The transmitter features one optical and one coaxial digital input, plus an analog audio input. Other highlights include easy recharging of the headphones as well as simultaneous connections of up to two headphones.

The RS 220 feature premium quality materials, ensuring exceptional wearing comfort even when used for extended periods of time. They are optimized for all analog and digital audio sources. All things considered, the RS 220 truly offer new levels of audio detail, refinement and transparency for discerning audio lovers.

[Sennheiser RS 220 Digital Wireless Headphones]

The Razer Blade features the Switchblade User Interface – Razer’s multi-award winning, highly intuitive interface technology. The interface is comprised of 10 dynamic adaptive tactile keys for easier access of in-game commands, and an LCD capable of two modes: one mode that displays in-game information when a mouse is in use; and another mode that functions as an ultra-sensitive, multi-touch panel designed for gaming on the go.

[Razer Blade Ultra-Thin Gaming Laptop]

Anti Sleep Pilot is a portable in-car active safety device that scientifically measures driving fatigue, which according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety is a factor in nearly 17 percent of all fatal traffic accidents. Battery-operated—Anti Sleep Pilot uses a standard AAA battery, so it does not rely on an in-car charger while the car is driven. Intelligent on/off button—the magnetic base acts as an on/off button to save battery life
when not in use. Touch sensor—ensures safe and easy use of the product while driving.

[Anti Sleep Pilot]

Audio recording; video editing; foreign language studies… it seems that the more powerful a software package is, and the more specialized its purpose, the more complicated it wants to make your keyboard. If you use one (or more) of these kinds of applications, you’ll appreciate KB Covers.

Take Logic Pro, or its little brother, Logic Express. They each assign some very specific functions to your familiar keys. Lay the KB Cover for Logic Pro/Express over your keyboard, and the command functions are laid out in front of you, at a glance. Color-coded, even.

KB has covers for a wide range of software applications, and for a wide range of keyboards. And, of course, these covers also keep dust and shmutz and the occasional beverage out of your keys.

KB Covers

[iCloud]

Music Beta lets you upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files.

[Music Beta by Google]

There is no unequivocal definition of life. The best that scientists can come up with is a description of characteristics that objects observed to be “living” seem to have in common.

There is a list of activities or processes that “living things” do — like undergo metabolism, respond to stimuli, reproduce, etc. — but they seem to boil down to two characteristics: they tend to have some kind of signalling abilities, and they are self-sustaining, at least over a period of time.

How about viruses? Are they alive? They carry with them the code required for reproduction, but they can’t actually carry it out without help from outside. They have to take over another cell’s machinery in order to make more copies of themselves. They don’t seem to have much in the way of biological processes to sustain, and as for signalling abilities — they are a bundle of DNA or RNA code wrapped up inside a protein package; thus, rather than having the ability to signal, they seem to be the signal, themselves.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen doesn’t waste time or energy quibbling over the definitions. Focusing on the ability to interact with and move about their environment, Jansen has created a series of mobile sculptures that he insists on referring to as a new life form. Having created them, he sets them free to roam about his native Netherlands beaches. Accordingly, he calls them strandbeests — Dutch for “beach creatures.”

And “roam about” they do. To see one of Jansen’s strandbeests in action inevitably creates the impression of viewing a living thing. Powered by the wind, they stop and start, change direction, and move with an impression of inner purposefulness. Or at least the semblance of it. Even standing still, their vanes twitch and sway in the wind in a way that is not immediately attributable to the wind, itself.

Nor is their choice of direction. Though powered by the wind, strandbeests do not just move in any direction the wind blows. Jansen has built into them mechanisms by which they can sense and respond to obstacles. Encountering the water, a strandbeest changes direction and continues on its way. Jansen’s strandbeests respond and move about their environment so naturally, they inevitably beg the question, What is Life?

Conway's Game of Life: "Breeder" animation

The Game of Life

To John Conway, Life is a game. Or, more accurately, it is a cellular automaton, a computer program. Just as Jansen’s strandbeests derive their complicated behaviors from sets of simple structures, Conway’s Game of Life is driven by a simple set of rules. A very simple set, in fact:

1. Underpopulation: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
2. Health: Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Overcrowding: Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.
4. Reproduction: Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.

The cells are represented as a gridwork of squares on a page. Colored-in squares are “live,” and cells the same color as the background are “dead.” To jump-start Conway’s world, the Player colors in some cells. This is the seed state. Then the rules are set in motion and the conditions of Life play out. The role of the Player in this Game of Life is to set the initial seed, then sit back and watch.

a Glider

One would expect this simple instruction set to result in a short and simple game. Instead, the watcher sees patterns emerge in the grid that appear to be behaviors. Some patterns, in fact, introduce the possibility of continuing the game indefinitely. One such pattern has been dubbed a “Glider,” for the way it propagates itself across the playing field. This pattern is so simple and iconic, it has been turned into an emblem of hacker culture.

