Posts Tagged ‘dylan-tweney’
Modular iPad Case Lets You Tweet From Your Kegerator
Author: Anthony Kristo
The guys behind the new modulR line of iPad cases have a clever idea: Let one case take on multiple identities through a variety of add-ons.
The basic case is a hard plastic shell that protects the iPad in use. Its rubberized edges grip the tablet securely, while little “nubs” on the back give your hand something more to grip onto than the iPad’s normally slick exterior. They also help raise the device off the table so it’s a little easier to pick up.
When traveling, you can clip on a hard plastic face plate that protects the iPad’s screen.
At your desk? Slide the case into an L-shaped metal bracket, which has slots that the case’s rear nubs lock into.
Those same slots appear on modulR’s “slim case,” which lets you mount your iPad on the wall — or, with the addition of a handful of powerful neodymium magnets, a refrigerator. In fact, this is the first refrigerator mount we’ve seen for the iPad in the Gadget Lab. It works with most old-school fridges, but if you’ve got a fancier wood-paneled or stainless steel refrigerator, you’re out of luck. (Stainless steel isn’t magnetic.)
We used it to display our favorite websites and recent tweets on the face of Beer Robot, our office kegerator.
You might be nervous about the effect of those powerful magnets on the iPad’s internals. While modulR couldn’t offer us a blanket assurance, they did say that they expected no problems — and we saw none during our tests. Perhaps if the iPad had a spinning disk inside instead of solid state storage, the proximity of magnets might be a bigger problem.
One down side is weight. The case is substantial, which provides protection, but it also adds 5.8 ounces to the iPad’s weight (10.2 ounces with the cover on). That may not sound like much, but it’s a noticeable addition to a gadget that weighs just 1.5 pounds to begin with.
The other is price: modulR sells a bundle that includes the case, cover, stand, and the slim mount for $100. The case and cover alone are $60.
Still, it’s a substantial, solid case and the only one we know of that allows fridge mounting. If that’s what you’re looking for, the modulR case is a good choice.
modulR iPad Case (product website)
Photos: Jon Snyder / Wired.com
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
See Also:
- Moleskine-Shaped, Bamboo iPad Case
- Quirky's iPad Case With Two-Way Kick-Stand
- The Case: Another Beautiful Moleskine-Like iPad Case
- Combination-Lock iPad Case is Almost Pointless
- How-To Make a Waterproof, Kitchen-Proof iPad Case and Stand …
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Modular iPad Case Lets You Tweet From Your Kegerator
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Modular iPad Case Lets You Tweet From Your Kegerator
Author: Brian McKinnell
The guys behind the new modulR line of iPad cases have a clever idea: Let one case take on multiple identities through a variety of add-ons.
The basic case is a hard plastic shell that protects the iPad in use. Its rubberized edges grip the tablet securely, while little “nubs” on the back give your hand something more to grip onto than the iPad’s normally slick exterior. They also help raise the device off the table so it’s a little easier to pick up.
When traveling, you can clip on a hard plastic face plate that protects the iPad’s screen.
At your desk? Slide the case into an L-shaped metal bracket, which has slots that the case’s rear nubs lock into.
Those same slots appear on modulR’s “slim case,” which lets you mount your iPad on the wall — or, with the addition of a handful of powerful neodymium magnets, a refrigerator. In fact, this is the first refrigerator mount we’ve seen for the iPad in the Gadget Lab. It works with most old-school fridges, but if you’ve got a fancier wood-paneled or stainless steel refrigerator, you’re out of luck. (Stainless steel isn’t magnetic.)
We used it to display our favorite websites and recent tweets on the face of Beer Robot, our office kegerator.
You might be nervous about the effect of those powerful magnets on the iPad’s internals. While modulR couldn’t offer us a blanket assurance, they did say that they expected no problems — and we saw none during our tests. Perhaps if the iPad had a spinning disk inside instead of solid state storage, the proximity of magnets might be a bigger problem.
