Salon.com > Gadgets

Vacuum on the cheap

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:00:00 +0000

If I were buying a vacuum on a budget, I’d get the Panasonic MC-UL815. At $150, you get features and suction power equal to or better than that of more expensive models.

The key to the Panasonic's abilities is that it has a 12 amp motor and a HEPA filter–things many budget vacuums do not have.

What should someone look for in a budget vacuum or a vacuum in general? Full-size household vacuums (robots excluded) break into two categories: Canisters and uprights. Canisters have a long hose with a suction head. They’re great for getting into corners, but the hose saps power. An upright has a head attached to the body–a layout that is generally better at freeing dirt and sucking it up with power while remaining easy to maneuver around a floor. The best general-use models, budget or not, are uprights. Cordless vacuums are a waste of time too. By relying on a battery, the vacuum loses lots of suction power. You'll want a cord that's at least Look 25 feet long to keep from having to switch it between power outlets all the time, but more is better. For example, the top-end Dyson DC28, our pick for best overall vacuum, has a 35-foot cord.

Don’t lose all of your data

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:00:00 +0000

It's impossible to read tech journalist Mat Honan's tale of losing virtually all of his data -- iPhone, wiped; iPad, wiped; baby pictures of his daughter, potentially unrecoverable -- without feeling a chill. As he explains in Wired, security flaws at fly-by-night outfits like Apple and Amazon, combined with his own lack of extreme paranoia, all but invited a hacker who calls himself @Phobia to wipe Honan off the grid. Why did @Phobia do it? Just because he could.

Wired has posted a list of steps to avoid Honan's fate. Here are three that even cave dwellers can figure out:

Weird news of the day

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:41:00 +0000

JERUSALEM—It's the latest prescription for extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who shun contact with the opposite sex: glasses that blur their vision, so they don't have to see women they consider to be immodestly dressed.

In an effort to maintain their strictly devout lifestyle, the ultra-Orthodox have separated the sexes on buses, sidewalks and other public spaces in their neighborhoods. Their interpretation of Jewish law forbids contact between men and women who are not married.

Walls in their neighborhoods feature signs exhorting women to wear closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts. Extremists have accosted women they consider to have flouted the code.

A great all-around backpack

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Starting at around $100, the Kelty Impact 30 backpack offers comfort, durability and lots of clever storage. It's big enough for a weekend trip outdoors but isn't too big that you couldn't use it day to day in the city to haul stuff around.

If you’re a seasoned hunter, rock climber, survivalist or ultralight camper, move along: There’s are a ton of personal stowage and cargo cartage solutions out there that will be way better suited to your specialized needs than what I’ll be talking about here. If you're looking for a commute optimized bag designed primarily to hold a laptop, or something designer, this is not it.

This is a bag for light adventure that will still work well in an every day setting.Trust me: I had to wade through them for close to 14 hours online in order to find the Impact 30. This bag is a high quality backpack that'll work for them in most situations.

Now that we’ve got that sorted out, let’s talk basic backpacks.

An adventure for the iPad

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:27:00 +0000

Like Maud, I fell for text adventure games in the 1980s. They were exciting precisely because you couldn’t detect the boundaries and limitations of the world they constructed, and because it felt like you could navigate that world at will. If you turned left, you might discover a castle, while turning right would lead to a dark and menacing forest. Your choice!

But the earliest adventure games, like many of their graphical descendants, turned out to be a lot more constrained than they at first appeared. You could do “anything,” but somehow you always wound up looking for a crowbar or a box of matches so that you could execute some banal task that would ultimately give you access to another bit of imaginary space in which you’d have to perform yet another inane job. These games are fun in the way any puzzle can be fun, but they aren’t really stories. The best of the bunch, the game Myst and its sequels, could be gorgeous and absorbing, but not ever truly moving the way a novel or dramatic work can be. It was once fashionable to claim that games like Myst pointed to the future of storytelling, but the rudimentary stories offered by the vast majority of the genre are less compelling than the average folktale, let alone a play or film.

Shakespeare’s sonnets on an iPad

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Elizabethan sonnets are like fantastically complex little puzzle boxes made of words, crammed with extended conceits, puns, double meanings, shifting authorial personas and more. For that reason, Touch Press’ latest and predictably magnificent app based on Shakespeare’s poem sequence, The Sonnets, is both exactly what you need to better understand the sonnets, and a bit more than you need as well.

Touch Press also produced The Waste Land, still a benchmark in adapting a complex literary work for the iPad, so the expectation is for beauty and elegance of design and that expectation is more than fulfilled. The Sonnets features standard texts of the poems, with the option to toggle to a facsimile of the 1609 Quarto, the first published edition.

