When it comes to preparing a Thanksgiving turkey, the focus these days seems to be on what ridiculous things you can stuff inside. And the Turducken, which sees the bird stuffed with a duck-stuffed chicken, might have met its match with the Turtwinkie. More »
Welcome to the Engadget holiday gift guide! Picking presents for friends and loved ones is never a simple task, and with thousands of options for each category, buying technology can be an especially frustrating experience. We’re here to help. Below you’ll find today’s bevy of curated picks, and you can head back to our hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season. And don’t forget to enter our giveaway — leave a comment for a chance to nab AT&T’s LG Optimus G.
Sure, Ultrabooks and Windows 8 tablets are flashy gift options, but it’s extras like the ones found here that really make ’em sing. Whether it’s a desktop or portable storage solution, a smart thermostat or a secondary camera for those more experimental shots, we’ve got you covered. This collection of high-tech add-ons will surely snag the attention of anyone on your holiday shopping list, so mosey on past the break to start perusing.
Continue reading Engadget holiday gift guide 2012: accessories
When I upgraded to the iPhone 5, I didn’t really think about how much of a pain it would be to find charging cables that fit Apple’s new Lightning connector. Sure, there are more and more products hitting the market these days, and I carry around the Lightning-to-30-pin-adapter in my bag, but I really like the idea of the Nomad Cable, a tiny Lightning-to-USB cable you can carry around on your keychain.
Invented by Chicago product designers Kegan & Roberto, the idea is simple but brilliant. The Nomad is a stubby little cable that’s got a USB connector on one end and an 8-pin Lightning connector on the other. The USB end has a special cap that slips onto your keychain. Given the size of the original iPod 30-pin dock connector, it might not have been too practical to carry one on your keychain at all times, but the new connector is small enough that such a cable is not much bigger than a key.
The 3″ long Nomad Cable is just long enough that you can plug your iPhone 5, iPad Mini, 4th gen iPad, 5th gen iPod Touch, or 7th gen iPod nano directly into your computer for charging or syncing. Plus. the cable has enough flex in it to deal with USB ports at just about any angle.
Overall, I think the Nomad Cable is a really convenient and inexpensive way to make sure you can juice up your latest Apple gadgets anywhere you go. While a small number of very early backers were able to grab one for as little as $5(USD), the current wave that’s up for pre-order is going for $15 – which I still think is reasonable. If you think it’ll come in handy, head on over to Kickstarter and place your pre-order for February 2013 delivery. I already did.
Work with a financial advisor who works with more money than you have. There are financial advisors, estate-planning attorneys and trust officers who have worked with $100,000,000 or more. The scorekeeper for your local bowling league is not one of them.
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Our friends over at TechBargains.com compiled a list of daily deals and we wanted to share them to help you save money.
Keep in mind that as with any true deal, the products are limited quantity and can sell out quickly – so don’t hesitate to check them out now. Also if you’re looking to buy a product from a specific store, you save money with updated and verified coupon codes here.
Computers & Peripherals:
Home Entertainment:
Personal Electronics:
The folks at AERIAL7 have come through with a lovely pair of over-ear headphones in the TANK, here in their newest iteration bringing you a completely do-it-yourself aesthetic. The DIY TANK model comes in all white with a set of materials on the surface that allow for great connections with markets, paint, ink, and everything in-between. Got an artist in the family that also likes to customize everything they own? This might be just the ticket.
These headphones provide a sound quality that’s certainly reflective of the price at $100 USD – 57mm drivers with frequency response between 5-20KHz and sensitivity at 108 +/- 3dB at 1KHz. In other words, they sound great for your average music lover. Also included in the package is a 1 meter long coiled standard headphone jack cable that extends up to 2.5m, a 1.2m light weight cable with a microphone for your smartphone, and a 3.5mm – 6.3mm (1/4″) adapter to plug in on your much more massive equipment.
These headphones are rather adjustable with folding-in action for storage, flip-up phones so you can listen in with one ear along, and thick earphone covers so you’re not hearing all sorts of outside forces when you’re trying to concentrate on your favorite track. The headband also extends for multiple head sizes – even if you’ve got a gigantic melon.
As these headphones are entirely white before you get to coloring them in, the package includes a lovely silky sack to carry the phones (and your cords) around in. Not just for protection against the elements and keeping your bits all together, but to stop the dirt in your backpack from messing up your phones soon-to-be-lovely aesthetics. To color the phones you get three rather generous permanent markers in the box: red, blue, and black. I say generous because they’re not your standard throwaway “10 minutes and over” sorts of crap markers, they’ve got quite a bit of juice in them.
The actual application process you’ll go through with these phones is pretty decent. There’s no surface here that doesn’t readily accept the markets included in the package, and aside from the same “just let it dry for a second” caution you’ll need to pay attention to no matter what surface you’re working with, you’ll find the art portion of this adventure to be entirely enjoyable. We’ve opted for a rather simple set of designs on the phones we’ve got here thus far, hitting each of the different materials and all angles to make sure we’ve got no dead-zones on the hardware – good news: it’s all good!
AERIAL7 TANK DIY over-ear headphones Review is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
SAKE, Congo — Congo’s president has suspended the army’s chief of staff, following the publication of a United Nations report which reveals that Gen. Gabriel Amisi oversaw a criminal network selling arms to rebels in the country’s troubled east.
The firing of the general indicates that Congo is finally getting tough on its notoriously dysfunctional and internally divided army. It comes as an eight-month-old rebel group, made up of soldiers who defected from the army, pushed beyond Goma, the bustling regional capital of eastern Congo, which fell to the fighters earlier this week.
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One thing I’ve learned producing events for Improv Everywhere over the past decade is that if I give our participants creative license, they’ll come up with choices that are far better than the ones I could brainstorm sitting in front of a blank Google Doc.
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In 2008, I dropped my theoretical physicist’s chalkboard and began developing the Global Village Construction Set — an open source, collaborative project. Today, we are showing the results that come from having zero competitive waste. Our approach is collaborative. Our business model is helping others replicate our enterprise.
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LOS ANGELES — Deborah Raffin, an actress who ran a successful audiobook company with the help of her celebrity friends, has died. She was 59.
Raffin died Wednesday of leukemia at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, her brother, William, told the Los Angeles Times ( ). She was diagnosed with the blood cancer about a year ago. http://lat.ms/R0q9NM
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