One down side is weight. The case is substantial, which provides protection, but it also adds 5.8 ounces to the iPad’s weight (10.2 ounces with the cover on). That may not sound like much, but it’s a noticeable addition to a gadget that weighs just 1.5 pounds to begin with.
The other is price: modulR sells a bundle that includes the case, cover, stand, and the slim mount for $100. The case and cover alone are $60.
Still, it’s a substantial, solid case and the only one we know of that allows fridge mounting. If that’s what you’re looking for, the modulR case is a good choice.
modulR iPad Case (product website)
Photos: Jon Snyder / Wired.com
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
See Also:
- Moleskine-Shaped, Bamboo iPad Case
- Quirky's iPad Case With Two-Way Kick-Stand
- The Case: Another Beautiful Moleskine-Like iPad Case
- Combination-Lock iPad Case is Almost Pointless
- How-To Make a Waterproof, Kitchen-Proof iPad Case and Stand …
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Modular iPad Case Lets You Tweet From Your Kegerator
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Tags: behind-the-new, dylan-tweney, Image, iPad, modulr, Office, robot, Ski, SPL, Tablet, tablets and e-readers, thumbnail, Video | 
No Comments »Setting Fires With a Giant Electric Blower
Author: Mark Jeffries
This weekend, I’m going to be sparking up the grill with the Looftlighter, an electric firestarter that looks like an oversized curling iron, sounds like a hair dryer, and gets a good-sized pile of charcoal briquettes ready to grill in just a few minutes.
I’ll admit I was skeptical about the $80 Looftlighter, which comes from Sweden and whose name, I believe, must be pronounced with as much Nordic accent as you can muster. It’s basically an air blower tucked behind a heating element. The idea is that it delivers a focused blast of hot air out the front. It’s hardly the “flamethrower” I’d been led to believe it was, however, and an initial test in the Wired offices proved that it was incapable of doing much more than charring the edges of a business card.
Plus, it looks dorky and requires access to a three-prong 110v power outlet. Even with the built-in bottle opener on the bottom, this isn’t exactly a manly-man kind of gadget.
But I put my doubts aside and tested the Looftlighter on a couple of recent barbecuing occasions. To my surprise, it works.
The Looftlighter really does look like a curling iron. Photo courtesy Looft Industries
For the first twenty seconds, nothing seems to be happening. You have the ridiculous feeling that you’re blow-drying a pile of charcoal.
But then, the heating element inside turns cherry red, and in short order the edges of the briquettes start to glow.
Sixty seconds in, you start to see flames shooting out of the briquettes in all directions. Fan the Looftlighter back and forth, and it quickly heats up the entire pile.
Within two to three minutes, your pile of charcoal is hot and just about ready to cook: Each briquette is glowing red on the inside and coated with a fine layer of white ash. Perfect.
It may be dorky, and it’s not suited for camping or picnic use — but for starting charcoal grills at home, I have to reluctantly admit that the Looftlighter works pretty well.
And it would probably be just the thing for starting a one-briquette Altoids tin mini-grill.
Wired’s review: No More Gas-Tasting Burgers: Super-Heated Air Lights BBQ Fire
Top photo credit: Dylan F. Tweney / Wired.com
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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Setting Fires With a Giant Electric Blower
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Tags: Air, Barbecue, briquettes, dylan-tweney, edges, Fire, grills-at-home, LED, lighters, order-the-edges, sweden, tasting-burgers, the-briquettes |
No Comments »Video: Inside the $7 Billion Bay Bridge Construction Project
Author: Katie Scott
Take a look on, inside and underneath the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge in this exclusive Wired.com video.
The Bay Bridge is nearing the end of a $7 billion-plus retrofit and reconstruction project. A $5.4 billion chunk of that project involves the building of the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge, a type of suspension bridge that uses a single cable, anchored to the span itself instead of to the ground on either end. When complete, this bridge will have a 525-foot tower and will be over 2,000 feet long.
