Gadgets

An interesting week in reviews again with cars, headphones and the mighty Popcorn Hour A-400. There was a time when the Popcorn Hour was the must-have gadget for the home cinema aficionado with a lot of video stored on computers, but these days, things...

Alex James, Brit band Blur's eminent bassist and famed cheese maker, was recently tasked with creating a film to help launch the 2013 Virgin Media Shorts short film competition using just his wits and a Nikon D5200 mid-range DSLR. The result was A Slice...

Stitcher just announced a new car mode for its iPhone app, bringing a simplified interface that works in both portrait and landscape positions. Accessible by tapping the Stitcher logo at the top of the screen, car mode offers a pared-down version of the app's standard UI, with bigger buttons and only the essential audio controls. It's nowhere near as flashy as Stitcher's BMW integration, mind you, but the point is to keep your eyes on the road and off your iPhone's screen. The app gets a few other updates this time around: a front page with top headlines, one-tap access to shows and podcasts you're searching for and improved playback when you're picking up in the middle of a show. Head to the source link below to give the app a spin, and drive safely! Filed under: Software, Mobile Comments Source: Stitcher Blog, Stitcher Radio (iTunes)

Looking for a pet with a bit of an attitude? Meow- Yes, you heard that right, Get a cat. We all are fans of the cat woman-well, most guys are *wink*, but as pets these cats can be very friendly and can give you hell at the same time. Nevertheless, they make excellent pets and [...]

Mixing surreal anaglyphic animation and a haunting soundtrack, this stunning short by Stephen Chan is cool enough to watch even without the glasses. Of course if you want the full effect but don't have access to pair, just blink your eyes alternately real fast. That might work.Read more...

Most approaches to capturing 3D models of real-world objects involve multiple cameras that are rarely cheap, and are sometimes tricky to calibrate. The University of Glasgow has developed a method that ditches those cameras altogether. Its system has four single-pixel sensors stitching together a 3D image based on the reflected intensity of light patterns cast by a projector. Reducing the pixel count lowers the cost per sensor to just a few dollars, and extends the sensitivity as far as terahertz wavelengths. Real-world products are still a long way off, but the university sees its invention as useful for cancer detection and other noble pursuits. Us? We'd probably just waste it on creating uncanny facsimiles of ourselves. Filed under: Science, Alt Comments Via: New Scientist Source: University of Glasgow

Pig farming is tough, foul-smelling, and dirty work. Turns out, that's the good part of it. See, since 2009 the American hog farming industry has been struck with an explosive pork poop problem—in that the decomposing porcine waste will go boom under the right conditions.Read more...

In all honesty, Blake Griffin himself could start a social network that served no purpose outside of featuring his dizzying (and disgusting, if you will) array of dunks, and it'd probably go over quite well. Instead, he -- along with other superstars in the National Basketball Association -- will soon see replays of in-game highlights making waves across Twitter in more official fashion. Hot on the heels of a deal between ESPN and Twitter comes this: a partnership between the NBA and the aforesaid social network that'll get video highlights to the world while the game is still ongoing. #NBARapidReplay will be the hashtag to watch for as the playoffs progress, and as you'd expect, short advertisements will appear alongside those clips. Twitter's foray into the television universe is hardly a new one, but it's becoming ever more obvious that the company is following the ad dollars into the homes of everyday viewers. Up next? A deal to tweet highlights from the 2014 Masters golf tournament... but only in extremely soft spoken, lowercase, predominantly pompous characters. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Bloomberg

Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change. FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June. Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t. For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates. As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.

It's been a brutal week at work, you've spent what? Maybe 15 seconds of it without your phone on your ear and your computer on your lap? At this point, your electronics are just as drained as your are. Give them a jump start on your drive home with this 180W car charger.Read more...