Nov 02

Aluminum Tray Turns Desktop Keyboard into Laptop Keyboard

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, desktops, Notebooks, Today's Chili

I have been looking for something like the BulletTrain Express Keyboard Platform for years. It is little more than a mock lower laptop-case into which you slot your Apple bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad. Thus appointed, you now have yourself a rather comfortable, notebook-like setup.

I find a notebook layout way more comfortable than the standard desktop layout. The trackpad is always ready to hand below the keyboard, so you aren’t forever reaching off to the right or left to mouse around. I actually tried to use my Magic Trackpad below my keyboard in this manner but it just gets in the way of the spacebar.

The Express has a hole for the trackpad and a cutout for the battery-holding cylinder at the back of Apple’s keyboard. In this picture you can see how much it resembles the top of a MacBook Pro, only with a way bigger trackpad:

It does add some thickness to the keyboard, but no more than a laptop does already. Hell, you could even lean back and use this in your lap.

The only thing putting me off is the price: It costs $100, enough to buy a second Magic Trackpad and let me double-fist my mousing setup to bet RSI. Well, there’s one more thing: Unlike the MacBooks, there is no option on the desktop to ignore the trackpad while you type. That could get old, fast.

BulletTrain Express Keyboard Platform [BulletTrain]

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Nov 01

Pick Punch Cuts Plectrums from Credit Cards

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, diy, Music, Today's Chili

The Pick Punch should be a Steetfighter special move, but it is in fact much more mundane, and arguably more useful. Looking a lot like an office stapler, the Pick Punch works like a paper hole-punch, only it is strong enough to cut through old credit cards, and deposits 351-style guitar-picks instead of confetti.

According to a review by the Gadgeteer, the resulting picks are smooth edged. The problem is, they’re not sharp-edged. If you have used a store-bought pick, you’ll know that the sides taper to a single edge, sharp (ish) and not squared off. You could address this problem with a file, but as picks are about the same cost as the small-change people sometimes uses to play their guitars (and damage their strings), then it’s hardly worth the bother.

On the other hand, this will let you use all the plastic crap that drops through the mailbox for purposes of good, instead of for landfilling evil. Credit cards, store-cards, over-packaged CF-card boxes, anything that will be stiff enough to twang a string can be recycled for your musical experimentation.

It even offers a measure of security: chop the chip, and a section of numbers, from your Visa card and you can toss away the rest free of fears of identity-theft. The price for this fun, practical yet ultimately superfluous piece of musical stationery? $25, and the company will even sell you sheets of plastic to chop through.

Pick Punch product page [Pick Punch via Gadgeteer]

Photo: Gadgeteer

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Nov 01

As Wireless as It Gets: Logitech’s Light-Powered Keyboard

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, bluetooth, keyboard, logitech, solar, Today's Chili

With its brand-new Google TV Blu-ray Players and much-loved universal remotes, you might think Logitech would let its well-established business in keyboard and mice coast a little bit. Instead, they’re coming out with a new wireless keyboard with a new wireless charger: the Sun.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 may have solar in its name, but let’s face it: how much typing on a full-sized keyboard do most of us do in bright sunlight? Thankfully, “solar” here are a shorthand for “powered by any light source whatsoever,” including the bare-incandescent bulb in your dank basement office.

Disclosure: I have a Logitech DiNovo wireless keyboard that I love, although I’m indifferent towards its plug-in charging cradle, which always seems to get unplugged when someone else in my house needs an outlet. I also have a solar-powered calculator from elementary school that I’ve loved since before puberty. So even though I have neither seen or used this keyboard, I am predisposed to be enthusiastic about it, in the hope that those solar cells across the top can keep the keyboard charged at least as well as my old solar-powered calculator.

Logitech says that the keyboard “can operate for up to three months in total darkness,” and they’re not shipping it with a separate plug-in charger, so they seem pretty confident. They’re also shipping a desktop app that helps “measure ambient light in the room, gives at-a-glance information about battery levels, and even alerts you when you need more power.”

