In a continuing effort to save us from ourselves, the good folks at Google have rolled out a new product aimed at offering late-night drunken emailers the restraint they may be unable to muster for themselves. Behold: Mail Goggles.

The basic idea is that after the user sets up a set of parameters for when the application is enabled, they must complete a series of five math problems within 60 seconds to gain access to the send functions of their Gmail account. Kind of like a breathalyzer for your keyboard. Depending on your natural math abilities, you can vary the difficulty from 2nd grade math to grad school. The default time window is Friday and Saturday night, from 10:00 pm until 4:00 am, but you can change that to allow for Wednesday Megarita happy hour at the Big Sombrero or Monday night softball if you’d prefer.

Think of the embarrassing situations that could be avoided by the use of a little forethought before hitting “send.” Mail Goggles is still in beta coming out of Google’s labs, but maybe next they’ll find a way to stomp out late night drunken texting as well.

The reputation you save may be your own.

The number one complaint I hear from new adopters of the latest God Phones is the problem they have with dropped calls. Battery life issues can often be fixed with firmware updates, but when you’re out of range, you’re out of luck.

In an attempt to help address this problem, the folks at ARC Wireless Solutions have released the latest version of the Freedom Blade wireless signal booster for PDAs, cell phones and laptop wireless access cards.

More info after the jump.

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My girlfriend and I eat a lot of spinach. [ed. note-this is my official entry into the 2008 "Most Unexpected Opening Sentence in a Tech Review" competition.]

We joined a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, last year and receive a bushel of whatever is fresh off the farm every week from spring until fall. A side effect of this is the fact that until the succulent peppers and tomatoes start to ripen in July we often find ourselves buried under mountains of greens-chard, kale, collards, spinach and the like. We’ve learned to blanch them, sautée them, bake them and eat them raw in salads.

It also means that my girlfriend spends a lot of time checking her teeth for hangers. For years, we had a secret routine where she would turn to me and say with a big smile, “How’s your grandmother?” The correct answer is always, of course, “Deceased.” But the question is actually a cue for me to check her teeth and respond either “fine” or “she’s having a little trouble” and point to the corresponding part of my own grillwork where there might be an offending stray bit of greenery. An aside-When you’re pointing to your own face to let someone else know that they have a sesame seed in their teeth or maybe a stray bit of nacho cheese in the corner of their mustache, do you point to the same side or the mirror image? Just curious.

Anyhoo, it looks like technology has put me out of another job. Because my girlfriend doesn’t need to inquire about the health of my dead relatives anymore. I’ve been replaced by The Echo Mirrored Screen Protector.

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You wouldn’t know it by my lunchtime eating habits (now where shall I get my lo mein today?), but my girlfriend and I like to consider ourselves as at least pseudo-gourmet chefs. And let me tell you, it’s hard work to whip up mess of Pseudos without overcooking them. Especially if you have to keep track of multiple burners and an oven.

Luckily, Tuscan Concepts and your local Target Store have teamed up to help solve that particular problem. The fix is after the jump.
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As we see a convergence of media formats, everyone is looking for solutions to carry their content on the road with them. One of the drawbacks I see of micro PC’s and MacBook airs is their unsuitability to play dvds to entertain me while I’m traveling. Yeah, I’m selfish that way.

Toast 9 Titanium – Burn. Watch. Listen. Share.

Roxio, the makers of Toast have evolved their product to respond to the needs of Mac and iPhone users who desire access to many different formats of video across various platforms. Read what they have to say below:

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If you know anything about me, you know I’m lazy. L-a-a-a-a-z-y. Brush my teeth while standing at the urinal watching SportsCenter lazy. I prefer to call myself a multi-tasker.

So I was impressed when I found out from the good people at www.tekzen.net that they’ve come up with another alternative for people like myself who don’t want to go to the trouble of typing in long url’s into their blog posts and Twitter Tweets. The product was developed by a friend of mine, Jackson Miller. True to his mission, Jackson has shortened his professional name to “Jaxn.” You gotta like his consistency of message.

So what makes urlzen.com better than the leader in the concatenation space, tinyurl.com? Find out after the jump:

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Every now and again, the GearDiary team gets a press release that leads to a round of “No way that’ll ever work!” emails being tossed around our “reply all” circle. Then invariably, I’ll be the one to volunteer to try it. Maybe it’s just the dreamer in me. My little world is full of butterflies and unicorns, too.

And it takes a dreamer to believe in a product like a telescope adapter for an iPhone. Especially when you read the claims on the website of its features:

- makes the super wide angel
- the larger luminous flux
- the higher visual acuteness
- good for color reduction
- detachable from the crystal case
- 6X optical Zooming

Now I don’t know if it makes angels wider or reduces color, and I’m pretty sure I don’t know what luminous flux is, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if the darned thing doesn’t work!

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I bought my girlfriend an iPhone for Christmas and ever since we’ve been trying to find the perfect case for her. I tested several different models from the good people at pdair.com, always a “go-to” source for iPhone swag.

Specifically, we looked at:

The black leather flip case

The pink leather flip case with snap

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With the approach of the 3-day Memorial Day weekend that unofficially kicks off summer, I figured it would be a good time to take a peek at a tool to encourage some of us pasty-white technophiles out into the actual outdoors. Although my legs have often been described as “cadaverous,” I realize that I probably need to break down and put on some shorts and get some fresh air for a change.

