Tag: useful
Amazon offers 'frustration-free' packaging on top products
We’ve all been there – that headphone cable that takes two pairs of scissors, a kitchen knife and a bulldog clip to get out of its packet, but still manages to nearly take off your finger. Well, if Amazon gets its way, that experience will be no more – it’s announced a ‘frustration-free packaging’ and launches today on 19 of Amazon’s best-selling products.
The goal is to make it easier for customers to get to the stuff they’ve paid for, and it also has the side-benefit of reducing use of plastic, which sticks about for bazillions of years once discarded. Amazon are initially focusing on two things – the aforementioned plastic bubble clamshells and those with plastic-coated wires tying them in place…
GMail adds yet more functionality – this time it's SMS
GMail’s really blitzing new features out at the moment – yesterday it became an OpenID provider, and earlier in the week they rolled out gadgets for Calendar and Docs, but today’s new feature is SMS.
If you’ve got phone numbers stored with your contacts then if they go offline when you’re talking to them, your messages will be sent as SMS instead. Best of all, it’ll give the person you SMS a number that they can email in the future to get messages to your GMail account.
The functionality hasn’t arrived over this side of the pond yet, but it’s a lovely little bonus feature, so I hope it shows up soon. It’s yet another reason why you should use GMail over Yahoo or Hotmail.
GMail (via GoogleWatch)
PNY launches "mobility pack" for its MicroSD cards
Over the past few years, there’s been a vast army of competing memory card formats, fuelling an army of card-reader devices that let you use the most popular formats. Luckily the industry seems to be settling on SD cards as a universal format, but the choice still remains between SD, MiniSD, and the tiny MicroSD. Reports that the NanoSD, FemtoSD and YoctoSD cards are forthcoming are all false…
Mimo 7" LCD screens – a little bit of screen, for a little bit of cash
I’m a big fan of multi-monitor setups. Although they look a little ridiculous, they really do enhance your productivity no end. At the moment, though, adding another monitor can be tough. Unless you’ve got a bad-ass graphics card, it usually requires the installation of a new one, then you’ve got to mess about with drivers, and OH it’s all so complicated…
Griffin Simplifi – iPod dock/card reader/USB hub combo device
We normally ignore most iPod dock releases here at Tech Digest. If we were to cover every single one, then you’d get three or four popping up each week. This one’s a bit different though. It integrates a 5-in-one card reader, and a USB hub. Much more useful….
Try out Photobox Super Photos exclusively on Tech Digest!
We covered Photobox’s cool new Facebook photo-syncing-and-printing application a couple of weeks ago, and promised you access to the beta as soon as it’s available. I’m happy to say that we’ve got that access for you right now, so you too can put Editor Dan’s grinning face onto a makeup bag…
Making ice while the sun shines
This is quite nifty. A team of scientists from San Jose University have worked out a way to make ice with zero carbon footprint and no moving parts. There’s no electricity involved either. All you’ve got to do is keep the machine clean…
Visualize your disk space with FosiX Lite
Bit dull this, perhaps, but mightily useful. Free application FosiX will allow you to visualize your hard disk space as a series of bar graphs or pie charts. You load it up, tell it where to scan, and it’ll show you some very pretty graphs, mostly likely highlighting exactly where your porn video stash is, so be careful of that one…
Snooze your email with HitMeLater
HitMeLater is an interesting web service that helps you to sort out your email. If you don’t have, or don’t use, flagging or starring functions in your email client, then you might find this service useful…
Facebook adding filters to news feed
Facebook have added a new feature to the big ol’ river of crap that is the homepage news feed. Previously you could tweak it a little bit, allowing you to display just status updates, or photos, but after a quick check of my Facebook account, there’s now a wealth of options available…
