beautiful

Beauty Camera slims down a lot of the more robust photo editor offerings into a few neat features. The only problem is that some of the features in Beauty Camera don't work like you'd expect them to. The app provides cool results when they do, though.

Like many photo editing apps, this one lets you pull photos from your hard drive or snap from within the app. You can preview filters that way, but the app's camera lacks top-tier quality. The filters, themselves, are useful, but there are only six for you to choose from. Other apps … Read more

If I were near Tokyo Station right now, I'd hop on a bullet train to Osaka lickety-split. Why? To get my scalp cleansed by Panasonic's shampoo robot, of course.

Hair salon Super Hair Seo in the nearby city of Nishinomiya is playing the lucky host to the electronics giant's Head Care Robot, which is undergoing its first tests alongside hairdressers.

Introduced back in 2010, the device consists of a reclining chair and a mechanized washbasin. It first scans your head to get an idea of its shape, and can accommodate a variety of noggins, according to Panasonic. … Read more

I confess to have become browser-bored. I have a feeling that Chrome might be the best, but I don't use it because it seems like Google is trying to trap me in a vortex of Googlephilia. Don't they have enough pieces of me already?

I use Firefox (I know, I know), because, oh, they seem like nice people. They're even nice when it crashes, which is more than I'd like it to.

Then there's Internet Explorer. It seems to have been around since PCs were worth using, without ever seeming terribly interesting.

So the advent … Read more

The iPhone is, primarily, a mirror to your soul.

Some people, though, see it as a mirror to their face. Which is, no doubt, why a sensitively enterprising plastic surgeon has created a special procedure so that you can look more attractive while you're on FaceTime.

I can feel your face wrinkling already, but perhaps you are one of the world's facially confident.

Dr. Robert Sigal of the Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Virginia, on the other hand, knows just how vast a problem FaceTime self-consciousness truly is.

The spark?

"It came from my wife," … Read more

Weather is one of those things you pay attention to during the more extreme climate seasons like summer and winter. You'll want to see if it's going to be cold in the morning when you wake up or really hot in the afternoon so you can dress appropriately for your day. You may find one of these apps suitable by itself, or you can try combining a couple of them to get the most information.

One of the most popular weather apps by far. The daily information is excellent in this app because it includes … Read more

I remember the first time I saw a Burmester component in a hi-fi store. I couldn't get over how beautiful it was.

The Burmester pictured here is the Reference Line 808 MK5 preamplifier. Introduced in August 1980, the 808 is the fifth-generation model. The preamp's modular construction was a revolutionary design approach in 1980, and new technologies have been incorporated to maintain the 808's performance at the current state of the art.

The Wavelength Audio Crimson digital-to-analog converter is the flagship of the line, and the output section is totally tube-driven. This component, made in Cincinnati, utilizes … Read more

Go to any hi-fi show and you'll see room after room filled with the latest and greatest-sounding speakers, but chances are you won't come away from the experience captivated by brilliant designs. I sometimes wonder if the audio industry will ever get its act together and make speakers you don't have to be an audiophile to love.

Extreme cars, like Ferraris and Lamborghinis, arouse strong, positive reactions from people who would never buy or even drive them, but high-end audio speakers rarely achieve that sort of admiration. My best guess as to why that's so is that truly beautiful audiophile speakers are rare. Or to put it another way, do you have to be an audiophile to think speakers are beautiful? Granted, if you're already an audiophile you might be predisposed to view large speakers in a positive light and see their form as part of their function. For nonaudiophiles, size is definitely a factor, in the opposite direction: the smaller a speaker is, the easier it is to fit into the average person's living space.… Read more

Few of us have been given the tools to make us instantly beautiful. Not even visits to the finest surgeons in LA seem to do the trick.

We deal with our imperfections. However, it appears that 30,000 who tried to gain access to BeautifulPeople.com, a dating site for the supremely pretty, are having extreme difficulty dealing with rejection.

You might remember this site. Two years ago, it declared that its standards were strict. It declared that British people were, in general, on the less blessed side of pulchritude.

But now the Guardian reports that Beautiful People has turned … Read more

Beauty Guide Lite is a free tool that lets you practice applying makeup to images of faces, even your own. It's basically a slimmed-down graphics editor with brushes and palettes optimized for cosmetics. You can undo, save, and print; sample and alter colors; smudge, lighten, and darken; and flip and rotate images. The software supplies faces to practice on, but you can upload your own images, too, and not just pictures of your own face but also friends, family members, even celebrities and historical figures. It's great for teaching young people how to apply makeup, and it gives … Read more