It’s true, we don’t review quite as many tablets around here as we used to, but that doesn’t mean slates have gone the way of the dodo. Microsoft’s new Surface 3 is as much a budget PC as it is an iPad competitor, while Dell’s sleek Venue 8 7000 remi…
Streaming services that use a cable TV subscription have an annoying wrinkle, where sometimes the provider can block them from working in places for apparently no reason at all. For Comcast customers that was the case for HBO Go and Showtime on Amazo…
Play Through the Fire and Flames literally through fire and flames with the Sound Torch. It’s a bluetooth speaker with a built-in burner on top, which emits flames that are synchronized with what’s playing.
The Sound Torch can play audio for up to 12 hours per charge, while its lighter fluid container holds up to 4 hours worth of fluid. Its flamethrowing feature works like a flame tube, where the sound coming from the speaker affects the amount of flammable gas escaping through the perforations. You can see examples of how Sound Torch’s fire looks like with different types of music on its YouTube channel.
The speaker will also have an app that will let you modify the Sound Torch’s burner. For instance, you’ll be able to keep the flames steady regardless of the music, adjust the height of the flames or even pick from fire templates. You’ll also be able to link and manage up to seven Sound Torches using the app. Alternatively, you can plug in an audio source via the 3.5mm input behind each Sound Torch.
As a safety precaution, the Sound Torch will automatically turn off its burner if it’s knocked down or if it reaches a certain temperature threshold. It will also shut off completely if it’s not paired with any device.
Pledge at least ~$159 (USD) on Kickstarter to receive a Sound Torch as a reward.
Smartwatch maker Pebble seems to be in some trouble. According to sources close to the company, the company is having trouble maintaining its growth and has turned to a Silicon Valley bank for a $5 million loan and $5 million line of credit. Valley VCs have been turning down the company’s requests for new capital. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky offered no comment. The company, which… Read More
It was first reported a couple of months back that multiple online streaming companies were engaged in a battle of sorts to win the exclusive streaming rights to NBC’s Seinfeld, a re-run favorite, and one of the most popular comedy shows to come out of NBC. Hulu later confirmed that it had acquired rights to become the exclusive online streaming home of Seinfeld and today it confirmed when all nine seasons will be available for on-demand viewing.
Seinfeld re-reruns aired to this day even though it has nearly been a decade since the show’s final episode aired. It’s considered to be right up there with Friends, another re-run darling, which is currently exclusive to Netflix.
It goes without saying that Seinfeld has played a major role in TV history and it continues to draw in new viewers even today. Despite having first heard of the show a few years back even I started watching it just a couple of months ago, and was so taken with it that I finished all nine seasons in just a few weeks.
Existing fans and those who would like to check out what’s all the fuss about this show can watch Seinfeld on Hulu from June 24th. All seasons will be available for on-demand streaming. If subscribing to Hulu is not your thing, you can always get the DVD box set.
Watch Seinfeld On Hulu Starting June 24th , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use. 
A recent report claimed that Spotify is going to make a move into online video as it seeks to fend off competition from the likes of Tidal and Apple’s upcoming music streaming service. The company doesn’t want its business to revolve around just music and today it made the formal announcement, Spotify does video now. The announcement was made at an event that Spotify conducted today in New York City.
To provide video content Spotify has teamed up with various partners such as Vice NEWS, Slate, NBC, BBC, ABC, Comedy Central, MTV, E!, Team Coco, Adult Swim, Elite Daily, TED, CBS Radio, PRX, multiple Conde Nast brands and many others.
According to Spotify these content partners are going to bring clips from their popular programs and shows within the app, for example Comedy Central will serve clips from its popular show Broad City, expect similar content from other partners.
Video content will aid Spotify to ensure that users increase the time that they spend in its app, and could possibly open up another source of revenue for the company, which would help it keep the free music streaming tier alive that’s increasingly coming under pressure.
Spotify will soon roll out an update to its app to bring this new feature to all users.
Spotify Now Does Video , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use. 
Xbox One owners in many other countries across the globe are able to watch live TV through an over-the-air antenna, however this feature wasn’t immediately made available to users in North America. Last month Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox One TV Tuner for U.S. and Canada will be arriving soon, finally allowing users in this part of the world to watch live TV over-the-air courtesy an antenna.
