vulture bytes

Vulture Bytes: Spy Kit, CorkPads, and Kindle Singles

This week in our little corner of the Internet: a USB spy kit, an iPad case that looks like a bulletin board, a piano that sounds like a cat, artsy movies for streaming, and new, short things to read on your Kindle.

And chat with us at VultureBytes@gmail.com if you have ideas. No vaporware is too frivolous.

More for you to act out your own pop-culture fantasies than to consume someone else’s, this little USB stick is the perfect spy gadget. For $50, you can be your own Q, armed with a surreptitious HD camcorder. Running a Powerpoint at a top-secret meeting that a rival corporation has paid you to record? Put this in a laptop and flick the record switch on. Your country needs you to get a vicious, traitorous cyberhacker to confess to his crimes, but you’re unable to wear a wire? There’s no better weapon. Have you gone rogue, lost access to your closet of high-tech surveillance bugs, but still need to get audio from inside an impossibly lavish hotel room? Plant a seemingly innocuous USB key and retrieve it later. Not that we’ve been fantasizing about this or anything. PRICE: $49.99
In our more existential moments, we worry about what our gadget obsession is doing to the world. Steve Jobs has assured us that buying an iPad isn’t going to pollute the world anymore than it’s already polluted. But he still made a product that demands a case, and who knows what’s in the rubber, cloth, and/or metallic things we slide around our tablets. Which is why we’re telling you about Kork, an iPad case made out of, yes, cork. We could tell you more about the product, but really it’s just a corkboard made to fit your iPad. It’s nice looking, doesn’t weigh much, and is perfect to help assuage gadget guilt. Also, it’s perhaps the best iPad case for the oenophiles in your life. PRICE: 50 Euros, which is about $70.
This app is what would’ve happened if the first keyboard was designed in the era of funny cat videos. Made for the people who have watched a cat play piano on an iPad 7.4 million times, the app transforms the sounds of a piano into sounds of a meow. Every key strikes a different note, if you could call the yelps notes, and amazingly, people are making actual music out of this. Proof: This feline rendition of “Teenage Dream,” originally found on Gizmodo. That old cat lady down the street finally has an instrument to call her own. PRICE: $0.99
Roger Ebert’s revived TV show has already done some good. It pointed Vulture Bytes to Mubi.com, a hub for art-house cinema, the people who love it, and the people who want to watch it online. One of the hosts on Ebert’s show, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, is a critic on the site’s blog, which is full of the kind of highbrow discussion that you can rarely find in person. There’s just a dearth of people willing to talk about the surrealist chronology of Luis Buñel’s Un Chien Andalou. (Partly because we become so insufferable once we start down that road.) The criticism is nice, but the real pleasure is in Mubi’s a la carte offerings of obscure art house films. For a few bucks, you can stream films that a true cineaste doesn’t ignore. And then afterward you can turn to the site’s forum, where you’re guaranteed to find a likeminded — if still slightly insufferable — community. PRICE: Varies, but it looks like most feature-lengths are $3.
The name is cheesy, but the concept is sound: Read long-form essays and articles on your Kindle and pay the authors who write them. Starting this week, Amazon’s Kindle store now offers articles, novellas, etc. that cost less than the paper copy of the magazines they’ve likely come from, and far less than a normal e-book. Authors like Jodi Picoult, Evan Ratliff, and Mark Greif are all featured. Some of these articles you’ll still be able to Instapaper from their host publications, of course. But now you’ll feel guilty, maybe more so than when you download a torrent of Transformers. Even Picoult doesn’t have a $200 million budget. PRICE: Depends, but probably between $0.99 and $2.99
Vulture Bytes: Spy Kit, CorkPads, and Kindle Singles