Wired

We review a lot of wireless Bluetooth keyboards and keyboard cases for iPads and other tablets, but we've yet to review a wired keyboard for the iPad. It comes as little surprise then that Logitech, which makes plenty of Bluetooth keyboards, has unveiled the Wired Keyboard for iPad, which it dubs "the first iPad keyboard made specially for the classroom environment."

The keyboard will come in a Lightning connector or 30-pin connector versions and have an MSRP of $59.99. The Lightning version is due to ship in August; the 30-pin version will ship in October. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ever wondered how Apple employees travel around the Cupertino campus?

- Taking New York's upcoming Citi Bike Share plan for a test ride.

- Why don't cell phones have a dial tone?

- Forget following teens, your new favorite Tweeter is 94 years old.

- Speaking of old people, here's Jeff's dear, old granny with a 404 sticker on her walker.

- Speaking of speaking of old people, here's a soul-cuddling video of an older landlady lip-syncing her favorite song from the 1930s.… Read more

It's no surprise to Google obsessives that the company announced yesterday that it will draw the curtains on its popular RSS-managing Reader service. So what are you supposed to do with your 60 bazillion feeds?

First off, you can export them using Google Takeout. That's an important step to take so you don't lose track of any of the sites you're following. It lets you download your feeds output, called OPML, as a ZIP. Then you extract it all to a folder, and upload them to your prefered Reader replacement service. But which one do you … Read more

Is it all getting too much?

Is your thinking crooked, your logic frazzled, and your every wire crossed?

Perhaps it's time to go and cut yourself off from your phone and Internet. No, not metaphorically, but literally.

That was allegedly the slightly illegal thought-process of Raymond Bischoff of Hastings, Minn.

As CBS Minnesota wires it, Bischoff, 65, allegedly thought it best to cut the wires and cables that happened to connect a local business to the Internet, the phone service, and even the satellite TV because he wanted to "relieve the pressure on his brain."

Some might … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Fear spills and splashes damaging your smartphone no longer. Startup company DryWired believes it has the technology to easily and effectively armor your handset against water and other liquids.

According to the Los Angeles, Calif. based firm, the DryWired technique uses a nano scale monomer material that, when heated forms a gas, then cools to become a water-tight sealant.

A special machine applies the DryWired material to phones and tablets that have been partially disassembled, the idea being that a device's internal components are protected, not only its exterior.

Indeed DryWired claims that after an ordinary phone has … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Republican senator says video games are a bigger problem than guns.

- DMVs ban txtspeak on license plates.

- The greatest hacker T-shirts this planet has ever seen.

- Amoeba Music finally puts used, errr, rare records for sale online.… Read more

Despite owning an iPhone 5 for several months, I find myself using Siri only when someone else wants to see how it works.

A video created by a Raspberry Pi enthusiast motivates me to learn about Siri's unadvertised side -- as a place where hackers can use special software to teach Apple's voice assistant new commands. One such person found a compelling use for the $35 Linux-based Pi and Siri: the ability to open a garage door with a push of a button and a simple spoken sentence. … Read more

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series, for the other parts, check out the related stories. This post was updated on March 29, 2013, to add more information on backing up.

One of a storage device's most important roles, if not the most important, is to keep the information stored on it safe, especially from hardware failure. Redundancy and backup are the two popular types of data protection. They are not the same, however, and it's important to understand the differences between the two.

In a nutshell, redundancy in consumer-grade digital storage means using … Read more

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. For the other parts, check out the related stories.

Now that you have some ideas about internal storage vs. memory after reading Part 1, here in Part 2 I'll talk about the two main types of external storage devices: direct-attached storage (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS).

DAS and NAS share a few things in common. They both use one or more internal drives (hard drives or SSDs) on the inside, and they utilize the same methods to combine drives' storage space (when multiple drives are used). But before we … Read more