The company has put up an Xbox branded TV tuner for sale today, manufactured by Hauppauge the TV tuner costs $59.99. It’s an inexpensive way to enable the Xbox One to capture over-the-air live TV feeds across the United States and Canada.
Once users can watch live TV, they will also be able to pause it for up to 30 minutes. There’s no DVR feature currently so recording shows is out of the question for now. The Xbox will also allow users to watch live TV in a small snapped window while users play games.
The TV tuner itself is not going to cut it, users will also require an antenna to get live TV up and running on the console. The company is selling a bundle through its online store which offers both the TV tuner and antenna for $99.99.
Microsoft recommends that users visit gomohu.com/xbox to find out which channels are available in their area prior to purchase this bundle.
Xbox One TV Tuner For North America Goes On Sale For $59.99 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use. 
What value does a person hold in society? Is a person more valuable because they come from a rich family, have a certain color skin, hair, and eyes? Are people more or less valuable if they are born or acquire disabilities during their lives? I often remind people that disabilities are part of life. A person is not broken because they are born with or acquire disabilities later in life. Bottom-Line we all add value to society.
Our daughter Sara was born with Down syndrome. Many ‘experts’ told us her life was a tragedy. We were told that she would be unable to care for herself and would be a burden on our family. We refused to believe the experts. We decided to treat our daughter like any other child and help her become the best person she could become.
Sara was born in the United States and several years later President George H.W. Bush signed the American’s with Disability Act in 1990.
The ADA helped our family ensure that our daughter had the same rights as people without disabilities.
At the time, other families and persons with disabilities around the world did not have the same protections. They were not afforded the same opportunities as our daughter.
Caption: Sara Ruh, Age 2
I recently had this conversation with a friend of mine named Ian Hamilton. Ian is an accessibility expert and advocate and understands the importance and value of accessible digital entertainment. He focuses on gaming and assuring we all can enjoy them.
Caption: Ian Hamilton
He told me a story about his father and his great aunt Jean Dewar. Jean Dewar was born with a disability and society gave her no support or protection. She died after a frustrating and sometimes unhappy life. Ian’s father, Bill Forbes-Hamilton, hoped that someone would tell Jean’s story as a testament and record of her existence.
It’s a simple anecdote of the importance of making society accessible to us all. This is especially true with the importance of accessible recreation.
Jean was born around the turn of the century, to a poor family in the small city of Brechin in Scotland. She was born with multiple disabilities, including profound hearing loss.
Caption: Brechin High Street, Scotland, around the time of Jean’s birth –
Picture Credit Valentine Series
Jean was born in a time before widespread sign language. She could not communicate meaningfully with anyone outside of immediate family. She lived in the gap between the end of silent movies and the start of subtitles in cinemas. Her motor impairments prevented her from taking part in physical leisure activities. Between all of these things, she had extremely limited opportunities for recreation, education, and employment.
The greatest joy in her life was her books that she loved to read. Her books were her gateway to the world that did not seem to understand or accept her. But later in life her vision started to deteriorate and she could no longer read the small printed text in books. So she lost her precious books because they were no longer accessible to her. For the rest of her life, she was trapped within the cage of her impairments, with no escape. Her sole form of recreation became sitting in her room looking into the fire.
If Jean had been born 28 years ago like our daughter Sara, things would have been different. She would have had a chance to be heard and to participate in more meaningful ways in society.
If she had been born today she would have had even more opportunities to participate in society. The UK is one of the many countries that has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Jean would have been allowed to attend school, learn sign language, and even been prepared to enter the workforce. She would have had access to apps, tablets, and smart-phone that would allow her to communicate her friends and family.
She could have owned a reading device like a Kindle or Nook. These devices provide extra convenience for the rest of us, but it would have been profoundly life changing for her. Just the simple feature of being able to adjust text size would have completely transformed her quality of life. Plus she would have benefited from the work of her grand-nephew and others – she could have owned gaming systems that were fully accessible to her. She could also have enjoyed characters in the books and games that were similar to her.
Some people have told Ian that his work with gaming is trivial. This could not be further from the truth. Ian notes that the gaming industry has annual revenue of over $80 billion. That’s a figure that is very close to all filmed entertainment combined –TV, DVDs, streaming videos, and movie/cinema box office. Games are a pervasive and deeply embedded part of our culture and society, so it’s a pretty big deal to be excluded from it.
