Archive for the ‘lists’ Category

The Mobile Decade: Greatest Gadgets From 10 Years of Innovation

Others may look back on the years 2000 to 2009 and remember elections, wars, global warming and Michael Jackson, but for gearheads like us, this was the decade that mobile tech grew up.

During the first decade of the 21st century, we saw a whole slew of new mobile technologies capture the public imagination: the smartphone, the MP3 player, the USB stick, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, 3G wireless, pocket camcorders, digital SLRs and more.

Thanks to these inventions, people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence. Where we stand now, notebooks outsell desktop PCs, people spend more on mobile phones than on landlines, and portable game consoles outnumber the ones plugged into your TV cabinet.

The products on this list exemplify that trend. While not every gadget here is portable (and many of them are gaming consoles — sorry, we can’t help it if the most exciting hardware innovations are poured into the videogame industry), the arc of the decade clearly reflects an increasingly mobile world.

From the PlayStation 2 to the Kindle 2, what follows are the best gadgets of each year in the “aughts.”

2000: PlayStation 2

Console gaming in the late 1990s kind of sucked. Sure, there was the Nintendo 64, the Sega Dreamcast and, of course, the original Sony PlayStation. But none of these rigs possessed the trifecta of deep game libraries, awesome graphics and multimedia functionality.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, Sony dropped a 100-megaton bomb it dubbed PlayStation 2.

Rich catalog of fun titles? Check. Top-notch graphics? Double-check. Multimedia functionality. Hello, hat trick. The PS2 also flaunted backward compatibility for OG PlayStation games, and it had easily upgradeable memory. Even mass shortages at launch couldn’t hamper the system’s popularity: Folks shelled out more than a thousand bucks for them on eBay.

A decade later the PS2 is the highest selling console in history with more than 138 million units sold. And it’s still growing, even though it’s technically obsolete. Case redesigns, price drops and seemingly unstoppable game-library expansion have virtually assured that the console will remain fresh for years to come. Hell, we just might ask Santa for a slimline PS2 this year. – Daniel Dumas

5 Fun Gadget Hacks to Tackle on a Rainy Day

Avast! There be a mighty tempest rocking the good ship Gadget Lab. OK, it’s just raining really hard in San Francisco and most of the Bay Area. But what better time to check off all those do-it-yourself gadget projects you’ve exiled to the bottom of your to-do list?

Sure, copious sunlight makes it hard to concentrate on backing up your data. But when it’s pouring and there’s nothing better to do than geek out, tasks like beautifying your iTunes library, turning your Mac Mini into the ultimate media center, or hacking your netbook can be a dorktastic blast.

Even if the skies are clear in your city, here’s a list of tech-centric activities you can take on when the weather is being a harsh mistress. Trust us — they’re a lot more fun than playing Monopoly or constructing a magical butterfly garden.

1. Straighten Out Your iTunes Library With TuneUp

Anybody with a sizable iTunes music collection is bound to have a bunch of albums with incorrect or ungrammatical song tracks (e.g., Track 01, Track 02, “here comes the sun,” etc). TuneUp is an awesome plug-in that hooks into an online database and analyzes your incorrect track titles and automatically renames them for you.

The TuneUp plug-in automatically launches with iTunes, and you drag a list of incorrect song tracks into the TuneUp menu to begin automatic renaming. The only drag is that it takes about 5 to 10 seconds per song, so if you have a ton of improperly named tracks, this can take a pretty long time.

Other than renaming songs, TuneUp can also identify any albums in your iTunes library that are missing cover art. Then, it will download that art from its database and automatically tag it onto the respective album.

TuneUp isn’t 100 percent reliable, especially when it comes to dealing with super-indie tracks, but it successfully fixed up about 80 percent of my iTunes library, which contains about 5,000 songs. Not bad. TuneUp costs $20 for a one-year license, or $30 for a lifetime license.

2. Turn Your Mac Mini Into the Ultimate Entertainment Box

Ever dream of a TV set-top box that offered every type of media you can imagine? An ultraversatile media machine doesn’t really exist yet on the market, but if you own a Mac Mini, you’ll like this solution. Sporting a gorgeous UI, Plex Media Center is a Mac app that serves your movies, TV shows, music and even content from websites such as Hulu and Netflix. It supports a large number of file formats, so even digital pirates will be pleased. Just install Plex on a Mac Mini, hook up the Mini to your TV and you’re gold. You can access and control Plex with your Apple remote, so forget about that shoddy keyboard-and-mouse experience.

Similar to TuneUp, Plex uses metadata from the internet to automatically retrieve art to accompany your media. In the screenshot above, Plex provides that slick Seinfeld background. One caveat: It’ll take some time to make Plex look just right. Plex can be pretty particular about just how you organize your files in order for it grab metadata for your media files. That means you’ll have to do lots of renaming of files and folders. Example: To load that Seinfeld menu, Plex required arranging the folders as such: Movies–>Seinfeld–> Season 3. Still, it’s worth the time and effort.