So that covers the wireless charging. For wireless connection to your computer, the K750 doesn’t use Bluetooth, but 2.4 gHz wireless, meaning that you’ll need a plug-in USB receiver. I knew it! I knew you’d have to plug something in! Oh, well. For better connectivity, I guess I’ll take it.

Below, I’ve got the Logitech promotional video, which tauts its super-thin frame, $80 price and one of the better tech catchphrases I’ve heard in a while: “If you’ve got light, you’ve got power.”

H/T: Navneet Alang.

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Oct 29

Quirky Contort, An Ingenious USB-Hub and Cable Manager

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili, usb

Contort is another crazy-useful looking gadget from the seemingly bottomless idea-pit at Quirky. Like all Quirky gear, it combines simplicity with a re-think of existing solutions. This particular widget is a four-port USB-hub and cable-manager.

At Quirky, they actually are working with a bottomless pit of ideas. A community of internet denizens coughs out an idea and then they work together tirelessly to perfect the design like an army of termites building a dirt-skyscraper, only in this case the termites are you and me and the termite-mound is a handy computer peripheral.

The hub is ridiculously basic. The four ports occupy one side of a reel around which you wrap stray cables, keeping things tidy and tangle-free. The lone USB-plug sprouts from one end and swivels on its flexible TPE-rubber cord, dangling straight from the hole on the back or side of your computer. There are also four cut-out “anchor” points around the circumference to hook cables and keep them firmly tucked in.

Like any Quirky product, you need to pre-order and then, when enough people have committed, production begins. The Contort will cost you $30, and is ready to order right now.

Contort product page [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany!]

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Oct 28

Smartpen App Makes Paper as Mighty as the Mouse

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

You can now draw virtual lines on your computer screen at the same time as you scribble them on paper.

A new smartpen app called Paper Tablet gives the Livescribe Echo smartpen some of the functionality of a dedicated graphics tablet, letting you write on the computer screen in real time and add manuscript text to files already on your computer.

“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

Paper Tablet is Livescribe’s first effort to expand to an area Marggraff calls “enhanced communication and collaboration” in paper-based computing. The application costs $15 from Livescribe’s online app store.

Typically, you use the Echo wirelessly, writing notes, recording audio and running apps using special notebook paper. Then you dock the pen with your USB cable to upload the notes to the computer. Only then do you get to see what you have and save or export your notes.

With Paper Tablet, you keep the pen plugged in. The notebook is the input surface, and the output is what you see on screen. You can draw, write notes and sign or annotate Microsoft Office or PDF documents. You can also use the pen like a mouse, hovering over the notebook to move across the screen, tapping to left-click, holding the pen down to right-click, and drawing a line to make a selection or drag a window.

Because of the USB connection, Paper Tablet is limited to the new Echo smartpen; it won’t work on the older Pulse, which connects to the computer using a dock. Marggraff said that the company was working on solutions where the pen could connect to the computer wirelessly, although he wouldn’t specify a release date or a specific technology.

See below for screenshots of a hands-on session with Paper Tablet, just after the jump.

PowerPoint Slide Annotated with Paper Tablet. Credit: Tim Carmody

First, a disclaimer: On a Mac, I couldn’t try everything that Paper Tablet can do. In Windows 7 or Vista, Paper Tablet can mark up and save Office 2010 documents of all kinds (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). Whereas, even Paper Tablet can only annotate PowerPoint documents on a Mac, even with its new Office 2011, and can’t save them.

Marggraff said he hoped to take advantage of better ink support in new versions of OS X, but for now the big push is for the higher-volume platform. (Also, because Windows Vista and 7 are designed to run on tablets, they’ve got pretty robust inking support baked in.) The company is also rolling out support for Google Docs, Evernote and other cloud services before the end of the year.

I was actually surprised at how well the pen worked as a mouse or trackpad substitute. It’s an absolute positioning device: Once you bind a sheet of notebook paper to the screen, the top left corner of the page maps to the top left corner of the screen, and so on. A mouse or trackpad is a relative positioning device: If you move to the top left corner of your laptop trackpad, it just moves you slightly up and to the left of your current position, not all the way across the screen.

