gadgets Archives - Page 8 of 14

Jul 23

This tiny portable wearable mouse lets you universally control all your gadgets with gestures

One wearable to rule them all…

What VANZY offers is best described as the future of Human Interface. Conventionally, we used keyboards and mice, then we used touch-sensitive displays. However, now, VANZY lets you control all your devices with their hand gestures, sort of like Tony Stark. Designed to sit on your finger like a ring, VANZY is an Air Mouse and a motion-sensing controller that gives you advanced controls over all your devices. You could swipe or perform gestures to move slides in a presentation, increase or decrease volume while listening to music, skip the intro on Netflix shows, play games, or do a variety of other things. VANZY’s ring also works like a computer mouse or trackpad that allows you to use it as a conventional cursor controller on your laptop or tablet, sort of like a wearable mouse. You can even control elements in VR, and potentially even use the VANZY to keymap some words, making it quite literally the ultimate input device for any gadget you have… and it’s small enough to fit around your finger.

Designer: CoX Space

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $129 (31% off). Hurry, for a limited time only.

About as small as a ring, VANZY comes with a 9DoF sensor that allows it to perform high-quality 3D spatial recognition and an advanced chipset that allows it to recognize as many as 7 different gestures across multiple software and on Windows, Macintosh, Android, and iOS devices. The premise behind the VANZY is simple – in a world with multiple devices that you control by touching and tapping with your fingers, why can’t your finger just be a mouse instead, working like a wand to operate any device it’s connected to? To that end, VANZY works with phones, tablets, and even laptops via Bluetooth, letting you operate them intuitively by waving your hands, or use the trackpad on the VANZY to control them more precisely.

The finger-worn ring works in two ways – either by recognizing movements and gestures, or by allowing you to navigate your device via the trackpad on top of the VANZY. The trackpad works just like the touch surface on your TWS earbuds does. You can keep the mouse functions by touching and dragging your thumb; left touch to left-click, right touch to right-click, and swiping for scroll-down/up on the VANZY. As far as gestures go, VANZY recognizes common gestures like swiping left, right, up, down, circling clockwise, anti-clockwise, and moving forward (like you’re pointing in the air).

Morning Routine – Turn your finger clockwise or counterclockwise to adjust the volume on your earbuds without taking your phone out first.

Move the Desk to your Fingers – Thumb control over an air mouse for all of your devices.

At Work – Perfect companion for lectures, presentations, and meetings. VANZY gives you precise control, even from a distance.

For Content Creators – Makes the discomfort of swapping between devices a thing of the past. Just use your finger.

Watching

Jul 22

Guardians Gadgets and Goodies by Gregg Jacobs

Whenever Disney opens up a new attraction, particularly an E-ticket, there will invariably be an avalanche of related merchandise available. Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind, which opened this past Memorial Day Weekend at Walt Disney World’s Epcot, is no exception.

The items range from standard to cool to quirky (Star Lord helmet, anyone?). Today we’re going to take a look at some of the standouts, and I’ll give a tip on how to buy them without waiting in a long line.

Without further ado, here are a few of the items that grabbed my attention.

Let’s start with clothing. Anyone of my generation remembers having a Members Only jacket in the 1980s, and I believe that style is back, at least in the form of the bomber jacket worn by Peter Quill/Star Lord in the Marvel movies.

You can be 80's cool with this Star Lord faux leather jacket. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.
You can be ’80s cool with this Star Lord faux leather jacket. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

You can have your own version of the jacket, made from faux leather, as per Disney. I know I’m an old ’80s geek, but this one is actually kind of cool. Adults can have one for $99. There’s also a children’s version for $79.

As usual, there are also several variations of T-shirts available. The one that stood out to me is kind of simple.

T-shirt with logos you see all over the ride. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

It features symbols of the ships from the ride with the heading, “Spaceships,” and says Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s yours for the somewhat steep price of $36.99.

For our limited edition merch collectors, there are a few things for you, too.

Pin collecting and trading isn’t at the fever pitch it was a few years ago, but some, like me, still like to grab a few that remind them of something special. For annual passholders, you can again get your ’80s geek on by buying this limited edition pin.

There's a limited pin to honor the ride opening date. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.
There’s a limited pin to honor the ride opening date.

It looks like the cassette mix tape you know you all made in 1984, and on the front, it says “Launched 5-27-22” in honor of the ride opening date. It doesn’t have an edition number that will be sold, but grab it soon, because Disney could pull it at any time.

Also in the limited time only category is the Guardians Magic Band.

The Guardians magic band is available for a limited time. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

The band is black with a star field that reminds you of the ride, the Guardians logo and images of the spaceships. It’s, again, available for a limited time and costs $39.99, in line with other “specialty” bands.

Getting back to basics for a moment, there are of course the normal assortment of T-shirts, mugs, and key chains. Nothing wrong with that and in this particular case, will give Disney props for making them interesting. For example, there’s a mug with funky design.

This mug could have been used in

Jul 22

The 7 coolest artifacts & gadgets stored away inside ‘Warehouse 13’

Without a history-spanning treasure trove of artifacts to line its musty, dusty shelves, Warehouse 13 (streaming all month long on Fridays as part of July’s nostalgia-bound SYFY Rewind) would feel like a pretty barren and boring place. It’s the artifacts, after all, that give the magic-sleuthing series its raison d’être; the stuff that makes an unassuming giant metal shed in windswept South Dakota far, far more than the sum of its rusted, rickety parts.

