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Really?
The Desk-It Weekly Calendar looks rather pointless, whether you prefer paper diaries over electronic or not. Scrawling your dates and appointments onto sheafs of dead trees is fine: The Lady prefers it that way because it is light, easy to read and more portable even than her never-used iPad.
But the Desk-It is always tied to your computer. Once you stick the sheet to the chin of your monitor, it’s going nowhere, so you may as well use the calendaring app on the computer itself. Sure, you could rip the giant Post-It-style sticker off to take it with you, but that’s about as practical as trying to carry a sheet of fly paper.
And if you’re not using an iMac, it seems even more pointless: Without that slab of aluminum behind it, you’ll have nothing to press against with your pen. And if you are using an iMac, you surely just cried out “What?! You expect me to use iCal? That piece of crap?”
My answer is to upgrade to OS X Lion. Despite the annoying leather-look, the 10.7 iCal is around one thousand times better than the old version. Try it out.
Back to the Desk-It. If you want one, a pad of sixty will cost you $10, or roughly $60 for a year’s worth. Available now.
Desk-It Weekly Calendar [Pocketo via Werd]
Photo credit: Desk-It
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Fujifilm’s X100 might soon be joined by a little brother. Photo Fujifilm
Fujifilm is planning on making a cut-down version of its hot retro-style X100 to go up against cameras like the Panasonic LX5 and the Canon G12. Rumors spilling out from a couple of different sources say that the new camera, to be called the X10, will be almost exactly the same as the X100, only with a smaller sensor.
The X100, to recap, is a fixed lens camera with an all-metal body, a big APS-C sensor and a fancy hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder. The smaller (but still chunky) X10 would have a smaller sensor, a 4x zoom, similar retro styling and a price half that of its big brother, at $600.
Given that the point of the X100 (apart from the big sensor), is the all-manual knobs and dials and that viewfinder, we’d hope that these features make it into the rumored X10. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just buy an LX5?
The rumors say that the camera should arrive in the next few weeks, so we don’t have long to wait to see if they’re true. Fingers crossed, though. I’m not spending $1,200 on a fixed-lens camera, but I might be tempted by a $600 one if it has that super-cool viewfinder.
Fujifilm X10 in the next few weeks [Photo Rumors]
Ganan terreno los rumores sobre la Fujifilm X10 [Quesabesde]
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A (non-Kodak) film canister. Photo Brian Turner / Flickr
If you have a hankering to take a teeny tiny packed lunch along with you, and you happen to have some old film canisters around the house, then Kodak has good news. While the plastic tubs aren’t FDA approved for food, Kodak reckons that they’re safe enough, despite not going so far as to actually recommend the practice.
After having made roughly 10 gazillion of the handy little pots over the years, Kodak knows a thing or two about them. The bodies of these canisters are made from high density polyethylene (HDPE), used in kitchen utensils amongst other things, and the lids are LDPE (guess what that stands for), which is also commonplace.
So, while kids might choke on the lids, human adults should be fine if they choose to store and carry food inside the watertight containers. There are no toxic or chemical residues from the film that was once therein, and the containers are “exceptionally clean” upon manufacture.
Which leaves us with one problem. What to put in there? Flakey Maldon salt is one idea, and a lollipop might fit in if you cut off its neck. You could even store a few cherry tomatoes inside for an impromptu (and minuscule) salad. After that, though, I’m stumped. Film-canister picnic ideas in the comments, please.
35mm Film Containers [Kodak via PetaPixel]
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Continue reading ‘Kraftwerk Who?’ Pioneering ’50s Synthesizer unearthed in French Barn
‘Kraftwerk Who?’ Pioneering ’50s Synthesizer unearthed in French Barn originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Aug 2011 03:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Smart Note is a kind of analog iPad
I have tried to use the iPad 2 as a classroom tool. In my ongoing quest to learn to speak Spanish at least as well as the average Spanish three-year-old, I go to classes a couple nights a week. I have used both iPads one and two (the 2 was bought to snap photos of the whiteboard, a task it utterly fails in), and they’re great. The problem is, they keep slipping off the table.
The neat little Smart Phone Note might be just the thing, though. With it I can press my aging iPod Touch back into action one last time, just like a tiny, electronic Rocky Balboa. The Smart Phone Note is a paper notepad with a slot up top to hold your iPhone (although it should work for the iPod Touch too). You can even leave the phone in there as you run from class to class or — in my case — from class to nearby bar. The slot will hold the iPhone in either landscape or portrait orientations.