The importance of accessible gaming runs deeper, too. Gaming represents access to recreation, to cultural life, and to socializing. These are all essential for our quality of life, and can mean the difference between existing and living.
Caption: Sara Ruh speaking at the Shafallah Center in Doha, Qatar
Today Sara Ruh is 28 years old, she works at Nordstrom’s and Ruh Global Communications as our CIO (Chief Inspiration Officer).
She is a keynote speaker and has spoken to thousands of people at conferences and shows all over the world. She speaks about her life, education, employment and shows that her life adds value to society.
She uses a kindle, iPad, and iPhone to play games, use social media, read books and communicate with friends all over the world. Sara is also an avid gamer and uses the Wii, PlayStation and Xbox 360.
The life she leads today is very different to Jean’s. Progress continues to be made, in gaming alone we’ve recently seen Sony adding a swathe of accessibility features to the PlayStation 4, industry bodies around the world working on awareness raising initiatives, and ever growing numbers of game developers considering people with disabilities with the help of resources such as http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com.
Society still has a lot of work to do to assure full access and true disability inclusion. Let’s always remember Jean Dewar’s life and strive to make the world a more inclusive and accessible world for us all. Jean’s nephew Bill wants us to all to know that despite the world not yet having been able to include her – she was and is remembered.
To learn more about Debra Ruh, please visit www.RuhGlobal.com or follow on most social media platforms @debraruh. You can also follow Sara Ruh @sararuh and Ian Hamilton on Twitter at @ianhamilton_.
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Spring is, of course, the season of optimism, not only from nature’s annual re-beginnings but from the emotions at the thousands of graduation ceremonies around the country.
Commencements are occasions for wisdom and inspiration, but few of this season’s events will match the remarks Vice President Joe Biden gave at Yale’s recent Class Day event.
I like Biden. I share his political philosophy, appreciate his commitment and approach to public service and admire him as one of the most consequential vice presidents in our history. Others do not. But whether you’re a Biden admirer or critic it’s well worth spending a few minutes to read and consider his Yale Class Day remarks. They’re better read than summarized (which won’t deter me from what follows). My guess is that when Biden began his remarks, Yale’s Class of 2015 and their loved ones in attendance included those in both groups yet I’ll bet that when he finished most present recognized that they had heard something special.
After his introductory comments, Biden offered some general lessons about life. The students who had invited him had praised his “compassion” but Biden said it was not “difficult, folks, to be compassionate when you’ve been the beneficiary of compassion in your lowest moments not only from your family, but from your friends and total strangers. Because when you know how much it meant to you, you know how much it mattered. It’s not hard to be compassionate.”
The students should each try to find their “sweet spot” which, borrowing from his father, Biden defined as “that thing that allows you to get up in the morning, put both feet on the floor, go out and pursue what you love, and think it still matters.” Biden had been lucky; inspired by JFK, the civil rights, environmental and anti-Vietnam War movements, he “learned early on” that engagement in public affairs was “what fulfilled me the most, what made me happy.” The students should each make a personal choice, whether it was Teach for America or Wall Street, music, medicine, government or something else. The happiest and most successful people had found that “sweet spot between success and happiness,” between “life and career.”
Although there was no formula to find that balance, Biden suggested some approaches built on character to help in the quest. First, most happy and successful people recognized that “a good life at its core is about being personal” about being there for people at times of joy and loss. Biden urged his listeners to question others’ judgment, not motives, a lesson he learned after criticizing the motives of Senator Jesse Helms in opposing programs to help the disabled only to learn that Helms and his wife had adopted a disabled teenage stranger who felt rejected by the world. We generally can’t judge another’s motives, Biden suggested. Moreover, it becomes difficult for people to work together when motives, rather than judgment, become the basis of their critical assessments. Students should look beyond the caricature and try to build real relationships, even with those with whom they disagree.
Second, Biden encouraged his audience to treat all with dignity and respect. Academic credentials were fine, Biden suggested to his audience at one of America’s most elite institutions, but no diploma could confer “the heart to know what’s meaningful and what’s ephemeral; and the head to know the difference between knowledge and judgment.”