Apps you don’t have to use

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Apps are reaching an inflection point. Now that zillions of apps are available to serve every imaginable purpose, there are two ways for them to keep us interested. They can either melt into the background and do their jobs with minimum fuss, or they can force us to pay attention to them. Which option sounds better in the long run?

This is a story of two apps. One has evolved from an inconvenience to a convenience, the other has done the opposite.

Greplin: The Business of Friction

I loved Greplin. It provided a critical service better than any other app: It searched across everything. You logged into your various cloud things, your Gmail, your Evernote, your Dropbox, your Google Docs and Calendars, your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and it gave you a search box that helped you find anything in any of those places. It indexed over a million of my documents, messages, reminders and notifications, no matter how small. It was one of the handiest apps on my phone.

Visiting the Museum of Endangered Sounds

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:48:00 +0000

The Museum of Endangered Sounds, by Brendan Chilcutt, launched in January of this year and is a small treasure trove of sounds from outdated technology. For me, these are childhood sounds, sounds I haven’t heard in years. Clicking through the interactive GIFs, memories popped up: the excited anticipation I used to feel while waiting for my dial-up modem to connect, the noises of the Game Boy I loved dearly before my parents took it away, the Pac-man game my sister and I would play at the local Pizza King.

What’s the best cheap tablet?

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Google's Nexus 7 8GB is our new pick for best cheap tablet, pushing out our previous pick, the Kindle Fire. Yeah, yeah, of course, the $500 iPad is better. But at $200, the Nexus 7 is a great balance of performance and price for anyone not married to the Apple ecosystem.

Why would you get a cheap tablet? A lot of people think that tablets are not that useful, except for consuming media. And so a cheap tablet is an inexpensive way to get that done. This one makes even more sense if you're an Android phone user, and less sense if you're an iPhone or Mac guy. Again, if you can afford it and want a nice tablet, you only need to get an iPad. More on that later.

The revolution will be hand-held

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:02:00 +0000

I proudly call myself a progressive but as a parent of school-aged kids, I’m often surprised by how culturally conservative I’ve become. I scoff at my thirteen-year-old’s full-body obsession with the British boy band, One Direction. And when she calls the recent movie Think Like a Man or any film starring Kate Hudson a “great film,” I lecture her for probably longer than the movie lasts on why the popular culture she claims to have been moved by -- in point of fact -- is absolute and total crap.

Did I mention that I’m a screenwriter?

Although I also write in other genres, writing for and about film and television has always been the focus of my writing career. Both socially and culturally, the movie theater has served as the climate-controlled center of my universe. My daughter’s world, on the other hand, revolves around whatever small screen she happens to be holding in her hand. Until recently, this seemed to me a sign of the coming apocalypse. But I’m beginning to realize that it might actually represent something more positive -- something big and revolutionary in the smallest possible package.

World’s best vibrators

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

My favorite multi-speed vibrator for people just getting into sex toys is the Silver Bullet vibrator. It's only $10.

(Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume that if you're reading The Wirecutter for sex toy advice, you're just getting started. But we have more sophisticated recommendations later in this article, too.)

Electric vibrators are more than 100 years old. Yet they’ve only become mainstream in the past 15 years (thanks in part to the Rabbit being featured in a 1998 Sex and the City episode). And it’s only in the past decade that vibrators finally have some style rather than looking like hair dryers or cake mixers. In addition to adult bookstores, vibrators are now sold online as well as through women’s in-home sex-toy parties, drug stores, and retail chains throughout the U.S. Even Walmart sells them, albeit only tamer models.

The best portable hard drive

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 17:00:00 +0000

The Silicon Power Armor A80 is our pick for best portable hard drive because it has a rugged metal body and a fast USB 3.0 connection.

Portable hard drives are the most vulnerable of all digital storage options. They're always being tossed around despite containing sensitive moving parts unlike a memory card or thumbdrive. That's why after six hours of research and reading as many reviews as we could get our hands on, we're recommending one that's shock resistant and waterproof on top of being super fast.

$99 is a pretty typical price tag for a bus-powered, 750GB USB 3.0 drive, but what you don't expect in this price range is an anodized aluminum enclosure that meets US military specifications for water resistance under 3 feet of liquid for 30 minutes and shock resistance for falls from as high as 4 feet. Silicon Power also offers a generous 3 year warranty (Seagate and Western Digital both only offer 2 years of coverage). Another nice touch is a miniature USB cable that fits right into the casing. This way you won't ever leave home without a cable.