After years with a mouse, this takes a little while to get used to — not least because you find yourself trying to keep an eye on the screen, the pen and the notebook simultaneously. Depending on the task, you have to train yourself to ignore one or the other. To annotate a document, it’s better to concentrate completely on the cursor’s movement on the screen so you don’t inadvertently write over what’s been written. If you’re doodling, it’s better to focus completely on the page of paper. And sometimes, you need to do both: An electronic signature requires watching the screen to get the cursor into the proper position, then looking back to the page to make your signature as naturally as possible.

I didn’t get a chance to try this, but the best of all possible worlds might be to print or copy a document you want to annotate onto smartpen-sensitive paper, activate Paper Tablet, and try to mark it up just as you would any other printed document. That’s a pretty complex workflow, without many advantages over just scanning a signed or annotated document, but might be useful in some real-time collaborative contexts.

For instance, I tried to mark up text, like a teacher might do with a student’s writing. (I had to copy it into PowerPoint first, since Paper Tablet doesn’t work in the Mac version of Word.) It didn’t turn out so well:

Screenshot of an annotated PowerPoint document. Credit: Tim Carmody

I don’t think this is the fault of the app as much as the limitations of using the cursor pen function in MS Office. Above, my annotations using the Echo are in blue, my trackpad in green: neither of them look terribly smooth.

In the drawing/collaboration webapp Dabbleboard, both manuscript and drawing turned out much better:

Dabbleboard screenshot. Credit: Tim Carmody

I can’t take credit for that perfect isosceles triangle though: Dabbleboard recognizes common shapes and snaps them into a sharp, regular form.

If you’re doing serious illustration, I don’t think Paper Tablet makes an Echo a replacement for a dedicated graphics tablet like Wacom’s Bamboo series. Like the pen is already, it’s really good for taking notes. Real-time collaboration is a killer app if you’re using teleconferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx and need an extra tool to either think on paper or draw attention to something within a document.

And being able to electronically sign a document in Adobe Reader finally closes one of the last holes in going paperless. Instead of printing, signing, and scanning, you can sign on screen, save and hit send. That’s a lot of time and a lot of ink saved.

None of these are really arguments in themselves for buying a smartpen and a bunch of notebooks. Instead, they augment an already versatile tool and add another suggestive layer of capability to alternative input devices.

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Oct 28

Livescribe Paper Tablet Makes the Pen As Mighty as the Mouse

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

A new smartpen app called Paper Tablet gives the new Livescribe Echo smartpen some of the functionality of a dedicated graphics tablet, letting you write on the computer screen in real-time and add manuscript text to files already on your computer.

“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

Paper Tablet is Livescribe’s first effort expand to an area Marggraff calls “enhanced communication and collaboration” in paper-based computing. The application costs $14.99 from Livescribe’s online app store.

Typically, you use the Echo wirelessly, writing notes, recording audio and running apps using special notebook paper. Then you dock the pen with your USB cable to upload the notes to the computer. Only then do you get to see what you have and save or export your notes.

With Paper Tablet, you keep the pen plugged in. The notebook is the input surface: the output is what you see on screen. You can draw, write notes, and sign or annotate Microsoft Office or PDF documents. You can also use the pen like a mouse, hovering over the notebook to move across the screen, tapping to left-click, holding the pen down to right-click, and drawing a line to make a selection or drag a window.

Because of the USB connection, Paper Tablet is limited to the new Echo smartpen; it won’t work on the older Pulse, which connects to the computer using a dock. Marggraff said that the company was working on solutions where the pen could connect to the computer wirelessly, although he wouldn’t specify a release date or a specific technology.

Click “Continue Reading” for screenshots of and my reactions to my hands-on with Paper Tablet, just after the jump.