To make the suspension bridge, builders must first create a “falsework” bridge: a giant, temporary structure that will hold up the road bed until the suspension tower and cables are in place. Then they place segments of the tower (shipped in from China), stack them up and bolt them together. Then they’ll place the road deck segments and lace it all together with cables. Once it’s under tension, builders will remove the falsework and the bridge will stand on its on.
They must do all this without interrupting the flow of more than 250,000 vehicles per day. They’ve got to anchor the bridge in deep layers of soft, squishy bay mud, without the benefit of bedrock, while making the bridge strong enough to withstand the most powerful earthquake expected in the next 1,500 years. And they’ve got to do it all without destroying the habitats for fish, birds, or other wildlife which still call the San Francisco Bay home.
It all adds up to an impressive high-tech engineering project. Take a look in this video, produced by Michael Lennon with sound by Fernando Cardoso.
See Also:
- Gallery: How to Build an Earthquake-Resistant Bridge
- Bridging the Future: Behind the Scenes at the Bay Bridge …
- When a Bridge Becomes a Lifeline
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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Video: Inside the $7 Billion Bay Bridge Construction Project
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Tags: Bridge, bridge-becomes, dylan-tweney, Exclusive, Gadget, place-the-road, Projects, Road, Suspension., wildlife |
No Comments »Hung Star Hates Shoes, Loves Vibram FiveFingers
Author: Matthew Baker
On the set, he plays a down-on-his-luck schoolteacher who turns to prostitution to make ends meet. Off the set, Thomas Jane wears the Vibram FiveFinger foot-gloves that have become a geek trend.
Jane, who says filming his many sex scenes in HBO’s Hung are “about as exciting as wrapping a dead fish,” joins Google cofounder Sergey Brin, lifestyle hacker Tim Ferriss, and even the editor of Wired.com’s Gadget Lab in his admiration for the goofy-looking, ugly, but oh-so-comfortable foot coverings.
As Jane explains, going barefoot engages more of the muscles in your foot and leg, enabling each of your toes to articulate separately and giving you better balance, more ankle strength, and possibly a more injury-free gait.
After taking heat for showing up to film premieres and other public affairs in completely bare feet, Jane switched to the Vibrams and hasn’t looked back.
We doubt that the Vibram FiveFingers will stop the gossip rags from commenting on his feet. To all you gossip writers out there, here’s a phrase tailor-made for this story: freaky plastic gorilla feet.
See Also:
- To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes
- Vibram FiveFingers KSO and Classic Running Shoes
- Vibram FiveFingers on GeekDad
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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Hung Star Hates Shoes, Loves Vibram FiveFingers
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Hung Star Hates Shoes, Loves Vibram FiveFingers
Author: Antonio Pierce
On the set, he plays a down-on-his-luck schoolteacher who turns to prostitution to make ends meet. Off the set, Thomas Jane wears the Vibram FiveFinger foot-gloves that have become a geek trend.
Jane, who says filming his many sex scenes in HBO’s Hung are “about as exciting as wrapping a dead fish,” joins Google cofounder Sergey Brin, lifestyle hacker Tim Ferriss, and even the editor of Wired.com’s Gadget Lab in his admiration for the goofy-looking, ugly, but oh-so-comfortable foot coverings.
As Jane explains, going barefoot engages more of the muscles in your foot and leg, enabling each of your toes to articulate separately and giving you better balance, more ankle strength, and possibly a more injury-free gait.
After taking heat for showing up to film premieres and other public affairs in completely bare feet, Jane switched to the Vibrams and hasn’t looked back.
We doubt that the Vibram FiveFingers will stop the gossip rags from commenting on his feet. To all you gossip writers out there, here’s a phrase tailor-made for this story: freaky plastic gorilla feet.
See Also:
- To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes
- Vibram FiveFingers KSO and Classic Running Shoes
- Vibram FiveFingers on GeekDad
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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Hung Star Hates Shoes, Loves Vibram FiveFingers
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Adorable Walking Robot Sets Distance Record
Author: Tyler Evans
A four-legged robot nicknamed “Ranger” has set a distance record, walking 14.3 miles before it ran out of juice.
