(while not actually our bedroom, a pretty close approximation) This is the conversation that used to go on in my house a few years ago: Me: Hey Sarah, would you like me to buy you a Kindle? Sarah: No, I don’t need one, look, I have all these books piled up on my nightstand. This is the conversation that went on earlier this year: Me: Hey Sarah, would you like me to buy you a Kindle? Sarah: No, I don’t need one, but can I borrow your old Kindle once in a while? This was the conversation a few weeks ago: Sarah: Hey, I looked at all those Kindle Summer Deals…can you… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Totally obvious statement: new and better-than-mediocre summer entertainment is scant and disappointing. We all know this. Yet each and every summer I, for one, tend to whine about the paucity of decent TV and movie releases. If you’re with me in craving something new and fresh, allow me to introduce you to something you may not have seen yet (and that’s streaming on Netflix!): The IT Crowd. This British half-hour comedy centers on an IT department in a seemingly pointless and often absurd corporate environment.  Shenanigans and tech-related humor begin when Jen, a woman who knows nothing about technology, talks her way into the position of IT department manager. This may seem pretty simplistic… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Bigger is better when it comes to computer monitors and today’s Gear Deal is BIG! How big? 27″ WQHD big! Yes, today’s deal brings us the 27″ Dell UltraSharp U2711 LCD Monitor featuring a WQHD 2,560 x 1,400 resolution IPS panel, 6ms grey-to-grey response time, 80,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio, an 8-in-1 card reader, 1 USB 2.0 upstream port, 4 USB 2.0 downstream port, capacitive-touch switches for setup and more. The monitor accepts multiple video inputs including HDMI 1.3 port, a DisplayPort port, two DVI ports, and, of course, component and composite ports. Normally $1,099, with this deal you can get it for just $824. It will even ship for free. Gear Deal… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

As we prepare for the historic final Space Shuttle mission, many of us who grew up with Apollo and then the advent of the Space Shuttle are feeling a bit nostalgic. If that feeling describes you, or perhaps you just love keeping track of the Space Shuttle as it courses through space above the Earth, then the new app GoAtlantis is just what you need! According to an article at SmartPlanet: A new iPhone and iPad app, GoAtlantis, will allow you to do just that. It will track the space shuttle in real time and, using your phone’s locating function, will tell you when the shuttle will be in your area Continue reading on Gear Diary …

