Hasta La Gadget!

If hand-cutting your own microSIM is a little bit too folksy for you, or if you own a back-street cellphone store and find yourself chopping up other people’s SIMs to fit into their iPads, then Henk van Ess’s Cut My Sim might be just the thing.

Instead of scissors or a straight-edge and an X-Acto knife, you just slip your SIM into what looks like a cross between a stapler and a hole-punch and push the lever. The stainless steel jaws clamp shut and strip away the excess plastic surrounding the chip, spitting out a perfectly iPad-ready microSIM.

This may be a little redundant now that carriers in all the countries where the iPad is officially available will just give or sell you the proper card, but that doesn’t make this any less useful for those wishing to hijack a non-iPad data plan or just use a non-supported telco. At the very least you’ll have a nice, retro-style paperweight for your desk.

The Cut My Sim costs $25 and will ship at the end of June. That price includes a plastic tray, called Back to Normal which will let you return it to its former size. Shipping later this month.

Cut Your Own MicroSIM! [Cut My Sim via Core77]

See Also:

• SIM-Trim: Cutting Card Down to MicroSIM Size
• SIMFi, a SIM Card With Built-In Wi-Fi Hotspot
• Fingers-On With The MicroSIM Card Adapter
• Use iPad MicroSIM and Data-Plan in Your iPhone
• How to Use an iPad on (Almost) Any Data Plan in the World

Mad Catz’s new wireless Litetouch keyboard is most obviously aimed at couch-bound media-center owners, but it could also be great for notebook users who “graduate” to a desktop.

The Litetouch combines mouse and keyboard into one, with two mouse buttons flanking a nubbin-like trackball under the numeric keypad. That keypad is the big gimmick here. It is a touch-enabled LCD screen (don’t worry, the QWERTY side is all real-life scissor-sprung buttons) which can switch between three modes: a standard number-pad, a set of media control keys and a custom “MyEclipse” mode, which lets you assign your own shortcuts. Because the keyboard is backlit, it does suck batteries: the li-ion battery will give you just 20 hours between charges.

As we said, it’s perfect for browsing and watching movies on the big screen. But that built-in mouse and the switchable number-pad also makes a great compact all-in-one for those of us who like to use a desktop machine, but hate to use a mouse. I’m one of them. The day somebody makes an Apple Bluetooth style keyboard with a trackpad built in, I’ll be in line to buy it. Until then, this will probably have to do.

Available now, $130.

Litetouch keyboard [Eclipse Touch. Thanks, Alex!]

The t’Light, short for “The Most Talented Light” might be the worst gadget name ever, but the product it describes promises to sweep all the cables off your desk, and provide a low-powered work-light at the same time.

Well, it promises to shorten your cables at least. The t’Light has a 3 watt LED lamp up top, which should last for around 50,000 hours, but the action is down on the base. Just by snaking one cord off the desk and into the wall, you can power a host of desktop machines. The t’Light has a USB port, an iPhone dock and a jack which puts out enough power for a laptop. Ironically, given the Apple-centric feature set and marketing, there is no adapter available for a MacBook, thanks to Apple not allowing anyone else to make them.

The lamps are fashioned from “metal-alloy”, and can be had in any of eight colors, including the natural shiny metal finish seen above. They cost $90 each.

t’Light [Tlight via Macworld]

Apple has been through some extreme ups and downs, but today the corporation climbed to an all-time high. Apple surpassed longtime rival Microsoft in market capitalization, making the Cupertino, California, company the most valuable technology company in the world, for the moment, at least.

The milestone is even more remarkable given Apple’s single-digit share of the computer market. Microsoft, by contrast, runs on about 90 percent of the world’s PCs.

Steve Jobs should feel vindicated. After being fired from his own company in the 1980s, the company gradually became less and less relevant, its market share dwindling and its innovative edge dulled.

Now, over a decade after his return as Apple CEO, Jobs — once viewed as an opportunistic entrepreneur who would never have the chops to run a really big company — is the king of the tech industry.

From the first iMac to the revolutionary iPad, what follows is a list of key turning points that took Apple from an also-ran into a champion.

Above:

Jobs Returns, 1996

A nearly bankrupt Apple Computer welcomed back its ousted founder Jobs in 1996. Apple purchased Jobs’ startup, NeXT, to help build a new, Unix-based operating system — but the real prize was Jobs himself. A year later, Jobs replaced Gil Amelio as CEO to retake the helm. With the help of some financial backing from rival Bill Gates, the return of Jobs marked the beginning of Apple’s gradual recovery.

Photo: Gil Amelio, left, and Steve Jobs appear together at the MacWorld exposition in San Francisco on January 7, 1997
Associated Press/Eric Risberg

$20 might at first seem expensive for a USB charging cable, especially as it is limited to Apple’s iDevices. But when you are down to the last few excited electrons in your iPhone’s battery and you just have to Tweet that your iPhone is sooo nearly dead, the $20 will look cheap.

So go spend it on Scosche’s flipSYNC already, a keychain USB/Dock cable that folds up into a tiny plastic capsule which itself looks just like the non-key part of your car key. Crack open the case and you have yourself two plugs, ready to gulp down a little extra juice from any nearby computer or other USB-teat.

For those of us not bound up in Apple’s world, there is another version which includes a standard USB connector along with both mini and micro USB plugs. This one is crazy useful, letting you connect phones, hard-drives and even cameras and card-readers to a computer for charging or data-transferring duties, and costs the same $20.

If you can stomach buying replacements for things you already have, then these two adapters, snuggled together on your keyring, could be the most useful $40 you spend since that handy, tasteful Laptop Burka.

FlipSYNC [Scosche]