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Product Description
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SAMSUNG ALIAS 2 Cell Phone Protective Vinyl Skin Verizon – Pink Diamonds

This weekend, I’m going to be sparking up the grill with the Looftlighter, an electric firestarter that looks like an oversized curling iron, sounds like a hair dryer, and gets a good-sized pile of charcoal briquettes ready to grill in just a few minutes.

I’ll admit I was skeptical about the $80 Looftlighter, which comes from Sweden and whose name, I believe, must be pronounced with as much Nordic accent as you can muster. It’s basically an air blower tucked behind a heating element. The idea is that it delivers a focused blast of hot air out the front. It’s hardly the “flamethrower” I’d been led to believe it was, however, and an initial test in the Wired offices proved that it was incapable of doing much more than charring the edges of a business card.

Plus, it looks dorky and requires access to a three-prong 110v power outlet. Even with the built-in bottle opener on the bottom, this isn’t exactly a manly-man kind of gadget.

But I put my doubts aside and tested the Looftlighter on a couple of recent barbecuing occasions. To my surprise, it works.

The Looftlighter really does look like a curling iron. Photo courtesy Looft Industries

For the first twenty seconds, nothing seems to be happening. You have the ridiculous feeling that you’re blow-drying a pile of charcoal.

But then, the heating element inside turns cherry red, and in short order the edges of the briquettes start to glow.

Sixty seconds in, you start to see flames shooting out of the briquettes in all directions. Fan the Looftlighter back and forth, and it quickly heats up the entire pile.

Within two to three minutes, your pile of charcoal is hot and just about ready to cook: Each briquette is glowing red on the inside and coated with a fine layer of white ash. Perfect.

It may be dorky, and it’s not suited for camping or picnic use — but for starting charcoal grills at home, I have to reluctantly admit that the Looftlighter works pretty well.

And it would probably be just the thing for starting a one-briquette Altoids tin mini-grill.

Wired’s review: No More Gas-Tasting Burgers: Super-Heated Air Lights BBQ Fire

Top photo credit: Dylan F. Tweney / Wired.com

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Product Description
Protect your wireless device with our premium cases. This accessory provides protection by preventing the device from dust and unnecessary scratches. It is made to fit perfect and gives the device its maximum protection…. More >>

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Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Get Medieval while he finishes his PhD in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and papermakers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (4pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (8pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (12 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

All images via Get Medieval.

Story continues …

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Product Description
Protect and personalize your cell phone with this Shield Protector Case. Shield Protector Case is a set of form fitting snap-on cover that protect your cell phone without adding a lot of bulk. Shield Protector Case has o… More >>

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FOLLOW me on TWITTER for UPDATES and GIVEAWAYS: www.twitter.com CHECK this case out for yourself HERE: www.elementcase.com

Image from Samsung Korea, via Gregory Han at Apartment Therapy Unpluggd

All-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines are so yesterday. Maybe the way to go is with better, single purpose devices: A compact, portable scanner combined with a fast, monochrome laser printer.

I hate my all-in-one machine. It sits on my desk, filled up with its expensive color ink cartridges, mocking me. I never print photos or make copies, and I don’t have a land line to fax anything. But I regularly need to print out black-and-white documents, and a little less regularly scan text or images. I need machines that perform these tasks cheaply and reliably, and then get out of the way when I don’t need them.

This is where two new buying guides might prove very handy.

The first is for scanners: IEEE.org’s “Speed-Dating Portable Scanners,” flirts with the MobileOffice (too big) and the DocuPen (too wimpy) before falling for the Doxie (just right, and which Wired recently reviewed). Pink hearts aren’t usually my thing, but I could really go for a scanner that fits in a laptop bag and Just Works, so I just might broaden my horizons.

The second guide is for printers: Apartment Therapy Unpluggd makes the case for old-school laser printers in “Stark Black and White: Why The Monochrome Laser Printer Still Makes Sense“:

Back when we had a color inkjet printer we were constantly running out of black cartridges. Those pieces of plastic we wasted and merely threw away requiring us to buy a new one after what only seemed liked 20 pages. Once we moved to a simple monochrome laser jet we began to notice that we could print literally thousands of pages before our toner cartridge went out. And instead of paying $35.00 for a shoddy black inkjet cartridge, that same cash can get us happily printing on our way for over a year.

In “Good Looking Printer For Small Space?” Unpluggd recommends the Samsung SCX-4500 monochrome laser — plus the Canon PIXMA iP100 and HP OfficeJet H470 for low-footprint printers with color.

The Samsung actually has a built-in scanner, but a portable model is still awfully appealing; if you’re anything like me, your papers wind up all over the house, while your all-in-one stays in just one place. If the mountain (of text) won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain.

See Also:

• The $20 DIY Book Scanner
• Doxie Scanner Sends and Shares
• HP Plans Line of (Relatively) Affordable 3-D Printers
• Office Equipment Does Printer Jam at onedotzero

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Product Description
Protect and personalize your cell phone with this Shield Protector Case. Shield Protector Case is a set of form fitting snap-on cover that protect your cell phone without adding a lot of bulk. Shield Protector Case has o… More >>

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TV Ad of the new iPod touch 3G! Video not made by me! All rights to Apple!

The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that’s significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we’ve tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).

Formerly called Tweetie, Brichter’s popular iPhone app impressed the big wigs at Twitter headquarters who ultimately hired the talented coder to produce native Twitter software in house. Twitter for iPad is his first brand new creation since the acquisition, and from the looks of this app, it was clearly a wise investment.

Loading and sending tweets feels almost instant, and the overall design is very pleasant. When you’re creating a new tweet, for example, the app brings up a notepad-style compose window, which is plain cute.

It also introduces some functionality we haven’t seen before: tap on a tweet with a link, and the content loads in a browser pane (pictured above); pinch a person’s tweet to get more details on the author, and swipe down with two fingers to view the threaded conversation. The paned view of content was very cool and surprisingly fast with loading photos and web pages. However, the pinch and two-finger swipe functions are awfully gimmicky: simply tapping on a person’s tweet with a single finger shows profile details and threaded conversations as well, rendering the pinch and double-swipe redundant (screenshot below).

When composing a new tweet, there’s a location-pin button to share where you’re tweeting from, as well as a paperclip icon to attach a photo. The photo-sharing feature worked in a snap, but after multiple attempts I couldn’t seem to get the location feature to work properly. I’ve put in a query to Brichter about this issue, and I’ll post an update when I receive a response.

All in all, it’s a sweet update, and it’s free. Download the Twitter app in the iPad’s App Store.

See Also:

• With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On Mobile
• Hands-On: Tweetie for Mac Shakes Up Twitterverse
• Tweetie 2 for iPhone Flutters Into the App Store

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