Retro

"Star Wars" is great, but "Star Wars" on your head is much better. The Crave team discusses this idea in depth in this first episode of 2012, along with Jell-O dispensers for grown-ups, StarCraft in Legos, and harmonizing hobbits.

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Fans of vintage cameras can now dress their iPhones in Gizmon's iCA case, which makes the handset look like a Leica rangefinder camera. The iCA case also comes with some useful functions, such as the ability to capture images via the case's shutter button and frame the scene with its optical viewfinder.

Made of polycarbonate, the $65 case also has a lens mount for users to swap four lenses, a tripod socket for long exposures, and strap lugs for you to loop your handset on a neck strap like a regular camera.

An entire system of accessories is currently in the works, with the company looking into developing attachments such as special-effects filters, an external flash, and a car accessory stand, to name a few.

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Take a long look at your iPhone. What does it remind you of? If you said, "breakfast," then I have the perfect dock for you.

The Gavio Toast iPhone dock and speaker system looks like a 1950s toaster all covered in chrome with rounded retro lines.

The details are sketchy, but it looks like the speakers hide behind the front slots. The iPhone sits right on top like it just popped up.

There is an adjustable volume control and a mysterious handle on the side that looks like it should trigger the dock to suck your iPhone inside.… Read more

A recent neuroimaging experiment apparently showed that the sounds an iPhone makes can trigger feelings of love in the gadget's user.

Well, such emotional connections are nothing new for Apple. Anyone who owned a Macintosh back in the day can probably remember the feeling of, if not love, then at least affection engendered when the machine booted up, the startup chime sounded, and the Happy Mac icon smiled forth. The device was functioning as it should, another session of satisfying and "user friendly" computing was about to begin, and all was right with the world.… Read more

It's easy to get a little jaded about the holidays.

If you're like me, you can't help but cringe when you hear that first strain of Christmas music wafting out of the speakers at your local drugstore in early November. ("Here we go again," you think.)

By the time Christmas Eve rolls around, you've battled crowds to grab your gifts and been bludgeoned with the latest Christmas cover tunes and advertising tie-ins. At this point, it's tempting to write it all off as nothing but an empty tradition or a moneymaking gimmick.

If you're lucky, though, you somehow manage to stumble on a Christmas story that hands you the holiday anew and makes the "spirit of giving" and "peace on Earth" more than mere platitudes.… Read more

For our last Crave of 2011, Bonnie and Donald revisit the '80s with a retro Walkman case, bad Apple fashions, and a look at Crave photo submissions that have been Instagrammed into blurry, oversaturated works of art.

And whether it's by ground or by sea, Crave has the latest high-tech methods for risking your life in pursuit of fun. In Geek News, Lego goes LOTR, and Batman goes Lego.

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On the way to our digital world, a strange thing happened--analog became cool again. How else can you explain something like Twitter-by-post?

The idea is simple, the execution not so much. Freelance writer Giles Turnbull decided to take his tweets offline by responding to his Twitter feed using physical postcards. He laid out the mechanics of the experiment--done with the help of about 15 "volunteers" from among his Twitter followers--in The Morning News:… Read more

Remember the days of Betamax, turntables, and Zenith TVs with rabbit ears and big honking dials?

Siri has just taken a little trip back to those simpler times of yore with a quaint little hack that turns the voice assistant into an operator reachable via rotary phone (cue the Jim Croce, those of you who remember hearing a voice say "operator" on the other end of the line).

Computer programmer Davis Remmel ripped apart a $2 Bluetooth headset purchased on eBay, fitting its earpiece into the earpiece section of the old phone and the microphone into the mouthpiece. The headset is enabled by dialing "1" on the rotary encoder.

In the video below, Remmel picks up the 20th century handset, dials "1," and delivers the command "Call John Doe." Siri then says, "Calling John Doe's mobile," and proceeds to call the number on Remmel's iPhone 4S, which is connected to the rotary phone. (For more on Remmel's rewiring job, see this detailed account on his blog.) … Read more

Sony's Walkman is alive and well in digital form, but the iconic tape player version is still the image that comes to mind when you think about Walkmans.

If the Audman Kickstarter project gets off the ground, you'll be able to take your iPhone or iPod Touch back to the go-go days of the '80s with a Walkman-style costume.

Besides making your iPhone much less attractive to thieves, the Audman also packs a surprising amount of bonus material.… Read more