Fabric markers give a black and white dress new life.
(Credit: Sander Marsman)
(Credit: Sander Marsman)Normally, it would be contraindicated to take a marker to your dress. Not so with Color-in-Clothing, which you’ll actually want to mark up. That’s the way you give it color and infuse …
Put away your smudgycams and break out your wallets, LG’s Viewty II has been given the full studio photo treatment as part of an unveiling at LG’s official blog. Dubbed the Smart, the GC900 is just 12.4 mm thick (under a half-inch), packing a 3-inch touchscreen on its face and of course that 8 megapixel camera on the back, confirmed to be able to capture video at 720 x 480 and geotag photos using the integrated A-GPS receiver. WLAN and HSDPA are also confirmed, but that’s about all the info LG is setting in stone at the moment — not that we didn’t already know everything about it.
Update: Oops! Looks like LG pulled the information — good thing you looked here first.
[Via Phone Arena]
Gallery: LG GC900 Smart
Filed under: Cellphones
LG’s GC900 Viewty II gets Smart, gets official originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Park Tool Cable Stretcher is a uni-tasker, but its single job appears to be so helpful that we’ll let it through.
The stretcher is a one handed (once set up) device with which to fit and adjust gear and brake cables on your bike. Fixie users, who have neither of these heathen features on their pristine machines, can stop reading now.
If you are anything like me, you tend to grab any tool at hand to do a job, even if it is the wrong one. I once ruined a neighbor’s needle-nosed pliers when tightening spokes to re-true a wheel, for example, and snapped an electrical screwdriver putting up shelves. And of course, kitchen shears are the ideal tool for stripping electrical cables.
So my usual MO when fixing brakes and gears is to use a pair of pliers and somehow try to tighten the nut or screw one-handed. The Cable Stretcher instead locks on to the end of the cable while providing a handy lever to pull the cable away from the fixing. Ingenious, and I’m surprised I have never seen one before.
These things have clearly been around for a while but, as the summer fast approaches, I thought it would be worth pointing out as the fair-weather cyclists get back on the road. Steel with chrome plate and padded handles, $40.
Incidentally, this reminds me of an upcoming project: I’m going to find an old beater racing bike and fix it up into a fixie — complete with top tube pad and playing card in the spokes (kidding on the last two). Any advice would be appreciated. I’ll make a full start to the project when I find the frame, and post pictures here.
Product page [Park Tool via Toolmonger]
We’d all but forgotten that National Geographic runs a little phone business on the side through a retailer partner, but yeah, it does — and after a couple years of forgettable hardware, things are starting to get interesting. The idea with these guys has always been to offer SIM cards that offer global roaming at a price that has at least a fighting chance of not bankrupting you, but the problem is that with a traditional phone, you’ve got to replace your regular SIM card while you’re using it; dual-SIM phones exist in bountiful numbers outside the US, but finding a domestic model is nigh impossible. The new Duet D888 option let’s you mix up one of Cellular Abroad’s roaming SIM along with a second of your own, so theoretically, you could make this your primary phone if you do a lot of traveling and hate breaking your fingernails (or your will to live) every time you want to swap cards between phones. As far as we can tell, the D888 lacks GSM 850 — so don’t expect stellar reception stateside — but it could be enough to get you by between trips to Madagascar.
[Via CNET]
Filed under: Cellphones
Dual-SIM phone launches in the US courtesy of… National Geographic originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Today’s winner of the award for tortuously squeezing a reference to the poor economy into a press release is Drop Stop. It begins like this:
With the continued economic downturn but affordable gas, road travel is the expected mode of choice for vacationing families this upcoming season.
How can Drop Stop save you? By selling you a couple of neoprene strips for $20. They squoosh between seat-squab and center console and catch anything from keys to cellphones to greasy French Fries. The moral argument against this pointless device is that if you are driving a car, you should be driving — not eating or chatting on the phone or digging out loose change (all examples in the suitably cheesy infomercial on the site).
But there is another, more practical argument against the Drop Stop — What if you, you know, drop things on the other side of the car, between the seat and the door? In the words of the internet meme: “FAIL”.
Product page [Drop Stop. Thanks, Renee!]
You know the situation. You’re away on vacation and you think “why don’t I send a postcard?” You find a suitably tacky specimen and then try to track down a stamp, discovering that you have to visit the tobacconist to buy one, and the tobacconists are closed today. Finally, the card bought, filled out and stamped, you put it in a postbox to commence its six-week odyssey through the foreign postal system.
It’s so World 1.0, right? What we need is a way to snap a picture and have it magically turn up on Aunt Flo’s doormat. This is what SnapShot Photo does. The iPhone application accesses your film roll (so you can even use it on an iPod Touch) — you choose a photo, add a message and an address and hit send. A few days later, a printed postcard drops through the letterbox.
We consider this to be the spiritual successor to the Polaroid, especially as Polaroid itself has done such a bad job of things. Snapshot looks expensive to begin with, but if you figure in the cost of postage as well as the cost of the printing, it comes out similar to the price of a postcard and stamp.