PowerPoint Slide Annotated with Paper Tablet. Credit: Tim Carmody

First, a disclaimer: Because I use a Mac, I didn’t get to try everything that Paper Tablet can do. For Windows 7 or Vista, Paper Tablet can mark up and save Office 2010 documents of all kinds (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). For Mac, even using the new Office 2011, it can currently only annotate PowerPoint documents, and can’t save them. Marggraff said he hoped to take advantage of better ink support in new versions of OS X, but for now the big push is for the higher-volume platform. (Also, because Windows Vista and 7 are designed to run on tablets, they’ve got pretty robust inking support baked-in.) The company’s also rolling out support for Google Docs, Evernote and other cloud services before the end of the year.

I was actually surprised at how well the pen worked as a mouse or trackpad substitute. It’s an absolute positioning device: once you bind a sheet of notebook paper to the screen, the top left corner of the page maps to the top left corner of the screen, and so on. A mouse or trackpad is a relative positioning device: if you move to the top left corner of your laptop trackpad, it just moves you slightly up and to the left of your current position, not all the way across the screen.

After years with a mouse, this takes a little while to get used to — not least because you find yourself trying to keep an eye on the screen, the pen and the notebook simultaneously. For different tasks, you have to train yourself to ignore one or the other. If you’re annotating a document, it’s better to concentrate completely on the cursor’s movement on the screen so you don’t inadvertently write over what’s been written. If you’re doodling, it’s better to focus completely on the page of paper. And sometimes, you need to do both: for electronic signatures, you watch the screen to get the cursor into the proper position, then turn your attention back to the page to make your signature as naturally as possible.

I didn’t get a chance to try this, but the best of all possible worlds might be to print or copy a document you want to annotate onto smartpen-sensitive paper, activate Paper Tablet, and try to mark it up just as you would any other printed document. That’s a pretty complex workflow, without many advantages over just scanning an signed or annotated document, but might be useful in some real-time collaborative contexts.

For instance, I tried to mark up text, like a teacher might do with a student’s writing. (I had to copy it into PowerPoint first, since Paper Tablet doesn’t work in the Mac version of Word.) It didn’t turn out so well:

Screenshot of an annotated PowerPoint document. Credit: Tim Carmody

I don’t think this is the fault of the app as much as the limitations of using the cursor pen function in MS Office. Above, my annotations using the Echo are in blue, my trackpad in green: neither of them look terribly smooth.

In the drawing/collaboration webapp Dabbleboard, both manuscript and drawing turned out much better:

Dabbleboard screenshot. Credit: Tim Carmody

I can’t take credit for that perfect isosceles triangle though: Dabbleboard recognizes common shapes and snaps them into a sharp, regular form.

If you’re doing serious illustration, I don’t think Paper Tablet makes an Echo a replacement for a dedicated graphics tablet like Wacom’s Bamboo series. Like the pen is already, it’s really good for taking notes. Real-time collaboration is a killer app if you’re using teleconferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx and need an extra tool to either think on paper or draw attention to something within a document.

And being able to electronically sign a document in Adobe Reader finally closes one of the last holes in going paperless. Instead of printing, signing, and scanning, you can sign on screen, save and hit send. That’s a lot of time and a lot of ink saved.

None of these are really arguments in themselves for buying a smartpen and a bunch of notebooks. Instead, they augment an already versatile tool and add another suggestive layer of capability to alternative input devices.

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Oct 22

Multi-Touch Mouse Brings ‘Magic’ to the PC

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

Up until now, only Mac-users have been able to sacrifice their carpal-tunnels at the beautiful white-glass altar of RSI that is the multi-touch mouse. It has been possible to hack Apple’s Bootcamp drivers for Windows to get the Magic Mouse working, but now there is a “magic” alternative.

The Speedlink Cue is a wireless 1000dpi optical mouse with a multi-touch top and a tiny USB nano-receiver like the ones that ship with Logitech mice. Mouse clicks are registered by touching the top section where left and right buttons would normally live, and other gestures can be configured with the supplied software.

