Being a gadget reviewer and a dad, I’m often asked what would make a good Father’s Day gift. Personally, a day when I get to sleep in and eat a large slab of meat is just fine.

For those of you who want to get dad a gadget, here are some suggestions based on what I use all the time. In other words: These gadgets have staying power.

The iPod Touch. I don’t own an iPhone (I like those, too) but the Touch offers everything an iPhone does, minus the phone and monthly service fee. It’s great for playing music or videos and showing off photos, and I use the calendar to plan my day. You can even send and receive e-mails when you’re in a Wi-Fi zone.

Headphones. For about $120 to $150, you can get a fine pair of noise-canceling headphones to improve the sound of any portable music player while blocking the external noise that causes one to crank up the volume. That makes them healthier for your ears, too. Check out Shure’s SE110s and the new QuietPoint model from Audio-Technica.

Car stereos. With so many options today, you may not mind being stuck in traffic. You can plug in an iPod, play a CD, tune in a satellite station or listen to a growing array of HD radio stations. There are good models from JVC, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony and many others starting around $100.

Also, with a little creativity, one can even access Internet radio feeds. My car stereo, for example, has a USB port. Hence, I can plug in a Slacker portable radio player (also recommended), and listen to Internet-based radio stations I created.

Amazon’s Kindle. As a print lover, I’m still amazed at how much I like this e-reading device. Amazon just cut the price to $359—still too high—but for someone who travels a lot and likes to read, the Kindle really lightens the load.

Portable universal charging devices. This is a booming category, including solar-powered devices like the Solio and USB-based devices like the PowerStick. These are great for road warriors who want to stop carrying several chargers.

The Flip video camcorder. Pure Digital introduced a new model, the Flip Mino, last week that’s smaller and thinner than previous versions. I have yet to give it a full run-through, but these little camcorders are super handy. They plug directly into your PC or Mac and have software for playback, e-mailing and uploading to YouTube built in.

And if all else fails, Dad will gladly take a gift card to pair with that slab of meat.

Thursday update: For those of you who heard me on Spike O’Dell’s WGN radio show this morning, here’s the column on the ESPN universal remote control. It includes a built-in Web browser — very cool.

TAKEN FROM  featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Developers submitting content to the App Store will have wide-ranging control over how their app is offered, but face a definitive limit for the size of their apps, AppleInsider has learned. The portal may also open its doors in sync with the launch of iPhone 3G.

People familiar with the matter say that apps uploaded to the Apple-run service via iTunes Connect have been given an absolute file size limit of 2GB that may prevent some developers from producing software with very large, integrated data sets. Apple doesn’t say whether the limit is technical or for other reasons.

For most other functions, however, the iPhone maker is said by those aware of the submission interface to be offering a significant amount of control over how and where apps are delivered.

A web-based portal lets developers manage a large number of business and store presentation elements. It also lets these creators set the compatibility of the app with the iPod touch, the global regions where program should be distributed, and even game content ratings that roughly match American and European standards, warning parents of particularly sexual or violent content during play.
TAKEN FROM www.appleinsider.com

Why this hack: Because it’s as fun and simple and cheap as they come. Hey, that sounds like the personal ads I’ve been running lately.

In a few simple steps, convert an ordinary box into a beauteous, practical solar oven.

Heart of the hack: Trace a border around the top of your box, about an inch inside the edges. Cut three sides, leaving one as a “hinge.” This is your oven door. Nice, eh?

Now, cut and glue a square of aluminum foil to the underside of your door, and cut a piece of plastic just a little larger than the opening. Remember how, when you were a devious little punk kid, you used to fry ants with a magnifying glass? This is your magnifying glass, only this time, you’re gonna be frying, well, hopefully not ants.

Next, line the bottom of the box with foil and then cover the foil with a piece of black construction paper. Tape it in place. Place your famous tofu-and-lima-bean casserole in your new oven, close the plastic lid, and prop open the foil-covered door at an angle that best reflects sunlight through the plastic and into the oven.

Grab a drink, kick back, and call all your friends. Just don’t tell ‘em what’s for dinner.

TAKEN FROM www.thedailygreen.com

A California startup revealed an aircraft on Wednesday evening built for an increasingly popular new kind of pilot—the weekend aviator with a jones for expensive toys.

Loaded with features like folding wings (so you can keep it in your garage) and seat belt-like parachutes (so you can ease the whole thing down to the ground), ICON Aircraft’s new light sport airplane (LSA), dubbed the A5, might just be the ultimate joyride.

“We designed it so that people who don’t know airplanes know that something has changed,” Kirk Hawkins, ICON’s chief executive officer, told Popular Mechanics.

What’s changed are federal regulations, which created a new form of airplane and a new kind of pilot licence that requires less training and no medical check to obtain. The Federal Aviation Administration created the Sport Pilot category in 2004, but only now are players large and small entering this virgin market. At the “Sun ’n Fun Fly-In,” an aircraft festival held in Florida earlier this year, manufacturers showcased 75 LSAs, up from just 20 in 2006.