The $5 app comes with three credits, and more can be bought for between $1 and $2, depending on how many you buy at once. Sending to US addresses costs one credit. International (ie. outside the US) costs two credits. It doesn’t matter where you are sending from, just where you are sending to.
I will be trying the application out — it looks like a lot of fun. Sadly, I will have to take some new pictures — the terms of service agreement manages to completely exclude the entire collection of photos on my iPod: “no obscenity, pornography, or illegal content is allowed.”
Product page [iTunes]
Product page [SnapCard]
While we broke the news of the ZuneHD to the world as we did the original, we have no way to verify the authenticity of this new image originating at Windows Mobile Power User and now trotting itself around the Intersphere fueled by the adrenaline of fanboy fantasies. We’ve been skeptically going over it pixel-by-pixel (what is that on the back? A camera, a screw-hole?) as this is the notorious period that always follows a product leak when dubious PhotoShops and fanart begins flooding our tips box. Fortunately, Zunited’s sources have stepped up with an assertion that the pic is in fact an authentic ZuneHD. So let’s turn an eye to the specs, the glorious, almost absurdly high-end specs that accompany the picture. Zunited’s sources won’t touch these and we’re keeping them at arm’s length for now under the it’s too-good-to-be-true heading. Click through to see what we mean.
[Via Zunited]
Continue reading Another ZuneHD render surfaces, fanboy specs too?
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Another ZuneHD render surfaces, fanboy specs too? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Argue all you like about the new PC ads, none of your whining will be as effective in debunking Microsoft’s obfuscation than this spoof ad from Mike’s Tech Shop.
Yes, Microsoft is spending money advertising other companies’ hardware instead of its own software. Yes, it is deliberately picking cheap, plasticky hardware that has one specification in common with an otherwise way better Mac. But all the moaning is just making the message stronger. This video, however, is spot-on, showing up the Microsoft ad-campaign for the nonsense it is.
Apple fanboy accusations — commence.
Laptop Hunters: Homeless Frank [YouTube via ★ via Jim Dalrymple]
If you're willing to order online, you can score prescription eyeglasses for peanuts.
(Credit: Goggles4U)
If you have the courage to look closely at my photo, you’ll notice I wear glasses. The pair in that pic cost me a few hundred dollars–fairly typical, right? Maybe not: The pair I’m wearing right now set me back $21.85–frames, lenses, and shipping.
Yes, they’re prescription. Yes, they have the all-important antiglare coating. And, no, they’re not ugly plastic “cheaters” like they sell at the dollar store. In fact, they’re stylish metal-alloy frames with a blue coating (to match my eyes, ahem).
I scored this deal from Zenni Optical, one of several Web outlets that sells prescription eyeglasses on the cheap–the really, really cheap.
Other popular stores for four-eyes include 39 Dollar Glasses, Goggles4U, and Optical4Less. Although ordering glasses online has its pitfalls, I think the savings greatly outweigh the risks.
Zenni, the only company I’ve tried thus far, offers a wide selection of frames, with prices ranging from $8-19, lenses included. All you need is your current prescription, which you can get from your optometrist.
…
Originally posted at The Cheapskate
The MSI Wind flavored Hackintosh has come one step closer to working like a real Mac — without the build quality and the price-tag, of course.
The biggest problem with getting OS X to run on third party hardware is drivers — the exact same trouble you have with a Windows machine, in fact. There’s a reason that Macs “just work” — it’s because Apple controls hardware and software and so can make sure everything plays nice.
So far, drivers have been found, hacked or written for most of the Wind hardware. The webcam works, Wi-Fi works, as does ethernet. You can even tweak the function keys to act as they do on the Mac, controlling volume and iTunes directly.
The last hurdle has been sound. The mic, both built in and the line-in jack, have remained resolutely dead, and the only way to get the sound out of anywhere except the tinny internal speakers was with a clunky workaround.
Now, the VoodooProjects team has released a version of its driver that makes everything work. The speakers even switch off automatically when you plug in the headphones. Or, to be strictly accurate, it should make everything work. I gat nothing, but my system is pretty highly hacked so anything could be interfering. Others over at the MSI Wind forums have had more luck and report a clean bill of health. If you have a Wind hackintosh, trying this can’t hurt — just remember to back up the original AppleHDA.kext in case things go wrong. Full instructions are included in the forum post. Good luck!
UPDATE: After more tinkering, I have the headphone jack working, complete with auto switching when I plug it in. I deleted the Azalia kernel extensions from the extensions folder and rebooted. If you don’t understand what I just said, you shouldn’t be digging around in that folder. The mic jack and built-in mic are still dead, although at least they now show up in the "input" section of the Sound System Preference.
Update: VoodooHDA 0.2.2 beta posted [MSI Wind Forums]
VoodooHDA 0.2.2 [VoodooProjects Forum]
Project page [Google Code]
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