It’s a girl! Country singer Jake Owen and wife Lacey Buchanan welcomed their first child, Olive Pearl Owen, on Thanksgiving day in Nashville, Tenn. She is named after Owen’s grandmother. Owen shared a photo of the newest addition to the family on Twitter. He also confirmed the news to multiple publications. “Lacey and I are so excited to start our own family,” Owen told People magazine. “We are looking forward to teaching Pearl everything we learned from our parents and also learning from her.”
Never imagine you’d see Walmart workers striking against their employer? Now you can, using the Twitter hashtag “#walmartstrikers,” a phrase accompanying many photos tweeted out by the protesters during the Black Friday protests.
Walmart doesn’t appear overly concerned. In a Friday morning press release, the retail giant said planned protests haven’t affected the company’s Black Friday plans so far:
“Only 26 protests occurred at stores last night and many of them did not include any Walmart associates,” Bill Simon, Walmart U.S. president and chief executive officer said in the release. “We estimate that less than 50 associates participated in the protest nationwide. In fact, this year, roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year.”
Black Friday is here and the deals are smokin’! Get out your shopping lists and hop on over to some of our favorite gadget destinations to take advantage of limited time offers. In addition to gadgets below and more like them on the sites keep these deals in mind:
Amazon.com: Lightening deals continue to change regularly. But already witnessed were things like 53% off the GolfBuddy and 73% off a Canon PIXMA printer. Click on the homepage Black Friday banner to see the current deals.
MacMall: 60 hours of Black Friday meaning you have the weekend to shop and save. Deals include 36% off an OtterBox Defender case for iPad Mini and $149 off a 11.6” MacBook Air.
Think Geek: Buy 1 get one 50% off on all mugs, t-shirts and robes. Up to 60% off on a variety of products, including some below.
Brookstone: Special free items included with select products in addition to discounts. For example get a free Neck & Shoulder Pro Massager when buying a uSqueez App Foot Massager.
Geeks.com: Free shipping on orders over $79.99 and up to 70% off hundreds of items.
Also, to help you stay on top of what is on sale during the busy shopping season visit our “Gadget Deals” page.
It’s awesome what robots can do these days. They’ve certainly come a long way from the first robots that people put together many, many decades ago.
Case in point? The U.S. Navy’s robot that can dance to PSY’s Gangnam Style and that sporty robot that can play ping pong.
The latest one to join this fray of over-achieving robots is the BFS-Auto book scanner that can flip through and scan 250 pages in sixty seconds. It would take a human with a machine far more longer to be able to achieve the same thing. Using lasers to help identify the curvature of the pages, it’s able to scan at the optimal time, and restore pages to their natural flat state, correcting optical distortion.
The BFS-Auto was created by researchers in Japan in a time when digitizing documents has become common practice for many firms and institutions.
While it’s crazily flipping through the pages, the machine can also capture two high resolution shots of each page at 400 ppi.
Though divided by the infamous prequels, it’s hard for any Star Wars fan not to get excited for the holiday season. Thanks to Lucas’ marketing efforts, there are more Star Wars gift ideas than there are stars…in that galaxy far, far away. Here are some of the best ways to put a Wookiee-sized smile on your giftee’s face. More »
While it was discovered that Google’s latest Nexus 4 smartphone does, in fact, have an LTE chip on the inside, the phone’s radios don’t cover the wide deployment of most LTE bands, resulting in unhappy users who yearn for faster downloads while on the go. However, a simple tweak has been discovered that allows Canadian users to take advantage of LTE on the Nexus 4.
Some hackers on the XDA Developers forum ended up finding a workaround that allows the Nexus 4 to use LTE in Canada using TELUS and Rogers networks. It turns out the Nexus 4 features unofficial support for LTE Band 4, which runs at 1700MHz and 2100MHz. However, it won’t work in the US, since most of the major carriers use alternate bands.
Then again, AT&T is licensed to operate on Band 4, and AT&T has said in the past that they plan to utilize Band 4 for its LTE networks, but there’s zero word on when and where that will happen. So far, users have had no luck trying to get LTE to work in AT&T’s network and other US carriers. It seems hackers and tweakers will have a hard time with this one.
However, T-Mobile plans to launch LTE on Band 4 within the year, and T-Mobile also happens to be the only carrier to partner with Google on the launch of the Nexus 4. What does this mean? Well, It’s still unlikely we’ll see official LTE support for the Nexus 4 on certain networks. Google doesn’t intend for the Nexus 4 to be an LTE device, and despite the simple tweak to enable LTE in Canada, the phone still doesn’t have all the necessary hardware for a reliable LTE experience.
