Hasta La Gadget!

This one is more for the life-hacking crowd than the gadget-loving crowd, but the simplicity, ingenuity and plain good-looks of this little cable management hack make it worth showing off. It also plays right into my cable-tidying obsession, meaning I couldn’t not post it.

This binder-clip cable-saver comes from David Rudolf Bakker in the Netherlands, and is something you could replicate right now just by rummaging in the junk drawer. The clips clamp onto the edge of your desk and you thread power, ethernet and USB cables through the fold-back loops by disconnecting them temporarily from the clip body. That’s it: your cable will never escape down the back of the desk again, and will instead be held patiently at the ready to be plugged into you notebook. Those wire loops are even big enough that the cable itself won’t snag as it is pulled through.

I don’t have any clips, having given up on paper some years ago, but I do have cables. Lots and lots of snaky, tangled cables. I shall visit the stationery store today.

No more USB cables behind your desk for losses [Lifehacking via Lifehacker]

See Also:

• Mysterious Cable-Tidy Hawked by Superheroes

My mother told me that it’s rude to point. Then again, we’re English, so pretty much everything is considered to be rude or inconsiderate to somebody. As a nation, we are uptight except when drunk. The 8-Bit Hanger, then, should never be sold in Blighty, as these pixelated pointy fingers would be the equivalent of shouting filthy abuse at your own parents.

In more balanced parts of the world, though, these cute little hooks are the perfect retro-styled hanger for pretty much any part of the house, from bags of onions in the kitchen to towels in the bathroom. The MDF and acrylic hangers come equipped with a permanently attached screw and measure 3 x 2.8 x 0.6-inches.

Actually, maybe these should be brought to England, and lined up in hallways across the nation as the perfect security device: Any well brought-up burglar would drop his swag-bag immediately upon seeing them and cower in shame at the mean accusatory tone of these jagged digits. $20 each.

8-Bit Hanger [Meninos via Noquedanblogs]

Take everything you thought you knew about multitouch and throw it out. Okay, keep the Minority Report stuff, but throw everything else out. What we’re looking at here is a 22 megapixel display, stitched together from the output of no less than 28 projectors (7,168 x 3,072 total resolution), which just happens to respond to touch-like input in a fashion even Tom Cruise would find fascinating. You don’t have to actually touch the wall, floor-mounted cameras pick up your gestures in 2D space and a 30-node computer setup crunches all the computational and visual data to deliver some buttery smooth user interaction. For demo purposes, the makers of this system grabbed a 13.3 gigapixel image of Tromso and took it for a hand-controlled spin. See the mesmerizing show on video after the break.

Continue reading Tromso students put together the best interactive display wall we’ve seen yet (video)

Tromso students put together the best interactive display wall we’ve seen yet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Guitarbud from PRS is little more than a cable that takes the output from the jack of an electric guitar and splits it to headphones and an iPhone. But this simple accessory, if done right, could offer almost endless possibilities for guitarists.

It all depends on which app you pump the sound into. The built-in voice-memo recorder will do if all you want is to record your music and mail it off to friends, but there turns out to be a slew of purpose-made guitar apps in the iTunes Store, from multi-track recorders to PRS’ own JamAmp software which lets you play along, via an amp-simulator, with backing tracks. In short, if you are a guitarist and you have an iPhone, you should probably have something like a Guitarbud.

Something like the Guitarbud, but not the actual Guitarbud itself. The problem start with the price: $30 for a splitter cable is clearly too much. Then there is the quality. Buyer reviews over at the Musician’s Friend store are almost unanimously bad, citing poor build quality (”it feels like it’s the $2 cord that you get when you buy a cheap guitar package”), crackling, non-shielded audio and problems getting anything other than a weak signal into the phone.

It’s a shame, as the possibilities are exciting, especially with the added power and size of the upcoming iPad. Based on the reviews, we’d hold off right now, and maybe even concoct our own solution from better hardware. But the idea of this little widget is enough to make me think about taking up the guitar again.

Guitarbud [PRS via Mac OSx86]

See Also:

• Wired 12.01: The 100-Megabit Guitar
• Moog Guitar Model E-1
• Let There Be Rock: Digital Guitar Better Than The Real Thing …
• Turn Your iPhone Into an Electric Guitar With iShred

Instapaper Pro, our favorite read-later iPhone application here at Gadget Lab, will be available for the iPad on day one. Over at the Instapaper blog, developer Marco Arment has posted screenshots and a great explanation of the problems facing developers without access to an actual, physical iPad.

Instapaper Pro for iPad will be a universal app, a bundle containing code for both the iPad and iPhone. This means that, if the app makes it through Apple’s approval channels, current Instapaper users will never have to see a pixel-doubled version, which “sucked, and it was completely unusable by my standards,” according to Arment.

Being a simple reading application, there aren’t many differences in the interface, which is mostly just text and pictures after all. Arment was wary of making changes without being able to see them in action: “I didn’t want to commit to any huge risks because I don’t have an iPad to test them on,” he says.

The one big change is the horizontal folder view, above. All it does is expose the folders into which your articles are organized (you knew Instapaper has folders, right?), but it looks to be a lot easier and more obvious to use.

Arment plans on making more tweaks when he has an iPad in his hands, but we’re very pleased he decided to go ahead with making an untested Instapaper available at launch. We feel exactly the same way as him about the app: “an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.”

Preview: Instapaper on iPad [Instapaper Blog]

See Also:

• Instapaper Update Adds Pagination, Dictionary and Browser
• New, Improved Instapaper for Kindle
• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• 5 Apps We Can't Wait to See on the iPad