a magnetic end that snaps into place thanks to an adapter tip that plugs into your charging port.
There is even a Lightning magnet adapter for iPhone and charging can be sped up by a button on the cable that shuts off data sync.
Some fashion and tech pundits have written that the Apple Watch is a little industrial looking or too geeky to appeal to women. Why can’t a woman be connected in feminine style?
A startup company says she absolutely can with a smart necklace that looks like a stunning piece of jewelry while equipped with a tiny projector that displays texts and calls onto the hand.
Well that didn’t take very long. A little over a week after Apple announces the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard accessories, a leather sleeve has emerged on Kickstarter to nicely pair your new 12.9-inch tablet with the stylus.
The new Pad & Pencil is a snazzy case for your iPad Pro made with high-grade, oil-tanned leather. It slips on and covers your entire iPad Pro, plus has an extending pocket on the side for safely storing your Apple Pencil.
Maybe the problem with your sleep is the noise. You actually might need a little.
A startup called SNOOZ has developed a white noise machine based on the premise that quiet rooms make our hearing acuter. The breeze-like sound coming from its machine will provide a gentle buffer between you and sudden startling sounds.
I have three Holga cameras sitting in a box with at least one still loaded with film. Plastic and unpredictable, the low-fi aesthetic makes portraits and landscapes look dreamy and from another time.
But film isn’t as easy or as cheap to develop, scan and print as it once was, so many photographers like me have watched the dust build up on these cameras while hoping a digital alternative would come along so we could relive the surprise and magic in a Holga picture.
The Hong Kong company that has been making Holga cameras since 1981 now has a digital offspring available on Kickstarter.
Photography equipment can be expensive, but there are plenty of items lying around the house that can help you get your shots. Why buy a pin-hole camera made of fine hardwood when you can make one out of an oatmeal container?
Designer Mattia Ciucciarelli wants to spare us the cost of an expensive tripod head for time-lapse and 360-degree videos with a device he calls the Hobie that attaches to the common kitchen timer.
David Tovey became homeless on the streets of London after a stroke and found salvation in an unlikely place – a disposable camera.
Tovey was invited to participate in an art project giving Londoners cameras to record life on the streets for a calendar now being sold on Kickstarter. He has had photos selected for the Cafe Art calendar project two years in a row.
Upcoming sci-fi shooter Rogue Invader looks like a massive HyperCard stack in glorious motion. Currently on Kickstarter to fund the last bit of development, the roguelike game is the brainchild of Squishy Games founder Nathan Rees, who’s been making games ever since he discovered the joys of MacPaint as a kid.
Pixeljam is no stranger to making iPhone and Mac games, but now the studio is taking on another challenge: transforming the way crowdfunding works to make it better for game developers and other creative types.
Company co-founder Miles Tillman describes the crowdfunding project as an “experiment” that’s an alternative to popular services like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Pixeljam’s new platform lets backers donate money just like the others, but prioritizes transparent communication, instant gratification and actually making the game ahead of crowdfunding staples like producing slick videos and stressing out over fundraising goals and deadlines.
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.
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.
It’s pretty difficult to use your smartphone while it’s standing vertically. That’s why when we place our phones on a dock or stand, we tend to neglect them until they’re done charging. Challenging this habit are the makers of the Tilt stand, who seem to think you should be able to use your phone while it’s getting juiced.
Google might have the Nest Learning Thermostat, but Tim Cook’s got a smart shower, thanks to a recent investment by the Apple CEO in a new, environmentally friendly shower company.
And what kind of boss would he be if he didn’t test the next-gen washing solution as an option for Apple employees?
There are fertility deities, dances, stones, herbs and masks. Every culture has rites and rituals that try to improve the chances of a woman getting pregnant.
Tech culture, too, tries to influence the forces of fertility with gadgets and smartphone apps to create ovulation calculators, period calendars and temperature trackers. But you still need the discipline of consistent record keeping for them to work.
The startup company, YONO Labs, has developed an ear piece that records BBT, Basal Body Temperature, and other body and hormonal symptoms while a woman sleeps. When she wakes, the device gets docked and the data gets stored in an iOS or Android app for your smartphone.
What are the artifacts that define America’s greatest moments? Two are the original Declaration of Independence and the Star-Spangled Banner that inspired the Francis Scott Key song.
If you see those in the top three, the third might be the suit Neil Armstrong wore when he stepped onto the moon’s surface.
While the suit was constructed to make it to the moon and back, it was not built to last forever. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is raising money for a major restoration project to get the Armstrong suit ready for public display on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 2019.
We hope that the designer of this cute Apple Watch stand doesn’t get an adorable little cease-and-desist letter in the mail.
The WatchMe stand bears an uncanny resemblance to the stars of some despicable memes scattered across the Internet like salt, but it isn’t a complete rip-off. They don’t have arms, after all. And luckily, the Apple Watch, which the stand wears like a monocle, isn’t round.
So it’s a toss-up, really.
The E1 camera is so small, there is barely any room on the body for its two-character name.
This is only a slight exaggeration for the slight camera with large ambitions and an impressive list of specs that could make it legitimate competition for GoPro, the reigning king of the Point of View camera market.
Startup camera company Z says its E1 is the world’s smallest Micro Four Thirds 4K video camera with interchangeable lenses.
When Apple created the MagSafe power connector for its highly desirable line of MacBooks back in 2006, the world changed. Gone were the days of tripping over your power adapter cord and pulling your entire MacBook down onto a cold, uncaring floor.
These days, your iPhone and iPad have a similar problem, with a Lightning cable that connects so securely to the power port that if you happen to walk by and trip on the cable, you’re gonna fling that oh-so-precious device right to the ground, dashing its poor little silicon brains out.
This Kickstarter project, ZNAPS, aims to fix this design nightmare with a magnetic Lightning cable adapter that will transform the way you charge your Apple mobile devices, all for an excitingly low price of $9.
It took a little while for investors to see the light, so to speak. Corey Egan and Swapril Bora developed a smartphone controlled LED light bulb, but needed two crowd-funding campaigns, prize money from winning new product contests they had socked away and a deal from Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban before the ilumi smart bulb could enter the market.
Tens of thousands of bulbs have sold in the year they’ve been in production. It won’t take quite so long for the second generation to begin lighting homes and commercial spaces.
With 20 days to go on Kickstarter, ilumi far exceeded its $50,000 goal with a newly designed bulb that includes new experiences – like turning it on and off the shake of your phone – and a new antenna that will pick up commands from 150 feet away.
The iPhone is the gold standard for modern design – and that sometimes gets in the way of some of its amazing functions.
Take photo and video. Even the most serious photographers and filmmakers can create high art with an iPhone, but conventional cameras, no matter how clunky they seem today, were designed with grip and stability that is missing from an iPhone.
A startup company has created an iPhone 6 case that converts the iPhone into a retro-looking handheld movie camera, complete with cinematic lenses, a viewfinder, film trigger and a mount for mics and lights.
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 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.