d°light Huggable Pillow
Posted by Evan A. Martin in Homeware on April 15, 2010
Available in white, pink, or gold, this unique pillow is probably one of the best night lights your going to find.
Want to cut down on the amount of light and electricity you use at night? How about the d°light Huggable Pillow that only uses four rechargeable AA batteries, or an AC adapter. After four hours it fades out and turns off. It would be a great gift to yourself or a friend, I could see myself using this for camping or reading a good novel before bed. The warm light would leave you in a good mood before dozing off. It’s made in Japan by Diana Lin Designs and made from warm colored LED lights, 100% polyester eyelash fabric and satin. Not a bad at just $159.00, it would be perfect for events like the 4th of July, and Earth Hour – next March 27th 2010. Take a look at it here.
Posted by Evan, for Riley Burton.
How much texting is too much?
Posted by Ben in Cell Phone on March 28, 2010
If your hands, specifically your thumbs, experience daily pains and sores, it might be time to put away the keyboard and pick up the phone.
Texting; the form of communication through words on mobile devices. Why do we text? Its not at all faster than making a phone call, and unless your a teenager, you probably haven’t mastered your phone’s mobile keyboard yet. The CTIA’s latest figures state that American’s with cell phone sent a over 740 billion text messages in just the first half of 2009. Do the math; that 4.1 billion texts daily, about 17 texts per person with a phone.
With more texts, fewer users were actually making phone calls, dropping the average call time from 3.13 minutes in 2007 to 2.03 minutes in 2009. Don’t get us wrong though, more and more minutes are being added to calling plans, and normal phone calls still take place on a daily basis. And with all those extra texting and voice plans, your bill on rose 2% this year to a$49.57 a month… and we don’t think most people have data plans at that price!
So how much is too much? Well if we consider that some don’t text, we can’t make our number too high. And with one 14 year old Florida girl sending over 35,463 text messages in a month (1,182 per day), we can’t make it too high either. Wireless companies usually charge around $10-$15 for about 200 text messages, about 7 texts a day. But for approximately $20-$25, you can get anywhere from 1000 to unlimited from your provider. At 1000 a month, you’d be sending 33 a day, just a little too much for those who would rather call. So what’s the magic number? We’d say 500 texts per month, about 17 per day. Any less and I’d congratulate you for actually using your phone for its intentions, but anymore… and I might not ever give you my number.
What Counts as a Hackintosh?
My Dell Mini 10v running a retail version of Snow Leopard. For $300 this is one of the cheapest and easiest Hackintosh's out there. But are you up for the challenge?
Also known as the OSx86 project, getting a non-Apple made computer to run any form of OS X is considered an accomplishment, and there’s even a name for your new machine: A Hackintosh. Officially, its against Apple’s Terms of Service to run OS X on hardware that wasn’t created by them, but wheres the fun in that? Now because it’s against Apple and what they believe, creating a Hackintosh isn’t for everyone, but if your a good sport, you’ll go buy the retail Leopard disc and at least reward Apple for a good operating system.
So do you have a Hackintosh? Do you plan on making one? Well I’ll share a key secret: there is no 100% guide to making a Hackintosh. Part of the challenge is picking pieces that are going to work in your machine, then you have to decide if your going to run a clean copy of Leopard or a modified version thats more/ less suited to your hardware. Kalyway, iATKOS and iDeneb are examples of modified Apple software thats been created to assist you in your journey. The advantage to running these modified versions are that your probability of success is higher, and most hardware-related errors can/ are solved in therse versions. On the downside, because its modified, it might not run just like a Mac, as a clean copy would. Its up to you which you choose, but if you can get a clean copy running flawlessly, your less likely to run into problems in the future.
A Hackintosh can be anything, in any shape or form. Seen above, you can see my Dell Mini 10v running a retail version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.1 to be exact!) and so far its been smooth sailing. The Dell Mini lineup is a small setup of netbooks that can run Leopard pretty dang well right out of the box, and for the few errors you encounter, some great guys (melkort and bmatlis I believe) created some great software to make the process much simpler. On another note, the desktop Hackintosh is probably the most popular as it saves you money and provides a great deal of hardware flexibility and choices when it comes to Apple’s selection.
Don’t get the the idea that running a machine like this is a walk in the park. Sometimes its just a matter of building a computer and running software the way it was designed, on the other hand, hardware and software hacking knowledge can and will be required to get your machine up and running. Its always a risk, but the reward is great.