One of the big claims of the new Sony Vaio S-series laptop is that not only does it deliver great performance in a svelte package, but combined with the sheet battery can deliver up to 15 hours of usage between charges. That requires certain settings and while I definitely plan to put it to the test very soon, I have also had the opportunity to test the Vaio S-series in other usage scenarios. There are two in particular that I found particularly useful – ‘Gaming Mode’ and ‘Normal Usage’. Each of those tests the S-series in different ways and therefore has different settings. In this article I test out my ‘Normal Usage’ scenario -… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you’re in the vicinity of New York City, AND you’re hankering for an ebook reader, great news! Kobo is creating a pop-up store in the Grand Central Station Terminal. What’s a “pop-up store”? Trend Watching has a great definition:  If new products can come and go, why can’t the stores that display them do the same? Well, you guessed it, retail outlets increasingly do. From gallery-like shopping spaces with one-off exhibitions to mobile units bringing innercity-chic to rural areas, TRENDWATCHING.COM has noticed an increase in temporary retail manifestations around the world. We’ve dubbed this trend POP-UP RETAIL, as these initiatives have a tendency to pop up unannounced, quickly draw in the Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I have talked quite a bit about how the music you hear on the radio and see on the ‘top charts’ has less to do with actual tastes in music and more in massive quantities of money being dumped into making those songs and artists omnipresent and triggering the ‘if I don’t like X I won’t be cool’ … along with the well known fact that when our brain hears something enough it gets ‘stuck’ – even if we don’t like it. I have also written rather derisively about these so-called ‘songwriters’ who are pop stars. While I cannot state emphatically exactly what involvement these folks have in the process, suffice to say it… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you ask long-time gamers about the early days of the first-person shooter, they will likely divide things up as follows: – Mid 1992: the dawn of the era, with Wolfenstein 3D leading the charge. – Late 1993: Doom ushers in the era of the shooter. – 1995: Dark Forces brings PC gamers a 2.5D story-based shooter based on the popular franchise. – 1996: Duke Nukem 3D signals the end of the Doom era. But wait … didn’t I forget a year? What happened in 1994? For PC gamers, they simply kept on playing Doom. For Mac gamers, however, there was a revolution coming – they were about to get the best… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I have always loved the art of Jackson Pollock. What for many is the epitome of all that is wrong with abstract art, I find the opposite – I see deep inferences drawn in the lines strewn on the canvas. Yeah … there is something wrong with me – or is it the statistician in me seeing the beauty of physics at work? A recent study published in Physics Today looks at the scientific nature of Pollock’s unique painting techniques using quantitative analysis and finds surprising results: “My own interest,” said Mahadevan, “is in the tension between the medium — the dynamics of the fluid, and the way it is applied (written, brushed, poured…) Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Special Sale: SeV Travel Shorts 20% off! It is finally warm enough (and I have finally lost enough weight) to start wearing the SCOTTEVEST Travel Shorts I bought a few months ago. I LOVE them. They fit great, are super comfortable and, of course, they have the signature SeV pockets. Best of all, they are on sale! Here’s what SeV has to say about them- Shorts are not just pants without long legs. Ok, ok, so they are exactly that… but our shorts are something more… and something less. MORE: Going to the beach? 11 pockets for all your stuff. MORE: Going to the airport? Non-metallic belt so you don’t Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Today’s Gear Deal brings us the 15.6″ Dell Inspiron 15R. It comes with switchable lids which means you can change things up any time you want. It also ships with a variety of different configurations starting with a 2.1GHz Core i3-2310M “Sandy Bridge” processor for just $499.99. The base configuration includes 4GB DDR3 memory, a 500GB Hard Drive, Intel HD 3000 graphics, a DVD+/-RW, 802.11n, Bluetooth, an HD webcam and much more. If you need more power you can get a 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M. That price, after all the discounts, is just $649.99. And if you want even more you can get the high-end model with a Core i5 processor and Blu-ray. It… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Last week I wrote about Fieldrunners appearing on the Google Android Market for $0.99 … which of course turned out not to be true. Developers Subatomic Studios thought that $0.99 was simply too much, they wanted to offer the game for FREE on day one – something the Google Market doesn’t allow. But the Amazon AppStore for Android DOES allow games to launch for FREE and then go to a normal price – and that is exactly what has happened here. So today only you can grab Fieldrunners for FREE. One note – it is a WiFi only download! So head to Amazon’s AppStore for Android and grab Continue reading on Gear Diary …

One of the keys to Apple’s remarkable success with their iOS devices is the fact that they control both the hardware and the software side of things. Good software is nice to have. So is nice hardware. But when you put the two together; when the hardware is specifically designed to work with the software and the software is specifically designed to work with the hardware… now THAT is a combination worth speaking about. The result? Well just take a look at Apple’s numbers since the iPhone was first released. The same holds true for Neat’s organizational tools since they created both the receipt scanner AND the software that works with it. The result is… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

July is a month for camping trips and summer camps, and I’ve found an item that you might want to consider packing the next time you send the young ones off — a set of Glow-in-the-Dark Playing Cards from Useful Things. Think about the uses that your kids will find for a set of playing cards that are both glow-in-the-dark, and waterproof. Imagine your child playing cards with his or her cabin mates well after lights-out, and you’ll begin to see the usefulness of such an item; you’re providing a means for them to bond with their fellow campers! Or at least a means to make extra snack money, if they are any… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Sega and developer High Voltage Software combine forces again for a credible first person shooter (FPS) exclusively on the Wii.