Swap

This secret is out. Sometimes, girls like to play with He-Man action figures and boys like to nurture dolls. A Swedish toy catalog is getting a lot of attention for swapping out traditional gender roles by depicting a boy playing with a dollhouse and a girl blasting an imaginary foe with a Nerf gun.

Top Toy created the holiday catalog for toy chains BR and Toys"R"Us. The catalog was released in both Denmark and Sweden, but the Swedish version features some Photoshopped changes. Perhaps most notably, a boy wielding a toy gun in the Danish catalog was replaced by a girl, while a boy appears on another page playing with a very pink dollhouse.… Read more

Verizon has reached a deal with T-Mobile to do an an Advanced Wireless Services spectrum swap, a deal that promises to add much-needed LTE capabilities to T-Mobile's network.

The deal would be dependent on forthcoming Verizon spectrum purchases, currently being scrutinized by the FCC. But, if the deals with SpectrumCo, Cox, and Leap go through, T-Mobile will get its LTE groundwork.

For iPhone users, this deal is particularly interesting, especially if you've already been using Apple's smartphone on T-Mobile's existing HSPA+ network. T-Mobile already offers tremendous support for the iPhone on its network even though it … Read more

This is the second time in a decade that the Internet has written a eulogy for Napster.

The service, which in a former iteration frustrated the music industry via peer-to-peer file sharing, was absorbed today in a takeover by a rival music service. In a deal first reported by CNET in October, Rhapsody agreed to acquire Napster's subscribers and assets.

The pioneering file-sharing service's software, created in 1999 by 19-year-old student Shawn Fanning, enabled users to swap MP3 files with each across the Internet for free. But that activity cut into the profits of the recording industry and … Read more

Part of virtual memory on a computer is where the contents of RAM are written to the hard drive (as a special file called a "swapfile") to free it up for other uses. As you use your computer, the system will load programs and data into RAM, which is like having your work on the top surface of a desk. As you place more items on the top of your desk (RAM) it may get cluttered, so to keep your work flow efficient you might free some space by putting a few items into the desk's drawers (… Read more

Shape Shift is a free, ad-supported puzzler, a classic color-matching game played on a grid, but with a couple of twists that make this app stand out.

The setup should look familiar to fans of the genre: you play on a 9-by-7 grid of colored blocks, and the goal is to match up--and take out--adjacent groups of four or more of the same color. In addition to being red, yellow, orange, green, or blue, each block also has a triangle, square, or circle on it, and you can swap any two blocks that share the same shape. The scoring and … Read more

Aviassin's EdgeSwap is a task switcher with a twist: you just move your cursor to the left edge of your desktop, select your window from a series of thumbnails, and EdgeSwap does the rest. It's portable freeware that runs in Windows 95 to 7.

Since EdgeSwap is totally portable and pretty small, too, you can stash its extracted executable file just about anywhere and run it with a click. We did, and EdgeSwap placed its icon in our system tray but gave no other indication it was working. However, we followed the program's instructions and rolled our … Read more

While some of Apple's new laptops are built with internal batteries to increase power capabilities, other systems still have easily removable batteries. In similar systems, the batteries are interchangeable, and while it may be obvious that you can swap batteries among these systems, some people may also have concerns about doing this. Some of these might include whether or not the system would read battery status properly and if charge values would be similar across multiple machines.

Recently MacFixIt reader David wrote in with such concerns:

Better Place announced yesterday details of its plan to open a series of electric-vehicle charging stations in Israel.

The company offers EV charging stations that, through a subscription service, give electric-vehicle owners the option of a quick battery swap instead of plugging in and waiting for their car's battery to charge over time. It takes only a minute to make the swap. The depleted batteries are then recharged and used in other cars, according to Better Place.

The service may be seen by some as a substantial convenience considering it takes 15 to 30 minutes to recharge an EV … Read more

Honda's 2011 CR-Z hybrid is about as sporty as it gets when it comes to hybrid vehicles. Granted, that isn't saying much. I mean the hatchback's 1.5-liter, IMA-boosted power plant only outputs 122-horsepower and manages a combined 34 EPA-estimated mpg. Ford's Fiesta manages similar numbers without the burden of hybrid trickery and complexity. So what's a self-respecting Honda tuner to do to improve the output of the CR-Z's engine room? How about a 200-horsepower engine swap?

Enter LHT Performance and Honda's 2-liter K20 engine, a mill a bit more befitting a sport … Read more