GadgetMETER - Meet The Coolest Trends » Tutorial – How To

DIY Touch screen gloves

Sarah — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:13:30 +0000

With everything being about touch screens lately it only makes sense that eventually the problem of using gloves would come up. It’s cold outside, you’re wearing gloves, your iPhone rings, and you have to take the gloves off to answer it because otherwise the screen won’t register the change in capacitance between the screen and your finger in order to execute the command you are trying to give it.
See, that’s how touch screens work. The human body is a conductor of electric current, and when you touch the screen of a capacitive touch screen device it detects the distortion of the electrostatic field (apologies to those of you who know this already, but I’ve found myself explaining it to several of my friends recently who have iPhones but know nothing about how they work).
I’ve heard there are special gloves on the market that you can use to solve this problem. But why purchase a whole new set of gloves (expensive ones probably) when yours are just dandy?
There is a solution. A really really CHEAP solution, that takes just the tiniest bit of DIY spirit.
There is a whole how-to article on Instructables.com, so I won’t go through the steps here. But the gist of it is that you sew a little conductive thread (yes, there is such a thing) into the tips of the fingers of your gloves. It completes a circuit with your flesh and blood finger, and viola! You can now use your touch screens without taking off your gloves.

Now go and check out all the other fun stuff you can do with conductive threads, you crafty DIY nerds you!

Also, if you don’t want to order a whole spool of thread, you can order just a few feet of it from here

Via Coolest Gadgets

Show Desktop in Windows 7

Jay — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:33:21 +0000

I found this little trick playing with Windows 7′s new Task Bar and thought that everyone knew it. But my fiancee was struggling this evening trying to find a way to recreate the Show Desktop icon. Even Lifehacker had a complicated process to re-add that functionality. So I figured I’d post this little tip in case anyone else needed to know how to show the desktop a la the old Vista/XP functionality.

(in the screenshot below, my task bar is oriented on the left hand side of my screen.)

See that little bar that’s in the area of the time/date display circled in orange? Just click that and you’ll immediately get your desktop, with all other windows minimized. It’s that simple.

Want a Google Wave Invite? We have some!

Quang Ly — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:58:46 +0000

Google Wave Invite

Google Wave is a hot topic now. It is Google’s ambitious project for next generation unified real-time communication and collaboration tool. I finally got my invite and can now invite up to 8 others. I’m giving them away so if anyone is interested contact me through the web form. It even works on the iPhone!

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Google Voice Quick Reference

Quang Ly — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:07:34 +0000

Google Voice Quick Reference

Google Voice is really quite an amazing service with a lot of features – for free. Granted if you have a smart phone with browser or near a computer to manage your calls. For those of you still sticking to your dinosaur phone lacking an Internet browser, this Google Voice Quick Reference is for you. Just print it out and put it into your pocket. I didn’t even know some of these features were available such as conversation recording. Managing Google Voice features is now whole lot faster.

Via TechCrunch

Transfer Your Mobile Number to Google Voice

Quang Ly — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:02:18 +0000

Transfer Your Mobile Number to Google Voice

I’ve been using Google Voice since it was owned by Grand Central. It is a great platform for managing free calls, SMS, and contacts with intelligence. Now Google Voice lets you port your mobile number from your carrier to Google as well. This way, your voicemail is accessible from the cloud. By allowing Google Voice to manage my voicemail, it solves my issue with AT&T which prevents me from receiving voicemail notifications. Once you receive a voicemail, you can be alerted a number of ways by transcribed email or SMS text messages.

Google Voice can let you have a single phone number that automatically rings to your mobile, work, home and other phones based on rules and settings. For example, calls from your kids will ring all numbers while office related contacts only ring your work number.

The process to move your carrier number to Google Voice requires a few steps. However, it is very worth it in the end.

Via TechCrunch

Dropbox Online Storage and iPhone App

Quang Ly — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:06:06 +0000

Dropbox Online Storage and iPhone App

Dropbox is an easy to use online file storage that syncs your files across all your computers. I installed it recently and must say it is very intuitive, easy, and fast! You simply go to their website, create and account, and then install on your computer (both Windows and Mac compatible). You can then select your drop box folder to by synced. Files or folders that are in your Dropbox folder are then synchronized online. The performance is great. When you make a change, Dropbox sends the “delta” only to the server thus making the change very quickly. You can also access your files through the website.

The free version begins with 2 Gig of storage space with an additional 1 Gig by referring friends. There is also premium paid version which offers much more.