We’re not gonna lie: There’s really no way to rank the relative greatness of all the (sometimes literally) killer artifacts that crossed our fearless agents’ paths over the course of five seasons and 64 insanely imaginative episodes. Artifacts are the show’s sci-fi lifeblood, and nearly every Warehouse 13 episode comes packed to the gills with magical relics both important and insignificant. Some of them — like Ferdinand Magellan’s Astrolabe — are seriously high profile, serving as season-spanning plot devices; while others appear only in fleeting moments as comic-relief afterthoughts…usually just to mess up the workflow for Artie (Saul Rubinek) and the gang, who have a bad habit of casually leaving them lying around.

But in a show that’s all about whipping the unexplained into safe, securely-stored shape, a handful of artifacts still stands out in our memories — even nearly a decade on from Warehouse 13‘s 2014 series sign-off. Here’s how we rate our favorites, with a friendly reminder from Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) about how to listen to your vibes whenever something in the immediate vicinity feels just a little bit off: “When something has no explanation, then the explanation is there’s an artifact involved!”

7: Harriet Tubman’s Thimble

In series lore, Harriet Tubman’s thimble once belonged to the famous Civl War-era activist, imbued from the start with the power to infuse light-bending qualities into the garments she sewed for escaped slaves fleeing oppression via the Underground Railroad. But a pinky-sized device that can fool people into thinking you’re someone else can come in pretty handy in the present day, too — especially if you’re up to no good. Helena G. Wells (Jaime Murray) had exactly that in mind when she debuted the magic-infused thimble early in Season 2, though it would go on to pop up in later episodes, after HG was on friendlier terms with the gang, as a useful good-guy tool.

6: The Tesla

Eddie McClintock as Pete Lattimer with the Tesla gun in WAREHOUSE 13 Episode 410 “We All Fall Down” . Photo: Steve Wilkie/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Our heroes wouldn’t get very far without wearing a standard-issue enemy neutralizer at their hip, and when you’re up against specters, spirits, and mad scientists from the restless past, no ordinary weapon will do. Carrying the prestige of a Nikola Tesla pedigree, the Tesla serves as one part stun gun and one part Men In Black-style memory eraser, wiping the minds of hapless

Jul 21

Time to update all your Apple gadgets ASAP

Yesterday, Apple released a bumper pack of updates, with everything from iPhones and iPads to Apple Watches and even the Apple TV and the now defunct iPod Touch needing to be updated.

On the iPhone and iPad front, we get iOS 15.6 and iPadOS 15.6. From the release notes, these might seem like minor updates that could be avoided.

After all, the release notes for iOS outline four patches:

TV app adds the option to restart a live sports game already in-progress and pause, rewind, or fast-forward
Fixes an issue where Settings may continue to display that device storage is full even if it is available
Fixes an issue that may cause braille devices to slow down or stop responding when navigating text in Mail
Fixes an issue in Safari where a tab may revert back to a previous page

Dig into the security notes, though, and it’s a different story. Here we see over three dozen patches, making this pretty huge and important update.

Even the Apple Watch, which gets updated to WatchOS 8.7, gets “improvements,” as well as bug fixes and over two dozen important security updates.

For you Apple TV users, you get TVOS 15.6, which, along with over two dozen security updates, also comes with “general performance and stability improvements.”

There are also slew of updates for MacOS too. Monterey is up to 12.5, Big Sur gets a bump up to 11.6.8, and there’s a security update for Catalina users.

Oh, and there’s also a Safari update that contains a whole raft of bug fixes.

Given the volume of security fixes here, it’s highly recommended that you update your devices as soon as possible.

Don’t know how? It’s easy! Check out our instructions for updating all of your Apple devices here.

Jul 21

Russia Replaces Disappearing Western Gadgets With Chinese Brands

Chinese smartphones and home appliances are Replacing major Western brands that have exited Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday.

January-June 2022 results analyzed by the Marvel Distribution IT supplier showed at least seven Chinese smartphone brands leading sales in Russia, according to Kommersant.

Tecno, Infinix, Realme and Xiaomi showed more than 100% year-on-year growth.

Realmi alone doubled sales from under half a million units in January-June 2021 to more than 1 million at the same time this year.

Electronic retailers reported that sales of individual Chinese smartphone brands including Tecno saw up to twentyfold increases in recent months.

Meanwhile, the share of Apple and Samsung smartphone sales in Russia declined by 14% and 15%, respectively.

Overall smartphone sales in Russia declined by nearly a quarter and totaled 10 million units in the first half of 2022, according to Kommersant.

President Vladimir Putin, who ordered troops to attack Ukraine in February, signed legislation last week legalizing so-called “parallel imports” into the country to maintain supplies of Western goods despite Western sanctions and brand exits.

The scheme removes penalties for importing cars, clothes, raw materials and other foreign products on a government-approved list without permission from trademark owners.

Analysts interviewed by Kommersant said they expect well-known Chinese brands to cement their leadership in the Russian market.

“Chinese tech brands will occupy up to 90% of the entire market in Russia,” Alexander Surkov, head of Russia’s GS Group advanced device designer and manufacturer, told the outlet.

“Afterward, they’ll start creating their own ecosystem, which will ultimately further strengthen their position,” he said.