Smart and Silly- Start the Spring Semester Right!
With the glut and revelry of the 2009 holiday season firmly in the history books, most of us are looking to settle into 2010 and get back to “normal” life. For some that means work and for others that means school. Now, while we can’t convince your boss or professors that margarita machines or naptime are good ideas, we can offer up some suggestion that will make your days easier and hopefully even more pleasant than they already are.
There’s a good chance that at some point most of us have been confined to a small space, like a cubicle or dorm room. Small spaces have advantages and disadvantages, though admittedly most have more of the latter. It’s often necessary for items around you to pull double-duty, so a lamp that’s also a digital picture frame may be just the thing for your desk. Sungale’s lamp with LCD screen has a reasonably bright LED lamp and a 3.5-inch LED screen mounted on the base. The light itself is fairly unremarkable. The light is certainly bright enough to work or read by, even in a darker room, and the bendy stand is nice. The 18 LED’s are supposed to have a life-span of 30,000 hours, of course we haven’t used it anywhere near long enough to know if that’s true. The LCD for your photos also plays video. If you have no other options for audio, this is better than none, but there are many other small audio options that you may want to consider for your primary sound source. The picture is nice and crisp, and 512MB of space allows storage for a fair number of photos. Both JPG and BMP are supported, so for those who like to take photos in RAW be aware that you’ll need to compress them to put them on this viewer. Audio format is WMA and video formats are MJPEG, AVI, and MPEG4. Load this up with some good photos from the holidays, and send it with your favorite student or cubicle dweller, available from Amazon for around $90 or from Sungale directly.
Last year we looked at the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen, we liked the possibilities it presented for future products. Just a brief refresher, the Pulse smartpen records and links audio to what you write, using a special paper, so you don’t miss any part of what you’re learning. Much like we expected LiveScribe has recently released the 4G version, which is has considerable amount of storage compared to the 1G version from last year. Such upgrades were really necessary in order to support all of the applications that are now available. The format for both acquiring and using these application will be very familiar for anyone who has used an iPhone, and there should be a little something available for just about everybody. There are both free applications and paid applications, ranging from games like hangman (of course, what else would you do with a smartpen?) to reference guides for organic chemistry. While there have been few significant changes to the functionality of the pen, the addition of the applications and the increase in memory make us excited for this product all over again! The 4G version of this pen will run you $199.99, which is impressive considering the 2G pen was the same price a year ago! Smart pens are available directly from LiveScribe as well as online from retailers like Amazon.