Third, Biden cautioned that “[r]eality has a way of intruding” as it did in Biden’s case when shortly after he achieved his ambition of being elected to the United States Senate his wife and daughter were killed in an accident. Biden found redemption in focusing on his sons, in commuting hours each day to be with them. Ambition is important, said Biden, but “ambition without perspective can be a killer.” Biden urged his listeners not to fall victim to the human tendency to rationalize choices which pursue ambition at the expense of the needs of their loved ones or which pursue socially-mandated preferences over their own North Stars.
Finally, Biden advised that even the most successful cannot escape from a social responsibility to engage the world’s problems. “You can’t breathe fresh air or protect your children from a changing climate no matter what you make. If your sister is the victim of domestic violence, you are violated. If your brother can’t marry the man he loves, you are lessened. And if your best friend has to worry about being racially profiled, you live in a circumstance not worthy of us.”
Biden did not simply encourage his listeners to give their opponents the benefit of the doubt; he modeled that behavior in going out of his way to praise Jesse Helms and President George W. Bush. Biden’s Yale Class Day remarks are profound in their insights but they are especially compelling because they reflect the public life he has lived. They offer important lessons for all of us optimistic enough to see spring 2015 as a time for new beginnings, personal, political and societal.
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co-authored by Annette Lamoreaux
We have watched with dread and sadness events unfolding in Garland, not only because American values are being invoked in the name of bigotry, but also because our Muslim neighbors are paying the price for a situation not of their making.
Now that ISIS has opportunistically taken credit for the shootings, it’s harder still to make sense of what happened. The two shooters — the only people who actually know why they did it — are dead.
But even as the law enforcement investigation continues, our commitment to free speech, to religious liberty, and most importantly to community should never waiver.
It is certain that the local Muslim community carries none of the blame for Sunday’s outcome. In fact, this community’s response to both the plans for the event and the attack was restrained and dignified, showing by example what a real commitment to the principle of free speech looks like.
Leading up to the event, area Muslims had urged their allies and followers to simply ignore the event, and most did so — there weren’t even protesters outside the contest. And in the aftermath, Muslims across the country denounced the attack, reminding us all that violence is not part of their religion.
Garland itself looks much like the rest of Texas: young and culturally and racially mixed. Of the 235,000 people who live there, just over 70 percent of them are under the age of 50. Whites make up about 36 percent of the population, while Hispanics are 37 percent and Blacks are 14 percent. A number of ethnic groups make up the Garland population, including a sizable Vietnamese population. The area’s state representative is a Chinese American, Angie Chen Buton.
Dallas area cities and suburbs tend to be religious with Catholics, Baptists and Methodists comprising nearly 40 percent of the religious adherents. The other 60 percent worship in the temples and mosques and churches of a wide variety of religions from Latter Day Saints to Assemblies of God, to Judaism, to Calvinism to Church of Christ to Islam.
This is the face of Texas. This is us.
Although Pamela Geller and her American Freedom Defense Initiative are fond of invoking the First Amendment to silence critics, the truth is that their free speech rights are simply not the issue. Our First Amendment protects Geller and her ilk from government censorship of speech, no matter how noxious and reprehensible.
But nothing in the First Amendment requires Texans to refrain from pointing the finger at the American Freedom Defense Initiative, blaming them for trying to provoke a violent response and deliberately engaging in rhetoric that demonizes Muslims and the Islamic religion. To the contrary, because government cannot censor, we must engage to defend our values.
The worst outcome would be to let outside provocateurs — from either side — harm what has been a successful integration of large numbers of religious minorities into our community, creating fissures.
Religious liberty and free speech are the necessary pre-conditions for this great American experiment. They alone are not sufficient. Civility and respect for the equality of our neighbors are also essential to a democratic and vibrant society.
Throughout our history, Jews, Protestants, Catholics and Muslims have all been victims of fear and discrimination. In the end, tolerance and fairness generally have prevailed. So should it here.
There should be no tension between free speech and religious liberty. The ACLU has a long history of defending free speech and the rights of all religious denominations — from majority faiths to unpopular religions — to establish places of worship, to protect Americans’ right to pray or to choose not to pray. It is the American way, as George Washington said, “which gives bigotry no sanction.”
Aziz is an associate professor at Texas A & M University School of Law in Ft. Worth. Lamoreaux is an attorney in private practice in Houston. Both are members of the board of directors of the ACLU of Texas; Lamoreaux is Vice President-Legal.
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