That amounts to 108.5 laps around the 1/8-mile indoor track at Cornell University’s Barton Hall — or 65,185 steps of Ranger’s spindly metal legs.
The robot’s journey took it 10 hours, 40 minutes and 48 seconds, using about a penny’s worth of electricity for each 3 miles it traversed. Although several humans accompanied it for parts of its stroll, Ranger was never touched by human hands during the journey.
Earlier versions of Ranger walked just 1 kilometer in 2006 and 9.07 kilometers (5.6 miles) in 2008.
Ranger’s steps are coordinated by 6 on-board microprocessors, but the robot’s steering is done by remote control. The “eyes” and “ears” on the robot are not sensors, but foam padding, designed to protect the robot in case of falls.
The research team that built Ranger was aiming for distance, not speed. By comparison, Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, an eerie quadrupedal robot built for carrying 300-pound loads, set the previous robot walking distance record of 12.8 miles. But BigDog is loud and frightening, while Ranger is quiet and kids love him (at least, one kid appears to).
See below for more photos and a video showing Ranger’s long walk. And for details and more photos, see the Cornell Ranger 2010 page at Cornell.edu.
Jason Cortell, Lipeng Yuan, Matthew Proudlove and Fatemeh Hasaneini accompany Ranger as it rounds the curve on an indoor track.
Humans Jason Cortell (on cart) and Lipeng Yuan may be at the limits of their endurance, but Ranger walks on.
At the end of the marathon walking session, Ranger and Jason Cortell take a much-needed break. Somebody call Beer Robot!
Top photo: Ranger completes a lap around the track, accompanied by Fatemeh Hasaneini, the 6-year-old daughter of one of the students who worked on the robot.
Photos and video courtesy Cornell University.
See Also:
- Wired 14.01: The 50 Best Robots Ever
- Why NASA Is Sending a Robot to Space That Looks Like You
- Jan. 25, 1979: Robot Kills Human
- Robot Band Backs Pat Metheny on Orchestrion Tour
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter. And don’t overlook the world-dominating plans of Wired.com’s own Beer Robot.
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Adorable Walking Robot Sets Distance Record
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Tags: Cornell, dylan-tweney, humans-jason, jason-cortell, Research, Robotics, Robots, University |
No Comments »Amazon: E-Books Outsell Hardcovers
Author: Alexander McQueen
Kindle e-books are outselling hardcover books by almost 50%, according to Amazon. For the past three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 dead-tree books. Paperbacks are not included in these figures. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:
Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books—astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.
As reported by my silver-tongued editor Dylan Tweney over on Epicenter [ED: flattery will get you nowhere], this has accelerated in the last month, with Amazon shifting 180 Kindle copies for every 100 hardbacks, and this is due to the price drop which saw the Kindle go from an expensive $260 to an affordable $190. Breaking the magic $200 mark has caused Kindle sales to rocket. Bezos again: “The growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189.”
While the “growth rate of unit sales” is far too cryptic a metric to go by (note that the actual sales have not tripled) it shows that people are ready for e-books and e-readers, if they are priced right. It also shows that they completely disregard the big advantage of the paper book: buy it and it is yours. Whereas a Kindle book is pretty much still the property of Amazon, and can be deleted from afar whenever it likes, a paper book can be lent, resold and used to prop up a wobbly table.
The same limitations never held up the iTunes MP3 store, however. And the fact that you can read your Kindle books on almost any platform certainly helps to hide these problems. One thing is certain: with the number of e-book-capable screens we carry around today, it won’t be long before the paperbacks also fall into a minority market.
Kindle Device Unit Sales Accelerate Each Month in Second Quarter [Amazon. Thanks, Kinley!]
Photo: Charlie Sorrel
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Amazon: E-Books Outsell Hardcovers