Dropbox recently released an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. This new iPhone app will let you get access to all your Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud. This is great for people who complain that the iPhone does not offer local file storage. Dropbox offers this and more with automatic sync with their cloud!

Dropbox can also let you share files and folders to anyone in the cloud. The iPhone app also lets you upload pictures and video (with iPhone 3GS).

In just a few days, Dropbox reached over 2 million users. Impressive.

When is Google’s rumored GDrive coming? Google???

Google Docs Now Convert Images to Text

Quang Ly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:29:01 +0000

You can now use Google Docs to perform OCR image-to-text conversions when you upload high-resolution files. It is a nice newly added feature from Google (and of course it is free)

For 3rd party webapps or services that uses Google Docs, they can use this URL parameter to accept JPG, PNG, and GIF files for conversions. Keep in mind this is still in beta.

Tell us what you think of Google Docs OCR performance. Was it good for you?

Google Docs OCR Convert Images To Text

Via Life hacker

AT&T Introduces A-List for Free Unlimited Calling

Quang Ly — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:04:08 +0000

AT&T Introduces A-List for Free Unlimited Calling

AT&T’s recently announced A-List plans on September 20, 2009. This calling feature lets customers talk with up to five people on any network for free, including landlines. The service is very similar to T-Mobile myFaves, which provides free and unlimited calling to customers’ five favorite people. The A-List feature is available on individual Nation plans that cost $59.99 or more. FamilyTalk customers with plans costing $89.99 or more can choose up to 10 people to talk with free of charge.

Want even more free calls beyond what AT&T offers? Add your Google Voice number to your A-list so now you can talk to anyone in North America without using your minutes. Google Voice acts like a conference call with the number you want to talk to (incoming or outgoing). The call with Google Voice is free which connects you to the number you want to talk to. When someone outside your network calls your Google Voice number, your Google Voice then redirects that call to you. So now the conversation is between your AT&T number and Google Voice. If you want to make a call outside your network, call your own Google number and sign into the Google voicemail system, you’ll have the option to place a call. Just press 2 and enter the number. You can also visit Google Voice mobile on your phone.

So what are you waiting for? Log into www.att.com/alist now and add your out of network numbers for free unlimited calls.

Google Push Email for iPhone Now Available

Jay — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:50:41 +0000

Google Push Email and Calender Sync

Dammit. I just spent $2.99 on an app to give me push Gmail on my iPhone and then Google goes and adds that capability through Google Sync. Damn you Google, for making what used to cost money free. Details at the Google Mobile blog. Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting me.

If you have GSync already set up on your iPhone, all you have to do is go to the Exchange entry and activate the Mail option. Simple!

Warning – the Google mobile blog servers are apparently mobbed right now, cause performance is slow slow slow.

UPDATE: In the 20 minutes since I activated this service, I’ve noticed three things.

You don’t get a popup alert on your screen when new emails come in. This could be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view. You will get a buzz indicating new mail (if your iPhone is set up for that).
There is a definite lag between receipt of email and Google pushing it to your iPhone. It’s not huge but it can be a couple minutes. I’m curious as to if this is due to the newness of the service or if it’s normal lag due to using Exchange. It’s no different than what sometimes happens with the Blackberry, so unless you’re OCD about your email you probably won’t notice it.
My Yahoo push email has apparently never worked properly and for whatever reason I do not get my Yahoo mails pushed to my iPhone. I only noticed this because of how Google’s push works. Luckily I don’t care about my Yahoo accounts, since they serve as repositories of spam and junk emails for various signup lists. Plus all my porn user names and passwords.

How To Fix AT&T iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Alerts

Quang Ly — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:39:38 +0000

iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Fix

One of the most frustrating and surprisingly under reported issues is with AT&T and iPhone Visual Voicemail notifications. When you receive a voicemail on your iPhone, an alert appears and you can play your voicemail as if its a song. There is now a solution!

Since the iPhone 3GS was released, some customers experienced lack of alerts for voicemail (me being one of them). I recently found a fix for it while I was researching tethering for 3GS. Apparently, tethering your iPhone may cause this issue.

So here’s the fix. Navigate to Settings → General → Network → Cellular Data Network and within the Visual Voicemail section add “acds.voicemail” into the APN field. Your visual voicemail will now work once again.

CAUTION: This fix does break the tethering. You can’t have voicemail notifications and Internet tethering work at the same time.

