OK, so by now I think everyone knows I love the Humble Indie Bundle both in terms of the games and the concept. Take that basic concept, move it to the iPhone and you have … the Indie iPhone Holiday Bundle! The idea is simple, as taken from their website: Six independent iPhone game creators have joined forces to raise money for Child’s Play, a charity that helps sick kids play their favorite games while they’re in the hospital. We’ve put our most popular games on sale for just $0.99 each, some for the first time ever, and a third of all our sales (after Apple takes their share) will Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Image courtesy of PRNewswire Technology makes our lives easier, less cluttered, and above all just more fun. But in the case of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) , you may be getting your credit card stolen and not even know it. Some current credit cards and passports now sport an RFID chip, which makes payments quicker and easier by only having to swipe your card past a scanner. My local convenience store has them for certain cards and I know a lot of gas stations on the east coast have speedpass or another assortment of key chain type scanner. As great as dropping an extra 30 seconds from your purchase time, you may be putting yourself at… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I read an article recently about self-publishing photo books. I have quite an archive of images on slides, black and white and color negative film and digital. My collection spans more than 25 years professionally and I even have some images I shot as a youth. The article got me to thinking about perhaps sitting down and pulling some of my best work and putting together a photo book that I could be proud to display or give as gifts. My usual holiday procrastination for gift shopping led me to find a note on the Apple website that states if I submit a book order by Dec. 23 it will ship by Christmas. I don’t have… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I’m not really sure what to say … I had heard that Steam was having a year-end sale, but with everything else they have been doing my expectations were not all that high. Well … no matter what expectations I might have had, THIS sale has exceeded them! As the screen capture above indicates, between the various daily deals, full-week specials, combo packs and publisher deals there are literally thousands of deals going on. Here is more from the Steam news item: The Steam Holiday Sale is on now through Sunday, January 2, 2011. Gamers may save up to 80% on select titles, with daily and week-long savings on featured titles, publisher game Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Even as things wind down for the year there are a few newsbits tricking out worth noting. Not surprisingly one of them is due to yet another massive update on the iTunes App Store. We already know that an Infinity Blade update is coming, and I have yet to check the app store and NOT find at least 5-10 updates on any given day this month! So let’s get right to it! Humble Indie Bundle #2 Now On Steam! I had just announced Humble Indie Bundle #2 a couple of weeks after noting the original Humble Indie Bundle from May being added to Steam… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

B&N bought Fictionwise/eReader almost two years ago. In that time we’ve seen the NOOK become a hit, and B&N turn eReader’s digital rights management into the default system for their own branded store. Meanwhile, Fictionwise and eReader are shambling around like zombies; still going through the motions of selling books, but without any fanfare or bells and whistles. A year ago eReader and Fictionwise were still selling ebook readers, and while I thought it was an odd plan at least they were doing something! With the advent of the “agency model” for pricing, Fictionwise’s membership plan disappeared, dropping a discount plan that was very lucrative to loyal customers. There’s… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

My wife is the Vice President of our middle school PTO, and therefore last Friday night (while Travis was out winning a state championship) I was chaperoning the middle school dance. Aside from all of the expected drama and tears, I noticed that the hip word for everything with the 8th grade boys was ‘ghetto’. Of course, for me that doesn’t have positive connotations, but for them … it means super-cool. I wondered when it came into use and how it had gone from the meanings I associated with the poor areas of World War II Warsaw through the inner city poverty implications into the new meaning as ‘best thing ever’. So I searched… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

When I was struggling to upload and read one of my work files or other–I don’t even remember the format any more!–I asked your humble Gear Diary team, gently and calmly, if they could recommend an app that would allow me to do so.  (“Help!  What app do I use?!!”)  The response came quickly, and was equally calm and gentle (“Goodreader.  You haven’t installed it yet?”)  And so I installed it on my iPad, and we’ve been good friends ever since, Goodreader and I. One of the nice things about the latest upgrade of Goodreader is that it included a bunch of cool upgrades, like nicer zooming, and support for iOS’ new wifi printing capability… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Aluratek is announcing the new Bump line of wireless speakers including a neat little boombox style MP3 player, wireless speakers and more. First up is the AWS01F MP3/FM Radio Boombox.  This includes a wireless speaker and you can connect up to 6 of these speakers to the same unit.  The back of it has a SD card slot, USB port for a USB drive and a 3.5mm input for attaching any device that uses a 3.5mm output.  It is available for $99.99. Next is just the boom box without the speaker, the AMS01F.  It has all of… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I’m not quite sure what message this gift would send but it sure is one of the most unique gifts ideas we’ve come across. For just $13 you too can give a cherished loved one a full year of… Toothbrushes. Yes, every 3 months for an entire year your loved one will get a new toothbrush. (That’s makes a total of 4 toothbrushes for those who are numerically challenged.) Best of all, they won’t have to think about replacing their toothbrush since a new one will just come in the mail. Here’s the story behind this service- How many times has your dentist told you to replace your toothbrush every three months? Continue reading on Gear Diary …

What do you get when you mix a BIG LCD monitor with a slim, but zippy, tower pc? Why today’s Gear Deal of course! Yup, today our Gear Sponsor brings us Dell’s Vostro 230 Slim Tower and a 23.6″ Samsung LCD Monitor for under $440! The Dell Vostro 230 is a slim, dual-core Tower PC running at 2.8GHz. In its base configuration it includes 3GB DDR3 1333MHz memory, a 320GB Hard Drive, a DVD+/-RW Optical Drive and GMA X4500 graphics. The system runs Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit OS and comes with Microsoft Office Starter 2010, a 15-mont subscription to Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services and is, of course, bundled with… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The relatively new Hard Candy Case company has been turning out new device cases at a pretty good clip lately. In fact, since the company opened for business a year ago this month that have moved quickly enough to now offer an extensive portfolio of products with more being released on what seems to be a monthly basis. We’ve looked at a number of Hard Candy’s offerings in recent months. Today we will be looking at the latest case for the iPhone 4 and then giving away the review units to three lucky Gear Diary readers… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I like beer. This is a fact that I didn’t realize until about two and a half years ago, when I first began dating a man who was a home-brewer and all-around beer connoisseur. I’d never really been much of a beer drinker before, so I never had much need for a bottle opener; that has since changed. There are so many fantastic brews available — none of which come with twist-cap, so being able to safely and easily remove a bottle cap when offered a new brew is a necessity. Therein lies the rub: I don’t carry a Leatherman or a Swiss Army Knife, so I don’t always have a bottle opener handy… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I talked about EA’s massive $0.99 sale on more than 70 games last week … but wait, there are more! First off, G5 Entertainment’s Daily Sale is still going on. And now we have a bunch more! Coladia Games – On Sale Dec. 20 – 23 I reviewed Destination: Treasure Island here, and Coladia Games is now having a sale on that game and both the iPhone and iPad versions of Secret of the Lost Cavern for $0.99 from now until the 23rd of December! Secret of the Lost Cavern Secret of the Lost Cavern HD Destination: Treasure Island Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The Christmas season brings out the kid in most of us.  Luckily I have two little boys to cover my excuse to check out all of the cool toys.  One of my long time favorite toys are remote-controlled vehicles.  My whole life I have been a sucker for cars, trucks, planes, boats, virtually anything that can be controlled with a remote control.  A few Christmas’s ago, I was accused of buying a remote control car for my young sons just because I wanted to play with it.  I will admit the boys were a bit young for the toy so they had to have help driving it.  Other than that, I am pleading the… Continue reading on Gear Diary …