Here’s one reason to continue paying $10 a month for your texting plan. ER Texting, Inc has a service that sends you a text message with a list of your local hospitals and their emergency room wait times. More
A new review of popular multivitamins found that almost a third did not contain the amount of nutrients claimed in their labels.
If you’ve been waiting oh-so-patiently for HP’s $49.99 WiFi Mobile Mouse to ship, take heart — the aforesaid critter is now ready to free up one more valuable USB port at your workstation. As mentioned before, this ain’t your mum’s wireless mouse, as it makes use of WiFi technology — you know, instead of the tried-and-true Bluetooth. In other words, this bad boy doesn’t require anything other than itself to connect. HP promises up to nine months of battery life, offers five programmable buttons, a four-way tilt scroll wheel and adjustable sensitivity. Just think — you can finally choose to keep those remaining Four Loko cans chilled without resorting to an inbuilt trackpad. Reason enough to pull the trigger, yeah?
Gallery: HP WiFi Mobile Mouse
Continue reading HP ships $50 WiFi Mobile Mouse, gives your Bluetooth radio a break
HP ships $50 WiFi Mobile Mouse, gives your Bluetooth radio a break originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
donniebaseball23 writes “Valve’s digital Steam service is going strong with 30 million active accounts, and now the developer has further boosted its offerings by adding free-to-play titles. Steam is kicking off its support of the free-to-play model with five titles (which will include in-game Steam exclusives): Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. Valve’s support of free-to-play shows just how widely accepted it’s become.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View the original here:
Steam Now Offering Free-To-Play Games
Some people buy name brand aspirin. Others buy generic, knowing it’s the same thing and thinking of the first group as chumps. To them you can now say, “Chumps! I make my own.” More
Don’t worry! It’s a whale shark. They’re filter feeders and are known for non-aggressive behavior toward human divers. Mauricio Handler captured this image off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where these sharks gather during the summer.
Link -via Super Punch | Photo: Mauricio Handler, National Geographic
Read More:
Snacktime
Toshiba’s SCiB (Super Charge Ion Battery) technology has long been the source of great hope and anticipation in electronics circles, but it’s never quite delivered the world-changing retail products that its marketing promised. Hoping to correct that in a big way, the company’s now hooked up with Mitsubishi to distribute said fast-charging cells in the taxman-friendly i-MiEV (to be known as Mitsubishi i in the US) and its taxi variant, the MINICAB-MiEV. How fast-charging, you ask? We’re told recharging will be done in 15 minutes for 80 percent, 10 minutes for 50 percent, and a mere 300 seconds for 25 percent. You’ll need a CHAdeMO charger to achieve such rapid revitalization rates, but those stations are sprouting up across the US now. There are other favorable qualities to Toshiba’s batteries, including “excellent charging and output” under very low temperatures, 2.5 times the number of charge / discharge cycles of regular lithium ion cells, and safer operation than most other alternatives. Check out the full PR after the break.
Toshiba SCiB to be used in Mitsubishi i-MiEV, recharge to 80 percent in just 15 minutes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 04:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Have a computer, Internet connection, and no Facebook profile? Now you’re the weirdo outcast. In a new study done by the Pew Research Center, collections of data from thousands of participants showed that people who use social networking services are now not only likely to have larger networks than those who don’t, but also have more close friends. The authors of the study don’t cite technology as the cause of our newfound friendliness, but those inclined toward social connections are now more likely to be online and networking than not.
For the study, Pew surveyed 2,255 American adults in October and November of 2010, and found that of 1,787 Internet users, 975 of them, or 47 percent of the total, use a social networking service such as Facebook (92 percent), LinkedIn (18 percent), Twitter (13 percent), or MySpace (29 percent). Pew followed up with a barrage of questions to detail how people used the services, and how their use correlated with the personal choices and aspects of their social lives.
Read the comments on this post
Read More:
Internet users now have more and closer friends than those offline
Those little cylindrical bottles may not look like much, but they contain an important package design innovation. Aptar’s “airless” cosmetics dispensers contain no rubber gasket sealing the product in and no metal spring to handle the return action of the pump: Instead some unnamed designers/engineers have slaved away to construct the four-part pump, seal and container entirely of plastic parts.
This has two significances: One, the airless design means every last drop of product can be evacuated, reducing waste. Two, the entire package can be easily recycled without the need for separation. As we saw in an earlier post on plastic recycling facilities, they are required to have special machines to separate the metal from the plastic.
Read more here:
Aptar’s Airless DuPont Packaging Award Winner Designs Out the Non-Plastic Parts
There are stand-up comics who do entire routines about trying to get a clamshell package open, and a couple of months ago we Tweeted a link to Quora’s “What is the worst piece of design ever done?” query, to which the most popular answer was Anita Schillhorn’s response:
Plastic clamshell packaging. Design should help solve problems. This packaging attempts to solve the problem of theft, but creates new problems that are far worse, principally irritating your own customers. It’s been the cause of thousands of emergency room visits, and there’s even a Wikipedia-approved term to describe the frustration you feel when confronted with an unrelenting piece of plastic between you and your product: Wrap rage.
It's no surprise that Procter & Gamble's Be Green Packaging was a Diamond Winner in the 23rd DuPont Packaging Awards.
See more here:
Procter & Gamble's Alternative to Clamshell Packaging Wins DuPont Packaging Award
