"Gadget" Greg Gazin Demystifies Tech & Life in a useful, fun & practical way!
Were you excited about Apple’s CarPlay that brings Siri’s voice control and other iPhone 5 functionality to your car, but saddened by the fact that it’s only available on new cars? If a brand new car is not in the cards in 2014, you might still be able to get Apple CarPlay in the vehicle you currently own as Pioneer Electronics will introduce a firmware update to their five 2014 NEX in-dash multimedia receiver systems later this year.
Read more…AT CANOE Tech Blog
More homes are not only getting more secure, they’re also getting much smarter, thanks to the availability of affordable and easy to set up security and home automation systems like Canadian-invented Piper.
Piper, which got its kick-start through crowdsourced funding on Indiegogo, is the brainchild of Ottawa-based BlackSumac (just acquired by California based iControl Networks earlier this week). The Piper solution revolves around a multipurpose camera unit and a multifunction downloadable app which together provide an all-in-one home awareness hub rather than just a typical security camera.
The Wi-Fi enabled camera shoots 1080p HD video. It’s equipped with a fish-eye lens that offers an impressive extremely wide 180-degree field of view. The 10x digital zoom supports pan and tilt functions giving you the ability to zoom in and look around the room. It also has an infrared motion detector to detect intruders (up to 10m), a built-in microphone and a piercing 105dB siren – loud enough to almost rival a chainsaw. More than just acting as your eyes and ears, it also has four additional sensors that measure indoor temperature, ambient light, and relative humidity. You’ll see why the last four are not just “nice to know”.
Read more…AT CANOE TECH BLOG
No matter where we go we always need to have some sort of USB cable nearby, whether it’s to charge up our gadgets or sync with another device. The truth is, carrying them around can be somewhat of a pain. They can be too bulky, cumbersome or we have nowhere to put them. Well Nomad has come up with a solution – in fact two of them, ChargeCard and ChargeKey.
Technically, ChargeCard and ChargeKey are not really cables at all; they are connecting devices and work like cables but look like a credit card and a house key respectively. They both allow you to charge up your device when connected via USB and full-fledged data transfer when syncing to a computer or other compatible device.
Both ChargeCard and ChargeKey come in two models, one for Lightning connector compatible devices, like the iPhone 5, 5C & 5S as well as any iPad, including iPad mini and iPad Air. The other is a micro USB version that will work with most Android and Windows phones as well as your BlackBerry.
Tired of the same old plastic bumper case for your iPhone? Have you ever thought of getting one made from wood? But not just any wood. How about an Eastern Hardrock Maple or Oregon Walnut, so you have both coasts covered?
Read more… At Canoe Tech Blog
EDMONTON, AB, April 8, 2014/ Troy Media/ – Windows XP is more than just a desktop and notebook computer operation system. It is also used in a significant number of retail point-of-sale systems (POS), restaurant systems and even ATM Banking machines are running it.
And with Microsoft ending support for XP today, April 8th, all of these systems will be vulnerable to severe data breaches such as theft of credit card numbers and other personal information.
Christopher Pogue, Director for Chicago-based Trustwave, an information and security company, said that everyone still using Microsoft Windows XP – and there is a significant number of them – should be concerned. “XP has been in production since 2001 and (is the) de-facto standard in many business verticals like point-of sale systems,” he said.
But even worse, he added, are those people who don’t even know their systems are running XP. READ MORE AT TROY MEDIA
Apple’s has once again announced their highly anticipated annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. This year it will run June 2-6 and will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone West. It’s an annual five-day pilgrimage for developers to help them learn about the future of iOS and OS X and give them the latest tools and technologies to create apps and more, which each year is oversubscribed in a heartbeat.
You can’t just buy tickets; you need to apply for them. Entries are drawn from a random selection, which starts now through Monday, April 7 at 10:00pm PDT, and you’ll know at the latest by 5:00pm PDT (8pm EDT) April 7th.
Read more…AT CANOE TECH BLOG
At first glance the Dyson DC62 Animal doesn’t look like much of a vacuum; in fact, it looks more like a metal detector than a vacuum cleaner. The first thing that came to mind was how such a small handheld unit, especially a cordless one, could do the job of a full sized vacuum. Fortunately for me, for today anyway, I live in a very dry area, almost back on to a transit station and have a significant amount of carpeting in my home, so there’s never any shortage of testing material – dust, sand and other sediment – that needed to be sucked up.
Read more…AT CANOE TECH BLOG
When Connected Data introduced Transporter a year or so ago, the idea was to be able to give you your own peer-to-peer private cloud a no-fee storage alternative and offer the functionality of cloud services like Dropbox, Box and SkyDrive and private storage options like Pogoplug.
The beauty of the product is that you have control over where the device is located and vis-a-vis where your data is stored. You buy it once and there are never any ongoing fees to pay. It’s simple to use and your data is accessible – to you and anyone you wish to share it with – on-line from anywhere, but it’s private and not stored in any public cloud.
Read more…at Canoe Tech Blog
It’s a no-brainer to get some sort of cover or protection for your iPad these days and there is certainly no shortage of options, especially those that try to compete with similar offerings from Apple.
Made specifically for the iPad Air (with a little brother version for the iPad mini), check out theSeidio: Ledger for iPad Air and iPad mini. These are a tight fitting full body folio style case that holds your iPad snuggly into place with an attached flip cover.
Read more…AT CANOE TECH BLOG
At the risk of sounding repetitive, there’s no shortage of battery packs out there on the market. They come in all different shapes, sizes and capacities. However, one neat little package is the Lifesaver II emergency battery pack by Mio, which stands out amongst others with its minimalist design and fast charging capability.
Read more…At Canoe Tech Blog
Also available via AMAZON
