vulture bytes

Vulture Bytes: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

While everyone was focused on magnets and tablets this week, Vulture Bytes was more interested in the gadgets that are less flashy, but just as magical. To wit, we’ve found Dr. Seuss, a USB turntable, a cheap app that lets you use your iPad as a second monitor, an even cheaper app that uploads your photos to the cloud, and a more expensive one that plays with green-screen technology.

After you read, e-mail us about great pop-culture gadgets you’ve found in your travels. Please, for the love of Jobs, just do it. We need all the help we can get. VultureBytes@gmail.com.

When Vulture Bytes was a toddler, the only children’s books we wanted to read or play with were the ones that came with a soundboard on the side. We couldn’t understand why all these adults were reading books that didn’t come with buttons to press. It must be so amazing, then, to be a kid in the 2010s. On the iPad, the classics come alive by default. The tablet’s ability to make children’s books into interactive cartoons is one of its most unsung features. The first time we noticed was when we downloaded a copy of “Alice”, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, in app form. And now we see that much of the Dr. Seuss catalogue — Fox in Socks, Horton Hears a Who, etc. — is online with interactive features and images, as well as audio tracks. It’s a far more lively rendition of The Cat in the Hat than Mike Myers’s attempt a few years ago. PRICE: Seuss is on sale now for $3.
Vulture Bytes supports vinyl’s repeated attempts to make a comeback over the past few decades. But the problem has always been its portability. Music has fit in our pockets for the last twenty years, yet luddites, D.J.’s, and hipsters want us to lug big LPs around? And what if there’s no record player where we’re going? We’ve schlepped a glorified Frisbee for nothing! But now there’s this pretty brilliant USB-centric turntable that is far more portable than most of the hulking phonographs you’ll find at the antique mall. It has speaker outputs and a way for you to rip the LPs onto your hard drive. But most important, it’s portable. Not portable like an MP3 player. But portable enough. PRICE: 4,000 Yen, which is basically $50. But it’s being shipped from Japan, so you may encounter a touch of shipping and handling.
When you walked into work this morning, you may have passed by the one guy in the office with two monitors and felt a twinge of envy. Second in status only to having an office of one’s own, the dual-monitor setup is proof that a company values an employee enough to buy the tools to actually let her get some work done. In the likely event you do not fall into that category, there’s this app, which makes your tablet into a second screen. It hooks into your computer’s IP address and then creates extra screen real estate on your tablet, so you can pretend to work on your Excel spreadsheet and still watch Hulu. PRICE: $5
At some point, Apple is going to notice the plethora of apps that wirelessly move data between an iDevice and a computer and just create its own solution. (This “solution,” of course, will only be necessary because of a deficient product.) But until that happens, apps like CameraSync continue to appear and be all sorts of handy. It’s simple enough: upload all of your iPhone’s photos to the cloud without using a cord. CameraSync will let you move the photos to a variety of sites, including Dropbox, Flickr, and even iDisk, Apple’s own cloud-storage solution. Not that you’d need a third-party solution to do that. Wait, what’s that? Oh. You do. PRICE: $2
Admittedly, this is a niche app. But for all of you who have dreams of augmenting your reality with more green screens, there is nothing easier than this. It’s an app that lets you Chroma Key your surroundings, turning any monochrome backdrop into something entirely different. The pros use it to help them get a better sense of what a green-screen shot will look like once they go to postproduction. Amateurs use it to enact secret fantasies of entering the scenes of our favorite movies. Gather some friends, set them in front of a wall (preferably one with a tarp hanging in front of it), choose the right image, take a screenshot, and suddenly they’re in Middle Earth staring down Shelob. Not that that’s the scene that first came to our mind or anything. PRICE: On sale now for $20
Vulture Bytes: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!