The musician, entrepeneuer, and Intel Creative Director known as Will.i.am has come forth with an accessory for the iPhone that he says will redefine what the device is used for. With this camera add-on, part of the new “i.am+” brand name, you’ll be able to get much higher-quality photos than ever before, all while using the iPhone’s standard iOS interface from Apple. In other words, it’ll be an iOS Samsung Galaxy Camera – sort of.
The producer and head honcho of the Black Eyed Peas was deliberately vague about the accessory before it makes its global debut next week. This device will fit around the iPhone (iPhone 4 and 5, so he says), making it a “genius-phone.” We must assume that this simply meant it’ll be working as a “genius mobile camera”, as he went on to note with The Daily Telegraph that the accessory will do the following:
“We have our own sensor and a better flash [than the standard iPhone hardware.] You dock your phone into our device and it turns your smartphone into a genius-phone. We take over the camera.” – Will.i.am
The camera will allow you, the user, a bit of internet “digital real-estate” with a web address connected to the soon to be revealed “i.am” webspace. You’ll be working with “http://www.i.am/Will” for example, with users of all i.am+ accessories being given their own address. At the moment all you’ll see there is a “coming soon” notification, mind you.
The full accessory lineup – or at least this one camera add-on – will be revealed next week in London where it’ll be sold exclusively at Selfridges stores across Europe. We must, again, assume that the accessory line will expand past this high-end store in the near future. The first accessory will be sold starting in early December.
A couple days ago, 4A Games developer Oles Shishkovtsov had some fighting words for Nintendo’s new Wii U gaming console. He simply said that the new console has a “horrible, slow CPU.” He was pretty straightforward in his comment obviously, but THQ‘s Huw Beynon — who works full time as a representative of 4A Games — says that Shishkovtsov’s comment didn’t tell the full story necessarily.
Beynon says that the Wii U, indeed, “isn’t as fast as some of the other consoles out there”, and Metro: Last Light is “a very CPU intensive game.” However, Beynon says that “lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform.” He thinks that Shishkovtsov’s opinion of the Wii U’s CPU had to do with the way that the game’s engine was built, making it more difficult to develop the game on the Wii U.
Beynon then says the game could have been ported to iPad if 4A Games had wanted it to be, but he says that every console version stretches the developer’s resources ever so much, and it turns out 4A’s resources are stretched pretty far as it is with the three versions of Metro: Last Light that are planned.
However, Gustav Halling, a game developer at DICE — makers of the Battlefield series, says that he’s been hearing the same things from his industry contacts about the Wii U’s slow CPU, saying that while the GPU and RAM can handle shaders/textures, things like physics and gameplay run on the CPU, and that can create a potential problem in the future. However, Halling notes that Wii U owners shouldn’t have anything to worry about, since the new console will still have plenty of great games released for it.
Google is bringing the Nexus 4 to another carrier in the UK, expanding availability to Three after debuting the device with O2 as its initial partner in that country. The Android 4.2-powered smartphone will be available starting December 13 on Three, either on a £35 per month contract with an upfront cost of just £29 on the One Plan (unlimited data and high on-network text and talk limits, but with a two-year contract), or pre-paid for £399.99.
The added carrier partner comes just one month after the Nexus 4′s official launch, which saw quick sell-outs in the UK and the rest of the world. Google’s latest smartphone seems to be experiencing either very high demand, very short supply, or a combination of both (although new reports claim shipping times have improved), so it’s interesting to see Google expand availability so quickly.
The Nexus 4 should offer fairly good speeds on Three’s DS-HSDPA network, but the hack revealed this morning that allows users to manually enable LTE on the device will do Three customers no good. Even when Three’s planned 1800MHz LTE network begins to roll out, it won’t be compatible with the Nexus 4′s AWS LTE band support. Of course, that feature’s still not technically even official, and the phone is still among the best options for Android devices out there. The interesting thing will be to see how many people opt to buy through carriers, versus getting cheaper outright prices direct through Google and bringing it to the network of their choice.
My sister’s baby crawls around so much that the floor looks infinitely cleaner and shinier by the time she’s all crawled out.
Someone else must’ve apparently noticed this with their own babies, because why else would they come up with something as silly and amusing as the Baby Mop romper?
It looks just like a regular onesie at first glance, but check out the front and you’ll see that it has some super-absorbent cleaning pads attached in strategic locations. Set your baby on the floor dressed in this romper and get ready to have your floors buffed and polished, baby-style.
I mean, why waste all that free baby labor, right?
All kidding aside, this would make a fun present for baby showers and will definitely elicit a whole lot of laughs from your family and friends.
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