By Becky Stern, MAKE – January 04, 2011 at 01:00PM
Cool Hunting went inside the Hästens mattress production facility in Sweden to take a fascinating look at how horse hair, metal springs, and wool are combined to make “the best bed in the world.”
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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – January 04, 2011 at 01:00PM
We’ve looked at other disposable email services, like MeltMail and SpamBox, but TrashMail provides a huge amount of control over your disposable addresses and you can create them quickly, without visiting Trashmail, using a Firefox or Chrome browser extension.
Trashmail offers several features, but most notably you can customize your own disposable email address, specify the number of times that address can forward to you, and set an expiration date for the address as well. Trashmail also provides a browser extension for easier disposable address creation. Here’s how it works in Firefox:
The extension isn’t necessary to use Trashmail, but if you want the added convenience you can download it for free for either Firefox or Chrome.
Thanks for the tip, John P!
You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
By (author unknown), Core77 – January 04, 2011 at 12:15PM
Colloquially it’s called a pigskin, but the modern American football is in fact made of cow. Which you’ll see in the video below, shot at the Wilson Sporting Goods factory in Ohio.
As Kottke has pointed out, it is fascinating that just a handful–less than ten people–have produced every NFL footbal in the past few decades. I also found it interesting that seven of them are women, and wonder if the players of this all-male game realize that.
Out of all of ’em, I think Glen’s got the toughest job–check out the color of his hands.
By Tina, MakeUseOf – January 04, 2011 at 11:31AM
Whether you’re a nerd, a geek, a programmer, or just a regular person interested in technology, you should enjoy some serious humor, otherwise this world is very sad.
With this article you can also do something for your abs and burn off the excess Christmas treats. Start the New Year with a broad grin and lots of laughter. It’s healthy and contagious. Infect yourself with 50 hilarious geeky one-line jokes.
Get the CAPS LOCK joke on a T-Shirt (as Baby Tee) from the MakeUseOf T-Shirt store.
Get the Beta joke on a T-Shirt from the MakeUseOf T-Shirt store.
Does your belly hurt, yet? MakeUseOf has more funny resources:
What is your favorite geek one-line joke?
Image credits: NinaMalyna, nex999,
Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
By (author unknown), MacOSXHints.com – January 04, 2011 at 10:30AM
Installing a new OCZ Vertex II SSD in an old 2006 iMac really speeds things up (and is documented in photos here).
However, I was searching for ways to limit the wear of my SSD (since each cell has a limited lifetime with regards to writes). One solution was to store the Safari cache on a RAM drive which will only be written to disk at logout.
Several hints on this site describe a way to store Safari cache on a RAM drive. However, none seemed to work for me because:
Therefore, I created this Mac OSX application (which is actually a simple Bash script), which you can place in your login items which will create a RAM drive and store/restore …
By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – January 04, 2011 at 08:00AM
Windows/Mac/Linux: Your camera defaults to giving your photos a numbered name, with a file date that can be changed. AmoK Exif Sorter sorts, names, and moves your photos however you’d like—by focal length, date taken, aperture, width, or other criteria.
In other words, it’s a dream for both control freaks and highly organized photographers (who may be one and the same, but we digress). You can use AmoK’s tool as an in-place renaming tool, or copy or move files into new folders with new names, sorting, and other criteria. Need a folder with just your 3072-wide shots taken in January? That’s the sort of thing AmoK excels at.
AmoK Exif Sorter is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It’s a Java-based tool, so you’ll need Java installed to run it.
By Ross Miller, Engadget RSS Feed – January 04, 2011 at 07:00AM
Back in March 2009 at the iPhone OS 3.0 debut event, Apple’s Scott Forstall pointed out medical devices specifically as one of the more interesting class of peripherals that could leverage the new custom app interface capabilities. And while it’s certainly an interesting concept — keeping tabs on your general health from the comfort of your own home — we haven’t really seen it catch on (only a couple of products come to mind). That isn’t stopping iHealth; the company’s blood pressure dock, available today from its online store (we’re told it should be filtering through Apple’s own channels later this month) ties in with a specialized iPhone / iPod touch / iPad app to monitor and track blood pressure from the comfort of your home, where theoretically there shouldn’t be a stranger in a white coat making you extra nervous. In our brief time with the device, the interface seemed fairly intuitive and the whole process simple and not at all intimidating. The cost of entry is $99.95 for the hardware; the free app should be hitting iTunes today. Press release after the break.