The best part? Plex is free.

3. Hack and Mod Your Netbook

Netbooks are popular not just because they’re so small and convenient to carry around everywhere; they’re surprisingly hackable. There’s a wealth of literature on the web that will teach you how to hack a netbook to run Mac OS X, or install mods such as an HDTV tuner, GPS or Bluetooth.

We know you dig the idea. Wired.com’s How-to Wiki has some tutorials to get you started: Run Mac OS X on a Netbook and Turn a Netbook Into a Net Jukebox.

4. Throw Your Hard Drive in the Cloud

… the digital cloud that is the interwebs, of course. Indeed, cloud storage is the hip way to manage your data (unless you’re a T-Mobile Sidekick customer). By throwing your files into a cloud-based service such as Dropbox or Box.net, you’re automatically backing them up to protect against data loss. Not only that, you can enjoy access to your files from any computer with an internet connection. For example, on my office computer, I can listen to my entire iTunes library, which I copied into Dropbox.

The words “cloud storage” are pretty yawn-inducing, but once you get past that and start experimenting with the tech, it’s pretty fun. After trying out cloud backup services, you might consider throwing your notes into Evernote, an online note-taking service. Evernote has apps not only for the Mac and Windows, but also for several smartphones including the iPhone and RIM BlackBerry. When I find a recipe I like while browsing the web with my computer, I paste it into Evernote, hit Sync, and then on my iPhone I launch the Evernote app — and there’s the recipe. Pretty sweet.

5. Set Your iPhone Free

Apple plays gatekeeper for its iPhone, enforcing stringent control over what types of third-party software appear in its App Store. This, of course, has resulted in some questionable app rejections, most of which blew over after a short duration. But Apple crossed an invisible line when it rejected the Google Voice app, a service that enables users to rely on a single phone number to ring all their phones, while also delivering the gift of free text messages and voicemail service, as well as cheap international calls. Fortunately, there’s a way around Apple’s restrictions: Jailbreaking the iPhone.

Jailbreaking (i.e. hacking) the iPhone gives you access to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, which offers a Google Voice app among other wares Apple would forbid. Want to tether your iPhone? There’s a Cydia app for that. Want to download files larger than 10 megabytes on the 3G network? Yup, there’s an unauthorized app for that, too. Jailbreaking is also the first step you must take if you wish to unlock your iPhone to work on a different carrier, such as T-Mobile.

The drag about jailbreaking is that it just isn’t very convenient. Every time Apple releases a software update, you lose access to Cydia, and your unauthorized apps temporarily disappear. Then you must jailbreak and re-download those apps again. (If you paid for a Cydia app the first time, you don’t have to pay to download it again.) But if you actually have free time, having a jailbroken iPhone can be largely beneficial.

From our experience, the best tutorials on jailbreaking can be found at iClarified, and if you need more visual aids, plenty of YouTube users have posted tutorials as well. What are you waiting for? Jailbreak away!

What are the rainy day activities you enjoy with your gadgets? Post your suggestions in the comments below.

See Also:

• How-To (Theoretically) Graft an In-Line Remote into Any Headphones …
• How to Hack a White Noise Generator to Help Your Baby Sleep
• Tired of Your Netbook? Turn It Into a Pet Cam

Photos: William Hook/Flickr, michaelhilton/Flickr, 60 in 3/Flickr

Well Hello Five Windows Task Manager Alternatives [Windows]

Want to branch out a bit from the default Windows Task Manager tool that’s probably helping keeping you abreast of the goings on of your PC right this moment? Look no further, for Lifehacker is here with another glorious top five list on that very subject! [Lifehacker]

Monstrous Mechanical Marvels: 9 Enormous Gadgets

When it comes to phones, notebooks and portable game consoles, smaller is nearly always better. But sometimes a gadget just needs to be really, really huge.

True to their size, gigantic contraptions accomplish tasks enormously useful to our everyday lives. Take for example the Bagger 293 (above), a 31.3-million-pound bucket-wheel excavator capable of mining 220,000 tons of brown coal in a day. And if the only cost-effective way to get the Bagger 293 to the mine is to drive it across the Rhineland countryside, so much the better. Because people love to gawk at gigantic machines.

Ever seen a giant wind turbine? Any idea what a crawler transporter does? How about a building-sized solar furnace? Read on for a glimpse at some of the biggest, baddest “gadgets” on Earth.

Bucket-Wheel Excavator
Towering 310 feet high and weighing 31.3 million pounds, the Bagger 293 holds a Guiness World Record as the largest and heaviest land vehicle in the world. The machine, shown above, looks and sounds intimidating, but its operation is actually quite simple: 18 gigantic buckets are attached to a giant wheel; when the wheel rotates, the buckets scoop up earth and dump it onto a conveyor belt. Each bucket is capable of holding 1,452 gallons of earth — about the equivalent of 80 bathtubs. The Bagger 293 now resides in brown-coal mine in Hambach, Germany, awaiting the day when it will again be free to roam the Earth.

Photo: RWE