Gosper's Glider Gun

When the game was young, Conway conjectured the possibility of an infinitely growing pattern, and offered a prize for the first person to come up with an example of one. Mathematician Bill Gosper, considered one of the cofounders of the hacker community, won the prize with the Glider Gun, a pattern that creates Gliders ad infinitum. There are other, bigger patterns, exhibiting even more complex behaviors, but the point is that they exhibit what can be described as “behavior” at all. By providing a computational basis for what has come to be known as “artificial life,” Conway and Gosper opened the doors for other pioneers. Like Theo Jansen.

According to biology, the basic building block of life is the cell. The basic building block of Jansen’s strandbeests is yellow plastic tubing of the type used in the construction industry for routing electrical cables. Using simple hand tools, Jansen combines sections of tubing with flexible sheeting, plastic hoses, recycled beverage bottles and other materials, to create mechanisms for movement. He chose these materials because they are readily available, inexpensive, easy to work with, and hold up well to conditions in the strandbeests’ environment, i.e., the beach. But he has created similar walking mechanisms from other materials, including wood and metal. Some of these constructions are large enough to carry passengers. Adhering to the Latin-based binomial nomenclature that taxonomists use, Jansen names his beasts according to genus and species. He calls one such transport device Animaris rhinoceros — “animaris” being a latinized shorthand for “animal of the sea.” And “rhinoceros” because… well, with its size, ponderous shape, and rough polyester skin, it looks like a rhinoceros. With people inside.

The mode of walking is what makes Jansen’s creatures so uncanny — not because they are strange, but because they move so naturally. We’re used to walking machines, metal spiders showing up at Burning Man, and the occasional dog-footed robot reports from the military. There’s a leg design called a Klann linkage that’s been around a while. Pretty standard for making walking mechanisms. But Jansen’s walking mechanism is something else again, which seems to follow its own graceful inner logic of movement. Animaris rhinoceros on the move, for example, looks not so much like a rhinoceros as like a chorus line of rhinoceroses boogalooing down Broadway in perfect sync. It houses no chips, no integrated circuits, no “brain” — just a deceptively simple feedback mechanism that has more in common with an old-time pendulum clock than with robots such as Honda’s state-of-the-art ASIMO. And therein lies both its elegance and its scalability. For “scalability” read not just size but adaptability. And for “adaptability,” read “future.” Jansen has a vision of the future for his strandbeests, and continually refines their design elements.

Animaris percipiere

Animaris percipiere uses the same basic walking mechanism as Rhinoceros, but it is clearly a step beyond, as the beauty (and complexity) of its internal structure testifies through its transparent skin. Percipiere is designed not as a mere transport mechanism. It is designed to be an autonomous entity. Or at least a step along the road to an autonomous entity. It sports a flexible wing along its back: a dorsal fin, if you will; and a row of recycled pop bottles. The bottles are connected by plastic tubing to simple pumps, not unlike bicycle pumps. The system serves Percipiere as a “digestive” system, the bottles being its “stomachs.” The wing, pushed by the wind, waves back and forth, driving the pumps. The pumps store pressurized air in the bottles. When sufficient pressure is reached… Animaris percipiere starts walking. The stored wind is routed into tubes that elongate under air pressure; these are Percipiere’s “muscles.” The muscles are connected by taps that can trigger other muscles in turn, like nerve ganglia (Jansen calls them “control centres”). Rather than simply being pushed by the wind, Percipiere “consumes” and stores the wind, and then uses it later, as needed. Which, taken together, is a pretty fair working description of what your “metabolism” does.

Why Life?

Jansen has come under criticism for his insistence on speaking of these mobile sculptures as “life forms.” He speaks thus of them because his ultimate aim, once they have reached a sufficient level of interaction with their environment — what biologists term irritability — is to turn them loose to fend for themselves.

Theo Jansen's Wind Lab

At his workshop on the dunes, Jansen continually refines his beasts. Once he’s learned everything he can from one design model, he declares it extinct and consigns it to his “boneyard,” where the sun and elements bleach the yellow plastic tubes, rendering them bonelike, indeed. Jansen has earned particular ire by claiming that his creations are refined by a process of evolution. Darwinians rightly point out that the whole point of evolutionary theory is that the driving mechanism is contained within the process, itself, and does not require an external hand guiding it — depends, in fact, on the absense of such a hand. These detractors fail to consider, however, that it is not this ongoing refinement of design that Jansen is necessarily referring to. Like evolution, Jansen is an eminently pragmatic experimentalist. In the early stages of his walking mechanism, rather than reiterate the painfully slow trial-and-error process of building and rebuilding a leg design, he did, in fact, employ a computer model that used a genetic algorithm, an accepted method for allowing a good design to refine itself over successive generations. Parameters for the design were allowed to perform inside the world of the computer model. More successful models were then allowed to “cross-pollinate,” eventually resulting in a design that would perform as desired in the real world. A genetic algorithm is, simply stated, evolution at work.