Via Apple Blog

Google Voice Now Fowards SMS To Email

Quang Ly — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:55:49 +0000

Google Voice Now Fowards SMS To Email

One of the most popular feature requested from Google Voice was the obvious forward inbound text messages to email. You can now receive incoming text messages to your email. Furthermore, you can even reply from email as well. Users previously could respond to the Google Voice text message on their phone but email forwarding was previously not an option.

Now, once we can have Gmail push to our iPhones then I can cancel the ridiculously priced text messaging plan from AT&T.

Via TechCrunch

Make Free Calls to Canada with Google Voice

Quang Ly — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:17:25 +0000

Make Free Calls to Canada with Google Voice

Google Voice now allows you to make free calls to Canada from within the continental US. Previously, you can only make free calls within the US with your Google Voice number.

You can make the call by logging into mobile apps , or by dialing your own Google Voice number from one of your phones and selecting option 2 to place a call. You can also install GV Mobile for a jailbroken iPhone from the Cydia store. GV is now free and can utilize your phone’s Contacts.

Review – AutoStitch Panorama Generator

Jay — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:00:39 +0000

I recently returned from a family vacation in Puerto Rico. Aside from having a great time and seeing some great sights, I was able to play around with an iPhone app I’d installed some time ago. I say “play around” but really the app became a core part of my vacation photography. AutoStitch is one of the most impressive photography apps I’ve seen on any platform, iPhone or otherwise.

You may remember my review of an app called Pano. AutoStitch one-ups Pano by removing the need to manually align subsequent photos to create the panorama. Before I go into detail, let me show you a couple of the pics it created. (All panoramas have been reduced to 60% of their original size to help them fit better on most screens. Click on the images to see them in their full glory.)

The image quality is not bad at all, considering I took these using the iPhone 3G’s junky camera. This app actually made me want to upgrade to the higher resolution/quality of the iPhone3GS, because I think the same pictures would have turned out even better.

If you recall, Pano used its own interface to the iPhone’s camera to do its thing. You took a series of pictures that overlapped guidelines that Pano provided. While I originally really liked Pano, I found it really difficult to use in real life because it’s tough to get the overlap Pano needs to make its panorama. I also found that Pano was slow to snap and save successive images, making picture taking a pain. AutoStitch solves both those problems.

When you launch AutoStitch, you are greeted with a very simple screen.

You have your list of photo folders plus the iPhone default Camera Roll. I wound up using mostly my Camera Roll as my source (I’ll explain why later). When you select a folder, you get a thumbnail view of all the pictures in the folder.

You just tap on two or more pictures to begin the process. Each picture you tap on gets added to the “Photos to Stitch” area.

You can remove pictures from the stitching area by just tapping it. Once you’ve selected your set of pictures, you tap the Stitch button to start the process. To show you the output, here’s the three pictures I’m stitching together:

You can get a sense of how those three pictures might overlap to create a single image, no? Well so can AutoStitch, because here’s the output of its manipulation of the above three images.

(Click on the image to see it in full size). Pretty impressive, no?

AutoStitch doesn’t use the iPhone’s camera directly. Instead, you snap pictures using the Camera app and then just select them in AutoStitch to generate the panorama. This makes picturetaking blazingly fast. The iPhone’s camera app is pretty quick to take and save pictures, so you can snap off a series of images to stitch together in no time. (This is why I say you’ll probably use the Camera Roll most of the time – you just snap pictures into the Roll and then select them for stitching. I recommend you do this quickly after taking the sequence – it becomes difficult to remember which images went with what panorama if you let too much time pass.)

Another benefit of AutoStitch is that you’re not limited to just six images like Pano. Instead, you can use as few as two or as many as 20 to create the final frame. AutoStitch recommends that you let each picture overlap by at least 30% to ensure the best results, but I didn’t really pay much attention to that after my first few stitches. I just kind of did a fast pan-and-snap and trusted in the app to do its thing.

Once AutoStitch creates the panorama, you can crop the image to remove top/bottom fragments that result from AutoStitch doing the overlapping necessary to generate the image. The crop area suggested by AutoStitch can be overridden by you but I found that I didn’t really need to do that – the app did a great job of finding the maximum size photo that could be extracted from the stitched images.

As my final showoff of the app, take a look at this gallery of thumbnails:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

And here’s the final output:

I’m totally impressed by AutoStitch and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to create panoramic images from iPhone snapshots.

