Normally I don’t mind trends, so long as I don’t actually have to participate in them. However, there is one trend that needs to be over yesterday: turning everyday tasks into games. For those of you who haven’t seen the onslaught of tasks-as-games app, here’s a brief run-down of some of the more popular ones: 0Boxer: Organize Your Gmail and Have Fun Doing It Epic Win: Level Up Your Life: Make Being Organized As Much Fun As Gaming with Epic Win-the to-do list app with an RPG setting Chore Wars: Finally You Can Claim Experience Points for Housework These are games that try to make everyday tasks…

You hear the term ‘iPad Killer’ an awful lot, don’t you? Well, like, I guess you would if you read tech blogs with any regularity. If you’ve trickled all the way down to Techi, I’ll assume you do, and I’ll also assume ergo that you have, in fact, heard the term ‘iPad Killer’ an awful lot. So we’ll start with that. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about an iPad Killer today. Good grief, am I ever not. Today, I will regale you with a tale of the HP Slate, the real goddamned expensive tablet that sucks out loud – for the price, anyway. To be fair, the Slate isn’t the worst machine in the world; this is, of course, presuming…

Not only does Apple get to celebrate its future release of OS X Lion and the hype surrounding the new Macbook Air, they get to laugh in the face of Research In Motion (RIM), too. Apple has now overtaken RIM for second place in worldwide smart phone share. Apple only trails one company when it comes to smart phone market share, and that company is Nokia. The third-quarter global smart phone share report from Strategy Analytics states that Apple has ousted RIM by 3.1 percentage points. It’s such an impressive undertaking by Apple, given that only three years ago there was no such thing as an iPhone. However,…

If you’ve taken a stroll through Nanjing, China lately, you might notice something peculiarly odd: vending machines. These things, on their own, are not usually odd, but sometimes the things inside of them are. This is one of those situations. This time, the Chinese are stuffing live crab inside of vending machines, giving “fresh” and “fast food” new meaning. The grab are placed inside individual plastic containers, and they are around 30 cents cheaper than crab sold in markets. What happens happens if you receive a dead crab? Consider yourself lucky: you’ll receive three live crabs for free….

As much as I love Twitter, these issues over stability and scaling are really starting to get to me. For the past several days, the message “Loading Tweets seems to be taking awhile” has bombarded my screen. It’s not clear what the issue is, but Twitter obviously hasn’t yet fixed the leaky pipes. The worst thing of all is that I no longer get to see the Fail Whale, I merely see a pointless useless message telling me that the website is broken. No fun at all….

Remember seeing those futuristic looking heads-up displays that soldiers and, well, Iron Man gets to have fun with? Well, Olympus and NTT Docomo are planning to bring something like that to consumers who have lost their way with AR Walker. It’s a pair of glasses, a smart phone, and a retina display all combined in one package to enable the user to acquire information in their peripheral vision. In other words, it blasts images and text to one of the user’s eyes without having the user become distracted and run head-first into a wall (as always, safety first). AR Walker has an acceleration sensor and…

Games go social, computers go mobile, and communication goes online, but many newspapers and magazines still haven’t made the connection; Or as the old saying goes: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It hasn’t ever been more relevant than today when New Corp failed to convince many of its publishers that an online subscription-based newsstand was worth their while. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, is always on the hunt to find new ways to make people pay, even if that means pissing people off. The concept of an online subscription newsstand sounds like a fair middle ground;…

I’ve seen some pretty ballin’ casemods lately, not the least interesting of which was a Hackintosh-in-a-box that needed to be hotwired just to turn off. But where that boxmod got my propers for being ghetto, this one what I’m about to get drrty on gets them for being blinged to the nines. How much space does your desktop have? What’s the norm these days, like, 1TB? 2? I think I’ve got just shy of 3. Most of us will never use that much space. I’m an insatiable media pirate and even I’m still reasonably comfy. But some of us just can’t get enough. Observe and behold: straight outta Russia comes this casemod…

I’m confident I’ve used that headline gag before. Whatever. If you’re used to the legend-status security of a Mac, better check your damn self – a security oversight in FaceTime fo Mac could land you with an enormous iTunes bill, if you’re not careful. Seems that in signing into FaceTime for Mac, a user can change one’s Apple ID password to whatever he or she wants (provided it satisfies the password rules) without having to input the old password – leaving your iTunes account up for the taking, assuming your enemy has physical access to your computer. Based on that fact of physical proximity, I don’t…

Despite the fact that Wired Magazine has said that the web is dead, the browser-based internet is still thriving. And why shouldn’t it? The web is open, accessible to anyone with a browser and is also widely adaptable. A browser window is many things: a television screen, a newspaper, a chat window, a social network or a webcam display. But all of these uses of the web now compete with things that, instead of running through a browser, run in their own specific world: apps. Apps work through the internet, but not on the web proper. For that reason, they are less democratic and open than the web. While…