We might not have our flying cares or entire day’s nutrition in pill form just yet, but damned if we’re not just a few months away from Minority Report style computing.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Leap Motion about the company’s amazing gesture based interface system. While the feature is um… featured in the September issue of Mac|Life, you can read it online right now over at the magazine’s site.
There’s no doubt that iOS is the biggest thing to happen to portable gaming since the invention of the thumb war. To capitalize on the popularity of iPhone and iPad hits like Infinity Blade and Fruit Ninja, a Montreal-based company has embiggened them, using hardware that leverages Microsoft’s PixelSense technology, and thrown them into an arcade setting. They’ve labelled the resulting product Touch FX, and you can read all about it here.
Stumbling around with a flashlight in the dark sucks. Having both hands free and seeing where you’re going because you were smart enough to buy a headlamp? That’s a win.
I spent eight hours playing with over 20 different headlamps, so that I could tell you that the Black Diamond Spot is the one you want to buy.
But for why, you ask in your best Zoidberg voice?
Head on over to The Wirecutter and find out.
Apple had a pretty busy day today. Aside from the fact that the WWDC keynote given by Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple executive crew was arguably on par with anything Steve Jobs has done in the past (I still miss the Hell out of him though), they released a gobsmacking number of new products and upgrades. Do you want them all? Of course. Do you need them? Well, most likely no.
If you’re curious about how what Apple unleashed on the world will affect your life, why not wander over to The Wirecutter and have a look at the guide Brian Lam and I put together. We cut through the hype and point out the bits you’ll want to know about before looking to buy any of the new hotness Cupertino’s selling.
The Wirecutter’s been keeping me busier than a cat trying to bury a turd in a marble floor of late, leaving very little time to do any freelancing. That said, I did have a chance to put together a feature for Mac|Life’s START section this month on Apple’s slow crawl into enterprise space.
Researching the story reminded me of two important things: First, I love working for the folks at Mac|Life. You’d be hard pressed to find a more dedicated, passionate bunch of writers and editors. Second, holy crap am I ever thankful to have not stepped foot into a corporate environment for close to three years.
There’s a Star Trek uniform in my past. There’s a Star Trek club back there too. I’m not proud of either of them, but they do serve to remind me that there’s wasting my time and then there’s REALLY wasting my time. While I’m not as much of a Trek fan as I was in my early teens, I still enjoy the show in small doses. More importantly, I appreciate what the show stood for, and how many of today’s best and brightest were inspired by it.
If you head on over to Techopedia, you’ll find a feature I recently pulled together on six technologies featured on Star Trek that inspired some of the real world hardware that we take for granted today.
These days, most of my writing is focused on technology, despite the fact that I’ve been working as a music journalist since 1997, for a traditional music publication called Irish Music Magazine. On Friday morning, my love of tunes and tech finally crossed paths, thanks to a conversation and interview with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains.
Paddy’s son works for Nasa, and because of this, he’s known Astronaut Cady Coleman for close to twenty years. Aside from having one of the coolest jobs in the world, Coleman is also a flutist. Paddy tells me:
I get this call from her over a year ago. She was saying she was going up on the International Space Station for six months, and could she borrow a tin whistle from me for some music. Then she got a flute from Matt Molloy, a spare one that he has. They went around for 93 million miles and 156 days or something. Last March, I was in the middle of the tour, and I get this call at 10:30 on my night off. ‘This is Cady. I’m in the International Space Station and I’m just straight over you at the moment.”On St. Patrick’s Day, we were in Toronto. She sent down a whole film of herself on the internet, wishing us all a happy St. Patrick’s day, with her hair all sticking up in the air, with the flute and whistle floating around. Then she starts to play Fanny Power, an old O’Carloan tune. I used her recording of the tune and then put the band around it for the album Voice of Ages. It was to say, where are we going next with this Voice of Ages? Up into space.
How awesome is that? I’ll save you the guess work and tell you: Very awesome.
My full interview with Paddy on the occasion of The Chieftains’s 50th anniversary will be hitting the pages of Irish Music Magazine this July.
A complex technological artifact, say a smartphone for example, is a collection of complex ideas made manifest. As we swipe and tap our lives away, most of us forget that a there’s a lot of brain juice squirted into each and every feature the hardware we own. Most of us, but not everyone.
Hardware manufacturers? They remember. Sometimes, they even sue other companies for daring to incorporate their ideas into their own products. That’s a patent law slap-fight, y’all, and it’s what my latest feature for Mac|Life is all about.
I don’t like bluetooth headsets. Up until six or seven years ago, watching someone talk to themselves as they walked down the street was the best tool the everyman had for gauging the sanity the person. Now? We’re working without a net. If you’d rather be part of the problem than a solution, you may as well rock the best headset out currently on the market.
After hours of research and a good deal of profanity, I can say with authority that you’d do very well to pick up Samsung’s HM7000. If you want to know why, you can read my explanation over at The Wirecutter.
Oh Hai! I’m writing for Techopedia! Trying to explain to someone you love, but have no patience for, how their private information can be exploited online? Well, you’re in luck: I’ve put together a very basic primer on the different kinds of information most of use unwittingly provide to search engines, advertisers and social media outlets on a daily basis.
Save yourself the pain of educating those you care about and let us do it for you. You’ll find the story here.