Klingon Language iPhone app

Sarah — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:21:06 +0000

Part two of my Star Trek inspired gadgets: The Klingon Language iPhone app.
Yeah, seriously!

I have not personally gone so far in my Star Trek geekiness as too try to learn the Klingon language. But I know a few people that have (they’re not fluent but they have a few key phrases memorized, which makes them hard-core Trekkers in my book).

This is the iPhone version of the Simon and Schuster paperback of the same name.
The app contains all the functionality of Ultralingua dictionaries in addition to the vocabulary and grammar developed by Marc Okrand, the linguist responsible for creating the Klingon language for Star Trek. It also has a suitably “Star Trekkie” GUI. So combine that with the fact that the iPhone already looks like a state of the art Tri-corder, you should feel like you really are a student at Star Fleet Academy (even if you are just sitting in your cubical at work on your break time).

And don’t worry about the pronunciation. It includes a listen-and-repeat function so you don’t cause a difficult situation when you accidentally say “Your mother has a smooth forehead” when you meant to say “Today is a good day to die!”.

FEATURES:
-Interactive, two-way bi-lingual text from English to Klingon and back
-History of searched dictionary terms
-Verb conjugation
-Number translation (critical for targeting)
-Listen-and-repeat audio format by author Marc Okrand teaches you basic grammar and pronunciation
-Text timed with the Conversational Kiingon audio for an added learning aid
-Searchable audio – find the exact portion of the lesson you want via standard playback tools, a handy scrollbar or complete text search
-Audio phrase pronunciation with volume control

In case you are worried about the dictionary’s credibility, rest assured it has been tested and approved by the Klingon Language Institute
For a sample check their site for some commonly used phrases and pronunciation guide!

You can get the app on the iTunes app store for only $11.99.

via iPhone Application List

Google Custom Search

Quang Ly — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:55:36 +0000

We are excited to let you know that we have finally implemented Google Custom Search to provide you with a better user experience. It took us a few tries but we happily made it!

You won’t see much difference in the user interface but our search results are now indexed by Google rather than WordPress (the wonderful blog platform we use).

Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

To see how to you can incorporate Google Custom Search on your site, visit http://www.zparacha.com/how-to-incorporate-google-custom-search-engine-with-adsense-into-your-wordpress-blog. They did a great job explaining it.

Cheers!
Your folks at GadgetMETER

How To Hack Your MacBook To MacTablet

Quang Ly — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:26:27 +0000

MacBook To ModBook

Do you want to turn your MacBook to a MacTablet? Well, now you can! You will be amazed by the guys at TechRestore with what they can do. For a limited time (March 6, 2009), you can have them turn your MacBook to what they call a ModBook for $1149.

For more information on their service, check out TechRestore

Via – GadgetGrid

Kill Air Polution. How To Grow Your Own Fresh Air (TED 2009)

Quang Ly — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:10:56 +0000

Three Plants that Give You Better Indoor Air

Commercial buildings account for nearly half of the total global energy use. That’s quite a lot! There is a growing fundamental shift in the way buildings are designed and built these days to reduce waste and impact on the environment and become more self sustaining. GreenSpaces is the new state of the art “green park” that is demonstrating this. Their philosophy is via technology, cultural changes, and design that energy consumption be reduced from 40% to 10% in an economically feasible manner.

Meattle’s presented at the TED 2009 conference detailing the large-scale project with success, using thousands of plants for hundreds of workers. The three plants: Areca palm, Mother-in-law’s Tongue, and a “Money Plant” (no Green jokes please…) can be used to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, remove organic compounds, and generally filter and freshen the ambient air. The average person usually requires a minimum of 11 total plants, and depending on the enviroment and sunlight availability. Check out the detailed slides from his TED talk:

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air – TED 2009 Talk

View more presentations from jaymeattle. (tags: plants greenhouse)

Fight Salmonella! How To Grow Your Own Peanuts!

Quang Ly — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:07:10 +0000

Fight Almonella Grow Your Own Peanuts

Do you want to rage the war against Salmonella? Don’t you just hate Peanut Corporation of America subsidiary in Texas to allow this to happen? Well fight back by growing your own peanuts!

Peanuts have a lot of health benefits to prevent cardiovascular disease as part of a healthy diet and regular consumption. It has magnesium, folate, and vitamin E. You can grow a couple of pots in the house so you will always have fresh peanuts year round. So say goodbye to salmonella! You will also help the environment by reducing waste!

Follow this guide here http://www.peanut-institute.org/040703_PR.html

Via GadgetGrid