But when I’m in the great outdoors, I don’t want to be totally disconnected from the grid and I want to know where I’m going. Enter the Universal Bike Mount Holder for iPhone / iPod / PDA / GPS from USB Fever.

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Something strange is happening to me. I was having lunch with a friend last week when he suddenly looked up from his plate and said, “I just realized that you drove up to meet me at a vegetarian restaurant driving your new hybrid car with your bicycle on a trunk rack on the back. Who are you and what have you done with my beer-drinking buddy, Chris?!”

Sure, part of my attitude change has come from the upward spiral of fuel costs. I just couldn’t afford to drive a Tahoe anymore so I traded it in on a Camry. I really think that the Greening of America is getting to me. I’m not a fanatic about it, and I don’t know what my carbon footprint is. But when I encounter a choice between doing something that is more socially responsible than the same old, same old, it’s becoming more natural (no pun intended) to take the greener option.

The folks at CREDO Mobile are trying to make it easier to go green with regard to your telecommunications. So if you’re a lazy environmentalist like me, take a look at their latest developments along with an update to my review of the CREDO Solio Charger after the jump.

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I’m no Apple-basher. Sure, I use a Dell at work and an HP laptop at home, but my girlfriend is on Apple laptop number three in the past four years, and I went to college near Cupertino in the second half of the 1980’s. If you went to Stanford, you just accepted that you were supposed to pay three grand for a Mac SE and an Imagewriter. So I did.

iPod devotee? Yup, that’s me too. At last count there were four different models in my household, and iTunes should send me a Christmas card.

But there’s one thing that most people won’t admit for fear of waking the sleeping Jobs-Bear. So I’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room. Brace yourself fanboys (and fangirlz.)

The earbuds that come with all Apple products stink.

There, I said it. They are uncomfortable. They don’t fit in most human-sized ears. They fall out when you’re exercising, jogging or even walking. They hurt after thirty minutes of use, and they probably excessively damage your hearing because you have to turn them up so loud to get any bass response at all.

Remember those four iPods I own? I’ve purchased at least twice that many aftermarket headphones in an effort to improve my listening experience. You can’t swing a dead cat around my house without tangling Tabby’s claws in a set of white earbuds tangling themselves up on some random flat surface in my office.

But the good people at Comply have come up with a way to improve the fidelity quality of the iPod aural without completely abandoning the phones that Steve built. Behold, the Whoomp! Earbud Enhancers.

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Sometimes, an item shows up in my mailbox for review that I REALLY want to work well. Maybe the description of the item just sounded so cool that I hope it lives up to the hype. Other times I’m rooting for the product because I believe in their mission and am rooting for the company to succeed. But in the end, the product has to actually work for us here at GearDiary to recommend it to you, oh gentle reader.

The Solio Solar Charger from CREDO Mobile is exactly this kind of gadget.

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Oh gentle reader, I’ll admit it. I’ve been struck by a wee case of reviewer’s block of late. I am in the midst of testing several new gadgets which I am excited to share with you all, but I also have some products that are real dogs. And like my Charm School teacher always said, “If you can’t say something nice about somebody…”

But in the interest of fair and impartial reporting, GearDiary readers deserve the straight scoop. Heck, we’ve even shared the trials and travails of a potentially devastating server crash. We all came out stronger on the other side of the crisis, but it was the big UGH.

So it’s time to jump start my idling cranium. I figured it would be best to start with a product that doesn’t promise to do much but that perfectly accomplishes what it does promise. And it looks pretty darned cool doing it.

Behold, the Bevy from www.mophie.com.

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I was in Vegas earlier this week. But not for the same reason as some people I know. I was there to celebrate New Years with my girlfriend and do a little gambling.

I’m a video poker fan. Somebody once told me that playing video poker is like getting paid to take a standardized test every eight seconds. That’s a good thing for me, because I was always good at standardized tests. It used to infuriate my math teachers that I was getting C’s in calculus class while I was finishing in the top 3 in the state on the Mathlympics, or whatever the heck they called them back in the Dark Ages. I figured if they were nice enough to put the answer in amongst the multiple choices, I should be able to find it somewhere.

So after graduating college, I parlayed this talent into a job teaching for The Princeton Review. I really enjoyed that job, teaching high school and college kids how to excel on the PSAT, SAT, LSAT, GMAT etc. It wasn’t exactly an academic pursuit; it was more like learning the techniques to finish a video game. I recognized that if colleges were really going to use the results of a tricked up test to decide who they were going to admit, it was only fair that the folks willing to learn how to beat the test deserved to move up the waitlist.

Now my former bosses have leveraged the latest technology to automate the process. More details after the jump.

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I’ll admit, I have it a little better than most cubicle dwellers. I actually have an office. With a window.

Of course the window just looks out into a bigger room at somebody else’s cube. And they quit recently, so I’m just staring at an empty chair and a blank computer monitor. Maybe I should burn up some carbon credits by leaving a screensaver of the outside world up on my ex-coworker’s screen so that I can pretend to have some contact with the outside world.

Or I could just dress the barren space up with some decorations from the good people at Cube-Star.com. They offer everything you need to turn your own personal space into a place you can be proud to call home for 8+ hours a day.

Check out some of their fun stuff after the jump.

From cubicle decor

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