Jansen envisions an entire ecosystem of strandbeests of various shapes and sizes and levels of complexity, going about their day-to-day business, which business may be as incomprehensible to you and me as, well, your day-to-day business is to me, and vice versa. Will they eventually come to be able to reproduce themselves, as we do? It seems like a stretch — but in the meantime, it seems a bigger stretch for us humans to learn to avoid reproducing ourselves, willy-nilly. Will strandbeests come to exhibit other traits of “life”? Will they prey upon each other? It could be that the particular paradigm of predator and prey is simply the most expedient mechanism that evolution picked for carbon-based cellular life forms, but that it is not needed by Animaris of any stripe.

What we do know is that the definition of “living things” is as ever-changing as living things, themselves; it is continually revised as scholars encounter new entities. (Talk to a biologist about prions sometime.) We may come to realize, sooner rather than later, that the “definition” of life matters less than our attitude about it. One thing we can expect to see is unexpected (and perhaps even unpredictable) emergent behaviors, as strandbeests of new sizes and complexities proliferate.

Strandbeests of various sizes already exist. Small ones are even available as pets. You can buy a palm-sized strandbeest — Animaris ordis parvus (“Strandbeest of a small order”) — in plastic kit form, from Theo Jansen’s website. Assemble it. “Feed” it by blowing your breath upon its windvanes. Watch it move. And prepare to be enchanted.

When you drop your iPad (or Galaxy Tab, or Kindle, or other tablet device), it’s almost certain to land on one of its corners. So the logical place to add protection is at the corners.

That’s exactly what iBallz does (do?). Four sturdy foam balls, each about the size of a golf ball, are strung around a heavy-duty elastic cord. These are not soft, squishy foam balls; rather, they are stout, hard foam. Think building materials, or something that might protect a boat from blows against a dock. Each ball has a right-angled slot milled in it. Slip the slots over the corners of your iPad. The shock cord holds everything in place, and your tablet has something between it and the floor the next time you drop it. (You will drop it, you know.)

iBallz is (or are?) useful even when you’re not dropping your tablet. The balls (ballz?) hold the face of your tablet up off any surface it’s resting on. Release one corner and tuck the ball underneath, and your tablet is supported at a comfortable angle for tapping and typing. The elastic cord holds the other three corners in place. The cord is so secure, you can even use it as a carrying handle. Any force you apply to the shock cord just makes it grip tighter.

Friendly Integration LLC, maker of iBallz, has thought it out, offering a line of soft and hard cases, satchels, and sleeves, and iBallz (iBallzes?) in colors and sizes to accommodate all kinds of tablets.

iBallz Protection Harness for Tablet Devices

iBallz in use

Every iPad needs a good carrying case. Think hard: aside from leather (and bone and ivory), from what animal-derived material can you make a great-looking and durable wrap-around case for your iPad? Think sheep. Think wool felt.

What? Felt doesn’t sound “durable”? Asian nomads live in it. (The Kazakh word for their dwellings translates, literally, as “felt house.”) Felt is more protective than you might at first think, with the innate ability to wick moisture away. Your hard-shell polycarbonates can’t do that. But the last word in durability? Think about this: Indiana Jones’ hat is made of wool felt.

Yeah, we thought that would convince you. Now you know why you need the Tilt iPad Case made by Hard Graft.

Everything about this case screams quality. A thick layer of grey wool felt, reinforced strategically with supple vegetable-dyed leather, wraps around your iPad, front & back. Leather tabs on either side hold it shut with metal snaps. The felt and the leather are joined together with heavy-duty stitching to hold their shape, with an extra layer of leather providing extra protection for the touchscreen.

supports your iPad at a comfortable angle for browsing...

Leather pockets hold your iPad at its corners while the case rolls underneath to form a tilt-stand, infinitely adjustable to comfortable positions for typing and web-browsing. These high-quality materials age well with use, becoming more attractive and more functional over time. Hard Graft’s Tilt Case is built to last; as the motto says, stamped into the leather: you lose what you don’t hold.

...and for typing.

Hard Graft of Austria, purveyors of fine lifestyle accessories

Fingerless gloves have been around for a long time. Their biggest drawback is that, well… they’re fingerless. And the part of your hand you most want to keep warm is the finger part.

Special purpose gloves have also been around a while, like hunters’ gloves for shooters that allow freedom for the trigger finger. But in the age of Multi-Touch displays, a really thoughtfully-designed glove needs to give you back both your index finger and your thumb, so you can not only point and tap, but pinch-open and pinch-closed.

That’s what Freehands are: really thoughtfully-designed gloves for touchscreen users.

The index fingers and thumbs of these gloves flip open like little hatches so your digits can go all digital. The thoughtful part of the design: tiny embedded magnets in the fingertips hold the tips open and prevent their flapping around during finger-active times. So, now, when you’re on the slopes, you won’t have to doff your ski gloves to update Twitter: just grab your iPhone, pop open the little hatches, tap and swipe, and keep on schussing.

A variety of glove designs for men and women are available. Pictured below is the Freehands Ski Glove; and above are the Soft Shells for men, a good, warm general-purpose glove with a silicone-reinforced palm, soft fleece lining, and an elastic cinched wrist to keep out drafts. There’s a plastic hook built in to hold the pair together… but, honestly? …the little magnets do a pretty good job of that, too.

The Freehands Collections

for the slopes