Gadgets posts

Ok, so yes we might be nerdy, yes we might have a passion for Star Wars, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t have to hang shelves. The people over at ThinkGeek.com have answered our prayers and is selling a digital measuring tape. Some of us geeks don’t know how to read ‘five sixteenths’ but we sure know that Aldera is the capital city of Alderaan. It has a 16 foot length (for those super long shelves) and will display five different forms of measurements – feet inches fractions, inches fractions, inches decimal, feet decimal, centimeters decimal. It easily switches from Imperial to Metric for all…

Recently two Silicon Valley giants made big investments in their future. But while HP’s purchase of Palm got all the headlines and page views, Apple’s acquisition of Siri, an iPhone “personal assistant”, is the real story. Palm Meet HP After pioneering the PDA market with fantastic products like the Pilot, Palm allowed itself to be lapped first by Handspring, a company formed by former Palm employees, and then by practically everyone else. RIM outpaced them on smartphones, then Apple revolutionized the entire industry with the iPhone. The Palm Pre was a decent enough phone, but the…

Everyone knows the perfect gift for any geek is the USB coffee cup warmer. I personally have over 75 of them, gifts from family and friends who don’t understand that geeks are human beings, not just coffee-drinking computer addicts. The days of warming only a cup are over. The Brainwave is a microwave. That plugs into a USB port. Crazy though it seems, this has never been done before. The USB microwave is an invention that will have geeks cheering and chefs bawling, but one thing is now certain: The days of getting up from your desk to prepare lunch are over. But wait. If your mind wasn’t already boggled,…

My entire life revolves around the internet. Between writing for Techi, interfacing with design clients, talking to friends, and gaming, there is almost not a moment of my life that doesn’t take place online. I have GOT to get me one of these. The Reconnect concept by Lars Rosengren is a genius little device. A diagnosed or suspected internet addict (read: you) can strap it onto his or her wrist, and the device helps monitor your social networking activities while periodically reminding you of your real-life priorities, and offering helpful suggestions. On the one hand, it’s sad that we as a people…

We’re really liking TomTom’s new daft idea: the Darth Vader navigation pack for TomTom! Narrated (as you can see in the video) by the man who provided the voice for Darth Vader, TomTom’s kit gives you the directions you need, all made a little more interesting by his iconic heavy breathing and slightly threatening tone. Better yet, the voice commands are inspired by lines from the original films, Vader may tell you, “Bear left, to the Dark Side,” for example. You also get Star Wars wallpaper, music and sound-effects from the films including the sound of light sabres and TIE fighters along…

How many times have you wished you had a time machine so you could go back and do something a different way? Well, according to the really super-amazing physicist, cosmologist and dreamer, Stephen Hawking, you can…given some simple equipment: Equipment list: A wormhole The Large Hadron Collider or A “rocket that goes really, really fast” Thorough understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity. We reckon you could probably do with Hawking for advice. These assertions all pop up in Hawking’s latest column for UK newspaper, The Daily Mail. He claims that since time must move faster…

You need a computer you can take anywhere, a laptop designed for life on the site or the road. You need it to be shock-resistant, but you want it to have power. For you, good news, with Panasonic today updating some of the models in its Toughbook laptop range. The Toughbook CF-52 now runs on the Intel Core i5 (up to 2.53GHz) processor and includes 2GB RAM and up to a 250GB shock-mounted hard drive. It also has a bevy of wireless connectivity options. We like that this machine’s been drop and spill-tested and features a magnesium alloy case (with a weird-looking but sturdy carry handle). There’s even…

Use your iPhone to monitor your baby remotely. Automatically log your baby’s activity so you gain insight into its sleeping patterns or receive instant notifications when it cries with the app playing a recording your own voice to sooth your child until you arrive. So, I’m a geek, my wife’s a geek and we’re engaged in bringing up a new generation of geeks, and that’s why we’re really pleased to have come across this really rather useful Baby Monitor and Alarm app for the iPhone. What it does? It does it all, really. It will monitor noise in the room of your sleeping child and send an SMS message…

Value-conscious geeks are snapping up the last available units of Palm’s Pre and Pixi smartphones at huge discounts as the company moves across to new owner, HP. And at these prices Palm’s smartphones really do look smart. Take the flagship device, the Palm Pre Plus. Verizon Wireless is offering the 16GB, 3G-savvy touchscreen handset for just $29 with a two-year contract. Or, for the same price, you can get the Palm Pixi Plus, with Verizon offering a “buy one, get one free” deal for both models of phone. Verizon no longer charges for its Palm Mobile Hotspot service on either phone, so you can tether…

Microsoft may recently have scrapped its plans for the Microsoft Courier device, but that doesn’t mean the company is out of the tablet computing game, company chairman, Bill Gates, told FOX. Microsoft chairman Gates and billionaire investor (and friend of Gates) Warren Buffet were in conversation about the economy, technology, Apple and more. Gates observes his company doesn’t intend to cede the tablet computing market without a fight, despite the cancellation of Courier, “Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing,” he said. “We think that work with…