Given that the only magic thing about Apple’s Magic Mouse is how it can manage to suck so hard whilst it looks so darned good, it’s no surprise that the Cue fails to beat it on beauty: the mouse comes in white, red, black and silver flavors, all of which are horribly boxy and have a logo emblazoned across the bottom that makes them look cheap. Appropriate, I suppose, as compared to Apple’s awful offering, it is cheap, and will ship in November for €40 ($56, but sure to be less in the US).

Our advice? If you want multi-touch that will work on both Mac and PC, buy Wacom’s Bamboo Touch. Amazon will sell you the finger-tablet for just $36. Better, grab the version with the pen and kiss RSI goodbye forever.

Cue Wireless Multitouch Mouse [Speedlink via Oh Gizmo]

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Oct 21

Samsung to Supply Stylish Prescription Specs for 3DTV

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili

While we wait for manufacturers of 3D TVs to get together and agree on a standard so we don’t need different glasses for every different set, Samsung is at least making things easier for four-eyed dorks like me. You will be able to order prescription 3D specs to watch Samsung 3DTVs, without having to pile up pairs of spectacles in a nightmare of layered lenses.

The specs will be made to order, are available in different styles and, as you can see in the picture, they’re actually pretty stylish. Samsung says that the glasses will take around a week to make. Finally, a pair of 3D-spex that I can wear down to my local bar to watch Barcelona playing in 3D on the big-screen. Well, as long as my local has a Samsung screen, I guess.

I imagine the future of these glasses. They have polarized, LCD shutters in them, right? What’s to stop the electronics inside automatically adjusting the amount of light they let through when I’m not watching TV? That way, I would need just one pair, for seeing, sunbathing and 3D-movie-watching.

3D prescription glasses for eyeglass wearers [Aving]

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Oct 21

Bone Amp Gives iPhone the Horn

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, iPhone, speakers, Today's Chili

The headline really says it all, albeit in a rather school-boyish, innuendo-filled way. The product is the Bone Horn Stand, and it is an un-powered amplifier for the iPhone 4.

Working just like the old-style horn-speakers found on gramophones, the silicon speaker slips over the iPhone’s end and channels the sound through the trumpet-shaped tube. This, according to the specifications, “adds 12 decibels of sound pressure to your iPhone’s speakers.”

The speaker also works as a stand, supporting the iPhone in horizontal or vertical orientation, and even has a nubbin that will pass your presses on to the home-button beneath. Sure, it’s a little dorky-looking, but it could be just what you need to make movies watchable, and it doesn’t use a drop of juice from the battery. Available now, $25.

Bone Collection iPhone Portable Amplifier [Cyberguys via Book of Joe]

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Oct 21

Thank You Apple, for Killing the Optical Drive at Last

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, macbook air, Today's Chili, usb

You know what was the best news at yesterday’s Back to the Mac event? The MacBook Air’s Software Reinstall Drive, which finally spells the end of the clunky optical drive.

Apple likes to drop old tech as early as possible. The floppy drive is the classic example, and caused a fuss when it was left out of the original Bondi BLue iMac. FireWire has been on life-support these last few years, flickering in and out of existence on Apple’s portables. And while the original Air had no way to load a CD or DVD, you still had to use one via a slow and clunky DVD or CD Sharing feature which let you “wirelessly ‘borrow’ the optical drive of a nearby Mac or PC” to install software.

Now, though, it is possible to buy an Mac and never have to deal with spinning media again. Hell, you can’t even buy a MacBook Air with a hard-drive anymore: inside, the only thing that moves is the fan and the clicking trackpad.

So the bundled restore DVD has been replaced with a typically stylish USB stick, something that will certainly come to other Mac in the future. And good riddance to this battery-sucking, space-gobbling piece of legacy tech. Who needs it? Hell, it’s quicker to download a movie these days than it is to rip a DVD.

The one irony here is that the new iLife suite, also announced yesterday, is only available on DVD. Because iLife, unlike iWork, does not require a serial number for activation, there’s no download available. Maybe next year, iLife 12 will come on a USB stick, too.

What’s in the Box (MacBook Air) [Apple]

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