Gallery: iHealth Blood Pressure Dock hands-on
Continue reading iHealth blood pressure iPod dock: another sort of Apple to keep the doctor away
iHealth blood pressure iPod dock: another sort of Apple to keep the doctor away originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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By (author unknown), MacNN | The Macintosh News Network – January 03, 2011 at 08:30PM
Seattle-based AliveCor is unveiling a wireless casing for the iPhone 4 called the iPhone ECG that, combined with an accompanying app, turns the device into a hospital-quality electro-cardiogram measuring instrument (ECG) at the Consumer Electronics Show later this week. The unit, which is expected to sell for around $100, can be used to monitor heart conditions and pacemakers, alert users of atrial fibrillation and print or email the results as a PDF file….
By Ben Blanquera, TechLife Ohio – January 03, 2011 at 07:18PM
If the promise of personalized medicine ever comes to fruition, Ohio State University Medical Center looks well-positioned to reap the rewards.
Five years ago, OSU established the Center for Personalized Health Care, which is dedicated to education and research to advance personalized medicine. Earlier this year, OSU joined the Seattle-basedInstitute for Systems Biology to create the P4 Medicine Institute, another organization aimed at advancing the field.
While a standard definition of personalized medicine may be hard to come by, the term generally refers to tailoring patients’ treatment regimens to their own genetic and molecular signatures. The concept is important because some estimate that about half the amount spent onprescription drugs in the U.S. is wasted because, for various reasons, certain drugs simply don’t and won’t work on certain patients.
By Jessica Cam Wong, MakeUseOf – January 03, 2011 at 06:30PM
The focus of web applications on collaborative efforts has been stronger than ever. You can hardly find a web-based application that won’t let you share a link to a public document or image, much less if it’s a productivity app. There are lots of productivity applications, particularly on the desktop, that seem to offer more and more collaboration features, but with the advent of web-friendly OSes, such as Google Chrome OS, Jolicloud and the like; there’s bound to be increased interest in web-based, collaboration-centric apps.
This round-up is a collection of incredible free online meeting tools that don’t skimp on features even when they are browser-based. Instead, they offer pretty fully featured suites for collaboration even to users with free accounts, but of course, most have additional paid offerings as well. Let’s take a look at the best free collaboration tools so far.
TeamLab is a project management platform that allows users to import data from Basecamp, build teams and departments, assign tasks, schedule milestones, lead discussions, track time spent on project tasks, generate reports and backup data. TeamLab also utilizes social tools to keep colleagues connected with corporate instant messenger, forums, blogs, and Wiki pages, as well as bookmark, photo and file sharing (uploaded files can’t exceed 25MB). While there’s no indication of the limit of users or projects, the source code is available for deployment if your team wants to host it on your own servers, restore backups and have more general control. TeamLab’s current features are said to remain free, while future offerings, such as document editing and e-mail management, may be available for certain fees.
While TeamLab seems to have the best offerings, there are lots of similar services, including UbiDesk, Huddle and TeamBox, though they all seem to come with more limitations for the free accounts in user or project count.
Sync.in is a web-based word processor for people who need to collaborate on the same public document in real-time. It allows users to co-edit notes for brainstorming sessions, planning projects, creating outlines, etc, as well as chat in real-time, identify each others’ color-coded edits, undo unlimited saves, replay edits using an in-document time-slider, and mark versions as important. Sync.in also has a cross-platform launcher for users who want to create new Sync.in notes from their desktop. No sign-up process is required. Users aching for more features, such as selective public access, own team site at “yourTeamName.sync.in” and bulk export, can check out Sync.in Pro.
Twiddla is a neat space for guests to markup webpages, documents and images. It can also serve as a collaborative whiteboard, text editor and chat service. While it also allows voice-conference, I couldn’t find the voice chat feature anywhere on the site. For storage, guests will need to buy accounts, but for general brainstorming and idea exchange, Twiddla has quite a bit of features.
While Tokbox has evolved into a business-friendly solution for web-based, video-conferencing, it still offers free, casual video calls for up to 20 users at a time. It also allows users to send video messages, text chat, share YouTube videos in-line, invite friends from Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live, AIM, or via email, as well as embed video chat and recorder widgets. Tokbox offers a very user-friendly interface with virtually no learning curve.
If you’re itching for additional features, check out DimDim which offers public web meetings with a shared whiteboard, annotation tools, live document-sharing, as well as screen-sharing (via a downloadable plugin) and text chatting with up to 10 users (although only one user webcam can be enabled during a meeting).
Vyew is another great web-conference service that offers private rooms, webcam and voice chat for up to 10 users, a conference number you can call to join the private conversation, a whiteboard, screen-sharing (via Java authorization), and ability to leave voice notes in addition to text and annotations on workspace. Free accounts have an ad-supported interface, but I didn’t find any ads while testing in my session.
For desktop-based tools that allow video-conferencing for two or more users, check out the open-source OpenMeetings.
What free online meeting tools would you recommend to work with colleagues? Share your preferred applications in the comments!
Photo credit: deviantdark
