John Biggs is a New York-based author and consultant. John has published work in The New York Times, Laptop, Men’s Health, Linux Journal, Popular Science and others. John is also the author of Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age. Visit his website here.
Email: john at crunch gear dot com
Go ahead and take that second helping of bacon-broasted mashed potatoes and high-fat gravy this Thursday, friends, because even if your tummy gets big and round like a steamed black bean bun, there’s an app for that.
Fitness apps for all!
iPhone fitness apps have come a long way since Nike+iPod. The addition of GPS opened entirely new vistas for running and biking enthusiasts and the iPhone’s video and audio capabilities made it fun to use the iPhone in the gym. Here are a few of my favorites. Read More
Here it comes: Best Buy ran a national Black Friday ad inviting the world to celebrate Thanksgiving and Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice. Fair enough, right? Happy Eid! Well, take a gander at the ad up there and brace yourself.
Look closely. You’ll probably miss the good will and wishes, they’re so innocuous. Read More
Not sure why you’d name your watch after something that doesn’t exist but the Swedes love them some existentialism. Void Watches V02 have two retrograde hands, one that shows the hours on one side and minutes on the other. It comes in four colors and uses a Japanese movement.
Using the Gas Cubby iPhone app to increase your fuel economy and keep your vehicle properly maintained can save you money and help the environment… but, if you’ve learned anything from CrunchGear, it’s that saving money isn’t much fun unless you can blow it on something cool and completely over the top. Well, one lucky CrunchGear reader gets to have their cake and eat it too. App Cubby, the developer of Gas Cubby, is giving away a Viper SmartStart kit to one lucky CrunchGear reader. If you own a car and an iPhone, surely you’ve heard about and have been lusting after Viper’s new technology that allows you to lock/unlock, open the trunk, and even start your car right from your iPhone.
Dost thou desire an Android phone in Red Passion or Oiled Bronze? Begin thy journey, brave Sir Knight, to China where you will be able to purchase the Dell Mini 3i with 3.5-inch touchscreen for a few coins of the realm.
The Mini 3i, as you’ll recall, is Dell’s first smartphone in almost half a decade and runs the Ophone platform, an Android-based system that will eventually brand most of China Mobile’s phones.
Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line.
The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly. Read More
If you ever sit next to me on a plane you will notice that I have a small ritual that I prepare every time I reach cruising altitude. I begin by pulling out my iPod touch and then my Movie Wedge. The Movie Wedge is a little bean bag with a lip for holding up MP3 and video players. That’s it. It’s amazingly great.
Good afternoon, readers! What does Santa have in his bag for you today? Interestingly enough, he was unable to bring his bag because this printer is far too big for it. We present, for your inspection, the Kodak 5250 all-in-one: a scanning, printing, faxing, photofinishing machine that can best the big boys in the printer race.
Best of all, the 5250 has built-in WiFi so you can stick the printer on your network and print from any computer in the house. Take a look at Kodak’s 5250 product page and then click through to figure out how to win. Read More
Although only a few Wii games support the light gun interface, if you’re a heavy player you may want to look into getting the $39.99 Wand Action Pack if you’re planning on adding a controller to your line-up.
This kit includes Nyko’s Wand Wiimote – essentially an exact clone of Nintendo’s product – along with a sleeve and gun attachment for light gun games.
Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.
I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.
Does your child enjoy dominoes? Does your child enjoy trucks? Does he or she like to see trucks move? Do they like to see the trucks poop out little dominoes? Do you know your kids? At all? Do you know that they’ll play with this for like five minutes and then eat the dominoes?
While I would totally go out with Princess Peach (provided all the parts are really there, and they must be because those Mario Brothers have been after her for years), I find this story to be quite disturbing. A Japanese man married Nene Anegasaki in a church in Guam and is going to be streaming their honeymoon live. Read More
So picture this: You are tasked with watching a volcano And you’re totally like out to lunch one morning and the volcano explodes. You’re like FUUUUUUUUUUU!