For ICON, reaching new customers meant a design that borrowed heavily from automobile marketing. “The product has to have sex appeal and be aesthetically inspirational,” Hawkins says. “It not only has to perform well, it has to look like it performs well.”

ICON faced another design hurdle in ensuring that aspiring pilots were not cowed by the risks of flight. The A5’s cockpit gauges look like they belong on a sports-car’s dashboard, while curved structures guard against accidental contact with the propeller whenever the plane is on the ground. Perhaps most crucial to this goal is that increasingly common parachute: no delicate maneuvers are necessary if the airplane is distressed—it can simply float to the ground.

Engineers at ICON also built the A5 to be a lot less of a hassle than other small aircraft, allowing owners to have a lot more fun. The wings can fold for storage in a large garage, and the airplane even comes with its own trailer. Amphibious models have platforms that connect to docks or piers. Versions of the A5 that can’t land in water will have automatic, rather than manual, folding wings.

Hawkings isn’t shy about his attempt to make flying small airplanes the luxury motor sport of the 21st century. “The passionate consumer will not use these to get to grandma’s house quicker,” he says. —Joe Pappalardo

TAKEN FROM www.popularmechanics.com

Verizon Wireless is finally fessing up to three LG phones that it will be delivering to customers in June and July:
• The Dare, aka VX9700: This has a touchscreen but is slim thanks to the absence of a hidden keyboard (like on the bulkier Glyde and Voyager).
• Chocolate 3: A phone we hadn’t seen before, that ditches the slider of the old Chocolates for a full dual-screen flip configuration. Still has a touch-sensitive face, but the buttons inside are all real. Other additions include FM transmitter and SDHC MicroSD support up to 8GB.
• The Decoy has a hidden Bluetooth headset that pops out when you need it, good because it eliminates the need for two separate chargers.
Those are just the salient points; there are more factoids and availability information down below.

It’s not official word from a press release, but Apple’s Australian site is showing the new App store as hitting June 27th—which would point to iPhone 2.0 firmware hitting at the same time. That’s earlier than Jobs’ “early July” designation from the WWDC keynote. But you know, toilets flush differently in Australia and everything, so a date typoesque mix-up could have happened. [Apple] Thanks everyone!

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

The results of a recently published study of workers’ instant messaging (IM) use shows that IM can actually improve workplace productivity. This contradicts a widely held belief that IM in the workplace is a hindrance to productivity. IM is often perceived as an interruption, and as such, “it can significantly hinder productivity by disrupting thought processes and work flows, causing individuals to take longer to complete tasks.”

Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine conducted a telephone study by randomly surveying individuals employed full-time who use computers in an office environment at least five hours per week. They netted 912 respondents, of which 29.8 percent claimed to use IM in the workplace “to keep connected with coworkers and clients.” Interestingly, the demographics of the IM users were essentially identical to that of the non-IM users in the study, with a mean age of 43.7 years old and 53.2 percent female. Neither occupation, education, gender, nor age seem to have an impact on whether an individual is an IM user or not. This should throw out a few more generally accepted beliefs that IM users are predominately tech-savvy young men.

The study theorizes that using IM enables individuals to “flag their availability.” Doing so can limit when IM interruptions occur. Even if an IM interruption comes when it is not necessarily convenient to the recipient, it is “often socially acceptable” to ignore an incoming message or respond with a terse reply stating that the recipient is too busy at the moment to properly respond. Also, new “patterns of communication” develop around IM:

“IM provides a means of obtaining task relevant information rapidly and with minimal disruption, allowing a worker to ask clarifying questions without the expectation of engaging in a longer conversation. Alternatively, it can be used to participate in a sustained form of low-intensity collaboration… Setting up a line of communication via IM is as easy as making a phone call, and the line can be kept open indefinitely, allowing participants to query one another infrequently on an as-needed basis and with the expectation that a response will be forthcoming at the next convenient opportunity.”

The study goes on to show that using IM does not increase the amount of time an individual communicates, in place of using e-mail, telephone, or face-to-face conversations:

“There is no significant difference in the overall levels of work communication between IM users and non-users in terms of either the time spent in communication… or in the amount of information exchanged with colleagues… In other words, workers’ communication levels are unrelated to their use of IM, and there is certainly no evidence that IM use increases the overall amount of communication time. This might provide a partial explanation for why IM is not associated with an increase in interruption.”

As to why the perception persists that IM disrupts productivity, the study posits that IM users are more likely to use IM for personal communications. Increased non-work related communications could easily be construed as harming productivity. However, the researchers found that personal-based IM communications have the same benefits as work related IM communications in that they can be short and responses can be delayed or even ignored.

Hopefully, employers who view IM communications with suspicion or disdain will see the potential benefits that the communications medium can bring. While many work environments have come to embrace IM communications, it is often viewed as a necessary evil. Perhaps this study will show those employers that this power can be used for good as well.

TAKEN FROM www.hothardware.com