Cardsharp 2 – Credit Card Sized Transforming Utility Knife

Posted in Gadgets, Lifestyle, News

This 13gram utlility knife sports a razor sharp blade and yet is just 2.2mm thick, so yes – it would fit happily in your wallet. The Cardsharp 2 is waterproof, made from rust-free stainless steel and ideal for camping, sailing, fishing, hunting, survival or opening packets of bacon at that impromptu barbeque on the common.

[Via Rokked.com]

iPro Wide Angle and Fisheye Lens System for iPhone 4/4S

Posted in Gadgets, iphone, News, Photography

The problem with most of the add-on lenses for the iPhone is that they’re simply gimmicks. Sure you can take a vaguely different style of photo, but the quality’s not going to be up to much because the lens is probably cheap plastic. For $199USD, the iPro Lens System is infinitely superior technology and gets you a wide angle lens iwth a 35% wider field of view than the standard iPhone camera and the 165° fisheye lens for this funky bowl shaped shots. It all comes with a cute holder than doubles as a tripod and is available now from the company’s website.

Drop Your Files on Bloodrop To Quickly Upload Them to Dropbox

Posted in Mac, News, Software, Utility

MegaUpload might have been closed down by ‘the man’, but there are a thousand other ways to share files. Dropbox remains a popular choice and, thanks to the public folder facility, it’s easy enough to share a file from your Dropbox account. Well now a chap called Alexey Skhodnensky has made Dropbox sharing even easier for Mac users with a neat little AppleScript.

Bloodrop is a simple scriptlet that enables you to drag files onto it, upload them to your Dropbox public folder and get the URL placed automatically on the clipboard. It does multiple files, can put files in the Public or a sub-folder of Public and includes Growl notifications on successful upload. You can get it, here.

Don’t invest in iTunes Match unless you have mainstream tastes in music and a small library

Posted in Cloud, Mac, Music, News

I wouldn’t say I had that esoteric a taste in music, but by Apple’s standards I clearly do. Like many people I signed up for iTunes Match when it was released because I fancied having my music in the cloud for ready access. However what I didn’t fully appreciate is that the iTunes store is a very vanilla, very mainstream affair and unless your music collection is equally mainstream, you’re going to be doing a lot of uploading.

The majority of my collection is electronic music of one kind or another. I was a DJ for a good portion of my adult life and therefore have a lot of tracks that probably won’t appear on some top 40 compilation. That said I’m not into nosebleed ragga accordian rave music – there’s only a few totally left-field tracks in my collection. And yet of the 19509 items in my iTunes library a full 7564 of them need to be uploaded to Apple before I can access them in my iCloud library. Assuming a relatively frugal size of 8Mb per track that means Apple want me to upload over 60Gb of music to their servers. Since my ISP counts uploads as well as downloads against my bandwidth, that leaves me in a bit of a bind – I really don’t want to be squandering so much of my monthly allowance on this and yet, if I want the music there, I have no other option.

Would really like to know if it’s just me. How many tracks are Apple asking you to upload to your iCloud? Do you plan on letting Cupertino hoover up all those esoteric songs of yours? Also – if the songs I’m uploading are being transferred because Apple doesn’t have them in its 18million strong collection – how are they going to magically transform them into high quality 256Kb versions since I’m the source and I don’t have them in 256Kb? Hmmm?

I Built My Own Tardis

Posted in How-To, Lifestyle, News

Evi – an intelligent personal assistant, only without the intelligent bit

Posted in Android, iphone, News, Reviews

Ever since Apple released the awesome Siri with the iPhone4S others have been scrambling to catch up. Microsoft had a go, Android developers tried their luck and various other existing iPhone devs pimped their talk-and-respond apps. But they were all, for the most part, shite – pale imitations that didn’t even come close to Siri’s accuracy, flexiblity and fact-finding capabilities.

The latest app to step in the ring with Siri and try its luck is Evi. I’d read good reviews of this app elsewhere and despite the huge number of one star reviews in the app store, I paid my dollar and downloaded it. First impressions were good, it sports a similarly simple interface to Siri and has a great layout with cool off-whites and dark grey dialog boxes.

So first I asked Evi what the current temperature was. I’d already given the app permission to access my phone’s location and thought it might check the weather and report back with a figure. Instead Evi suggested, “The web page might be useful for that Intellicast – Current Temperatures in United States“. Ermm great, firstly I’m in Australia, secondly I’d have liked an actual figure, not a link to a website.

Then I try one of the examples that the developers actually list when you first start the app. I asked, “Pubs near here”. Despite the fact that there are two pubs in my town, it couldn’t find them and suggested I check Yelp for results in a town 20km from here. Awesome. Since it had at least identified a town near here, I figured I’d find out what films were on there and the best Evi can do is a link to a film previews website. Rapidly losing the will to live, I asked Evi, “What films did Robert De Niro star in?” Evi did at least recognise the name Robert De Niro, but instead of serving up some useful information, gives me a link to De Niro’s entry in Wikipedia. Not very helpful.

Finally Evi gave up completely. Any search requests you try now are greeted with an apology from the developers that suggests that they massively underestimated the demand that would be placed on their question-and-response servers. Which isn’t really good enough. I hope they work the bugs out, but at the moment Evi’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Pizzazz Pizza Oven – Late Night Snacks Get Edible

Posted in Lifestyle, News

If you’re the sort of person that enjoys the occasional boxed frozen pizza from your nearby convenience store, then this particular kitchen gizmo might well appeal. The Pizzazz pizza oven uses a rotating heating tray that crisps the pizza underneath while cooking it evenly from above using a heating element. Reviews of the product on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive – it’s for sale at $42USD.