With the HUMANITARY INVENTION you’ll never be away from an exploding volcano! This device, which consists of a Piezoelectric system that pushes a rod out of a box. You are then supposed to put a phone next to said box. The phone will then call you and you can be totally like “OMG MY DISTANT PHONE IS CALLING ME! WOW!”
Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the Wii-holder. The Charge Base IC is a $34.99 induction charging device for Wiimotes and looks like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wright sketchbook. The base sits firmly on the ground while sweeping cantilevered arms reach out to cradle your Wiimotes with magnets. It’s almost graceful, this amalgamation of clear and white plastic, the glorious sense of weightlessness, the architectural stability with just a touch of grandeur.
But darn it if the lights on this thing aren’t too bright.
Like a ’70s cop team – one is the goodie two shoes and the other one is the drunk – the DuinoTagger and Talcapult allow you to shoot things and make smoke appear. The gun uses an Arduino board to control a tiny catapult that blows out a little puff of smoke. Read More
Velcome, darling! Look what we have for you! Sergey Brin wearing VFF KSOs, CrunchGear’s favorite, as Greg calls them, “crazy monkey shoes.” I’m personally a VFF convert and I’m very impressed that Sergey is willing to walk around in these.
While you won’t be able to sense it at first, expect to feel a high frequency buzz from the direction of Redmond in the next few months. That’s the Windows 7 and Office group fearing the rise of a new juggernaut on low-cost computing hardware, ChromeOS.
ChromeOS may not be powerful, it may not play Far Cry and it may not run Microsoft Office but it’s a game changer. The underpowered laptops that limped along under Vista, XP, or 7 will fly under a new ChromeOS regime and thin-and-light laptops will fall below the vaunted $199 mark as the so-called “Microsoft Tax” – basically the small cost manufacturers pay for OEM licenses – disappears.
In the end, everything will have an app store. Take the Pulse smartpen from Livescribe, for example. The company, whose pen is quite cool (it records what you write and can “remember” things on page, allowing for paper-based calculators and control panels), has just launched an app store for its 2- and 4GB Pulse pens.
The store offers multiple games, tools, and study aids for prices that range from free to about $2. You can download apps here and then upload to your pen. Read More
I’ve suffered much when it comes to digital photo frames. I purchased a number of frames from multiple manufacturers for multiple members of my family with the expectation that I would, for time immemorial, be able to email said frames images, thus allowing family members the opportunity to see new photos without having to drag them over from the computer. Alas and alack each one of these frames (Damn you, SmartParts!) has failed and their attendant services have gone out of business.
I’m an optimistic fellow, however, and they say digital picture frame usage after being burned by picture frames in the past is a triumph of hope over experience. Well fool me again, picture frames, because I’m going to talk about the eMotion Social-Connect Digital Photo Frame with LifeGoRound.
We’re giving away five Peek Protos this week, one a day, and we want you to ask us nicely for one so we can give you one. What I’m basically trying to say is that you should respond to this post with a comment (using your real e-mail address) and also follow CG on Twitter and watch the Gift Guide for more special things. Read More
Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.
I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.
Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera, everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having “a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath.”
We’re giving away five Peek Protos this week, one a day, and we want you to ask us nicely for one so we can give you one. What I’m basically trying to say is that you should respond to this post with a comment (using your real e-mail address) and also follow CG on Twitter and watch the Gift Guide for more special things. Read More
An anonymous tipster send us in this image of an e-reader running Android OS and explained that it came from a company that has never been in the tablet/e-reader business. Interesting…
I suspect this is some sort of music device for composers/performers because of all the musical notes on the top of the screen and some things we saw in the background of the image. Any guesses as to what this could be?
Here’s another episode of my little side project, the HourTime Podcast. This time we talk about a $500K sports watch and the history of timekeeping and some of your favorite brands. Hope you’re enjoying this and we’d love some feedback. Read More