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JetBlue bolter slides into Mile High Text Club role

What do you do after you quit your JetBlue flight attendant job while still on the plane, tell the rude passengers what you thought of them, open the emergency slide, and waft your way down it and into the public eye?

If your answer was "train to be a pilot," "try volunteer work," "have a talk show on basic cable," or "pose for Playboy," you would be heartily mistaken. For Steven Slater, perhaps America's most renowned former flight attendant, is to become the official spokesperson for the Mile High Text Club.… Read more

Speck A-Line Bag is functional and fashionable

Despite the emphasis on convergence for certain tech categories, the sheer number of gadgets many of us continue to schlep around can be rather astounding. I can tell you from experience that carting devices around in bags specifically designed to organize and protect them makes the whole task less daunting (the Built Travel Organizer has saved my sanity on more than one trip). Plus, if you're a woman who has been using a standard purse to carry a vast array of heavy items, I'm sure you've had your fair share of visits to the cobbler.

But hey, … Read more

Catalog tool

Online sellers, small-business owners, retailers, auctioneers, and collectors will want to take a look at Catalog Creator. It's a free tool for designing, filling, printing, and posting catalogs, brochures, and similar documents in print, online, and on CD-ROM. It offers a wide range of customizable templates for creating colorful catalogs and an efficient means for displaying lots of wares, up to thousands of items. It's compatible with Microsoft Office features, too.

Catalog Creator, or CatCreator, has a unique interface based around a Main Menu with clearly marked buttons that open new pages for their functions and settings. Clicking … Read more

Draw lines to kill enemy invaders

Axe in Face--Defense of the Daffodils is a silly, yet challenging game that borrows elements from many classic iPhone games in the iTunes App Store to make for a fun time-waster. The object of the game is to defend a garden of daffodils from an approaching onslaught of baddies (think Plants vs. Zombies) by drawing a path from your viking warrior across the screen to throw your ax.

The ax will return to you like a boomerang, which comes in handy for hitting foes as the ax circles back around, but be careful not to draw complex paths because you … Read more

Build your own burger

Sky Burger is a casual burger-building arcade game with endearing visuals, surprisingly fun controls, but fairly repetitive gameplay.

Your job is to build burgers to order, one at at time, by positioning a bottom bun (and a teetering, ever-growing tower of ingredients) under a steady, random cascade of pickles, patties, tomatoes, onions, and the like. Burger ingredients fall from the top of the screen, and you can get your proto-burger under them by using either touch or tilt controls: touching and dragging the bun, or tilting left and right. Both have their advantages (tilt keeps your fingers from ever obscuring … Read more

Exif edits on command

ExifTool is a handy, free Perl-based program for editing the Exif information in digital image files as well as the meta information in other digital files, such as music and movies. It's available in several configurations; we tested the standalone Windows executable version, which doesn't require Perl and omits some of the features of the command-line version but offers essentially the same functionality, including, notably, a command-line capability.

ExifTool downloads as a ZIP file and unpacks as a Windows executable file that we chose to park on the desktop. To use ExifTool, you simply drag and drop a … Read more

Detect lies and draw lines: iPhone apps of the week

No iPhone for Verizon? That seems to be the implication in news this week via AppleInsider. According to a Wall Street analyst with RBC Capital Markets, Verizon and Apple have not been able to come to an agreement on bringing the iPhone to Verizon. Apparently, both companies have issues with the deal; Verizon is wary of the iPhone cannibalizing Android's market share, and Apple may not want to settle for a lesser marketing campaign to lighten the impact of iPhone sales.

As you know, I already have an iPhone 4 (and needed one for my job, obviously) so I had no choice but to re-up my contract with AT&T. But what about you? Are you one of the people who decided to wait to buy the iPhone 4 for a chance to get a contract with Verizon? Do you think this really means the end of a deal between the two companies? I'm interested to know what people will do with this information, so please chime-in in the comments!

This week's apps include a fun way to see if your friends are telling the truth and a line-drawing game that has you hurling axes at approaching bad guys.… Read more

Ford beaming Sync software to assembly line cars

Ford will tap into the power of Wi-Fi by wirelessly sending its Sync in-car software to vehicles as they're built on the assembly line.

Touting itself as the first automaker to use Wi-Fi on the assembly line, Ford said Thursday that the new process will cut out the need to build and store Sync modules for each car, helping to reduce costs, streamline manufacturing, and ultimately improve quality. The process takes advantage of the Sync system's built-in Wi-Fi that Ford added earlier this year.

"Using wireless software installation via Wi-Fi, we can stock just one type of … Read more

Headphones with iPod controls

With Apple thoroughly touting the headphone remote capability of its various iPods, third-party headphone manufacturers are eagerly turning out products with integrated playback controls. One solution we've seen is the in-line remote cable attachment that can connect to any set of headphones, thereby letting you simply update your favorite pair.

Of course, if you need to upgrade from Apple's stock earbuds anyway, picking up a brand-new model with the controls (and mic, if applicable) built in makes more sense. The selection is constantly expanding, but not all the options provide a great experience. We've rounded up some … Read more

LineScout power grid robot rolls on down the line

We've seen prototype cable-crawling robots that look like UFOs from the Electric Power Research Institute, but north of the border rolling robots are already checking live high-voltage power lines in the vast Hydro-Quebec network.

Developed at the Hydro-Quebec Research Institute following the 1998 ice storm, the LineScout is a remote-controlled rolling robot that uses its movable, 360-degree cameras to inspect power lines.

A thermo-infrared imager on the device helps identify power problems, and sensors check the electrical resistance of splices. It's also equipped with manipulators that can unscrew bolted assemblies and perform minor repairs on the line.

Operated … Read more