Thus equipped, I could use a dictionary app and view photos taken of the whiteboard from previous lessons (with a proper camera, dammit) while writing on paper, all without anything slipping off the desk. There’s even a cut out for plugging in headphones, which frankly seems dumb, or at least pointless.
The Smart Phone Note is available now, for 30,000 Won, or around $27.
Smart Phone Note product page [Design Tag via Oh Gizmo!]
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This handheld SNES-a-like is almost as ugly as the real thing
Just as we feel nostalgia for the music of our youth, so we feel equal attachment to the video games played during our pot-smoking college years. For me the console that most often appeared through the smoky haze was the SNES, with games of Super Mario Kart and Streetfighter II played until we were too tired and stoned to taunt each other any longer.
So I have my eye on the Hyperkin SUPABOY, a handheld, LCD-screened console that plays SNES games as God intended: from the original game carts and not through a downloaded ROM file. This portable aspect, though, isn’t the one that gets me excited. I’m far more interested in the ability to plug in two proper SNES controllers (some of the best ever designed, according to my smoke-hazed memory) and send a signal to a TV via a composite-out cable. I could of course pick up a real SNES, but it’s just too big to keep around the house.
It looks good, although weirdly none of the features are guaranteed by Hyperkin. Still, the prototype had no trouble with the usual problem games like Starfox (tricky thanks to its “Super FX” DSP chip).
The price is a reasonable $80, to which you’ll have to add your own controllers. Still, I’m tempted. If only I can find some similarly old friends to play against.
Available soon.
SUPABOY product page [Hyperkin via Retro Thing]
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It’s slow, and it doesn’t have Thunderbolt, but if you’re buying thousands at a time, the $1,000 iMac is a bargain
Apple has today made available a low-specced, slightly cheaper iMac to the educational market. The 21.5-inch model costs $1000, $200 less than the regular entry-level iMac of the same size.
However, for that relatively small saving you get a lot less Mac. The processor is a dual-core Core i3 running at 3.1GHz, against the quad-core Core i5 at 2.5GHz, RAM is just 2GB instead of 4GB, the hard drive is a pathetic 250GB (Vs. 500GB) and the graphics — which use the same AMD Radeon HD 6750M processor — shrink their memory from 512MB to 256MB.
It also lacks a Thunderbolt port.
The educational iMac does get a keyboard with a numeric keypad, although you’re stuck with the Magic Mouse — there’s no free option for a trackpad.
For individual users, the $200 saving is clearly not worth it in exchange for last year’s tech — you’d be much better off buying a refurb from Apple and getting a bigger discount. For schools and colleges who don’t necessarily need to latest and best, and which buy in bulk, a $200 saving on, say, 50 machines is a lot of cash.
iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2011) – Technical Specifications [Apple via Mac Rumors]
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Okay, so iHome’s SD63 headphones may not be quite as “retro” as their name suggests, but there are certainly some design elements that harken back to a simpler time of beanbag chairs, black lights, and physical media — a fact helped along by the inclusion of the old Soundesign brand. The SD63 Retro-Style Hi-Fi Stereo Headphones pack 40mm neodymium drivers, a volume knob on on the outside of an ear cup, and a coiled six-foot cord. They’re available now for $50, which totally would have bought you a lot of Jethro Tull records, back in the day.
iHome’s SD63 headphones will satisfy your vague sense of nostalgia originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It probably infringes all kinds of trademark law, but the iPad Game Boy cases is still pretty awesome
Lootiful’s retro-tastic iPad case will make your iPad 2 look just like a first-gen Nintendo Game Boy. The polycarbonate snap-on back plate turns your sleek, modern tablet into the taste-wasteland of beige, gray purple and yellow that was all the rage back in 1989.
While the case isn’t yet ready for sale, Lootiful already sells a smaller version for the iPhone 4 for a reasonable $18. You can pre-order the case “soon,” though. And with Nintendo’s continued refusal to put its games on non-Nintendo hardware, this might just be the closest you’ll get to playing Mario on your iPad. At least until Nintendo is forced to pull a Sega, I guess.
iPad 2 Game Boy case [Lootiful via TUAW]
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