Hasta La Gadget!

It’s good to know that we live in a day and age where technology is increasingly making our lives safer. When you’re out on the road, OnStar keeps you ready for anything – from turn-by-turn directions to hands-free calling. OnStar is a powerful built-in technology available in most GM vehicles that connects drivers to a real person, 24/7. OnStar can even help out with almost any situation on the road, whether it’s a crash, medical emergency, or even a flat tire.

Now there’s a smartphone app that connects drivers to their vehicles. The OnStar RemoteLink Mobile App lets car owners control their vehicles from just about anywhere. When installed, the app allows drivers to do things like lock the doors, check on fuel levels, or even start the engine.

Check out this video to learn more about how OnStar can help, and visit http://www.youtube.com/OnStar to see what other incredible features are available.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” Technabob received compensation for writing it, however, we only recommend products or services we find interesting or have used personally, and believe will be good for our readers.

Most people mean well when they give you directions. However, they often give pretty confusing directions that might get you lost when you try to follow them.

Turning these hand-scrawled directions into an art project, though, is New York conceptual artist Nobutaka Aozaki.

His piece is called Here to There and his goal is to make a map of Manhattan using handwritten directions and maps that he asked for from strangers.

Aozaki walks around the streets dressed in a souvenir baseball cap while toting a Century 21 shopping bag around, posing as a tourist. He then approaches random people to ask about directions on the part of the map he’s working on.

Aozaki’s goal isn’t to create an accurate map (those already exist and his method doesn’t really lead to this end), but rather, he wants to keep track of his daily routine and create a mapped diary of sorts for that.

So if you happen to live around that area, take a closer look at the people around you. Who knows? You might actually run into Aozaki himself.

[via Spoon & Tamago via Colossal]

For kids, field trips are one of the biggest highlights in school. They offer a temporary escape from the dreary confines of the classroom once every few months (or weeks, if they’re lucky.)

Just because you’re all grown up now doesn’t mean you can’t go on field trips anymore.

You might not be in school anymore, but if you’ve got a smartphone, then a whole new world of possibilities and new discoveries is open to you, right here, right now. Just download the Field Trip app and you’re good to go. It’s an interactive app by Google internal startup NianticLab that shows you cool, unusual, and sometimes historically-rich stuff that can be found around your neighborhood, or wherever you happen to be at the moment.

The app can be customized based on your personal interests, and gathers data from a variety of data sources, including Arcadia, Historvius, TimeOut, Thrillist, Food Network, Zagat, Eater, Atlas Obscura, Dezeen, Daily Secret, Cool Hunting, Freshome, Inhabitat, Songkick and more. It can also be set to automatically notify you when there’s something interesting nearby.

If you’re traveling somewhere, just fire up and the app and get ready to take yourself (and whoever else is with you) on a field trip.

You can download the Field Trip app at Google Play and the iTunes store.

[via Laughing Squid]

Modern automobiles benefit from increasingly small and smart computers, which can help control or augment everything from a car’s dashboard display to fundamental functions like steering. But as the world is slowly realizing, if something runs software, that thing can be hacked. That’s what Forbes recently found out thanks to a demonstration by two computer security experts.

Image by Forbes

Forbes’ Andy Greenberg met with Charlie Miller – a security engineer at Twitter – and Chris Valasek – the Director of Security Intelligence at security services consulting firm IOActive – to experience firsthand how today’s high-tech cars can be fooled. Charlie and Chris connected to one of the Electronic Control Units or ECUs of a Toyota Prius and proceeded to do all sorts of dangerous tweaks with it on the fly.

Charlie and Chris are working under a grant from DARPA to expose vulnerabilities in cars. Greenberg also drove a Ford Escape that both security experts hacked in similar ways. When Greenberg spoke to a Toyota spokesperson, he was told that the hack in the video above didn’t really concern them because it involved gaining access to the car and physically connecting a device to it. But the reason why Charlie and Chris didn’t bother to do it wirelessly is because that part has already been proven, way back in 2010:

Yeah these things need to be patched now. These videos are extremely troubling.

[via Forbes via BBC]

Luggage hasn’t changed much in the last few decades, but there’s hope on the horizon. How about having suitcases with built-in GPS that you will never lose again? I’d certainly consider that, since losing your luggage can certainly get painful at times.

The Airbus Bag2Go is a prototype and it’s a sort of “smart luggage,” carrying sensors that work with an app in order to bypass the usual airport BS. It has got an RFID that lets travelers check in their bags and link to it on every step of their itinerary. GPS tracking will alert travelers to potential tampering. The luggage is being developed by Rimowa and T-Mobile.

While spending a lot of money on luggage isn’t my cup of tea, renting one of these on long trips could be quite useful.

[ABT via Mac Rumors]