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Internet Archive gets $1 million donation from bitcoin fund
The cryptocurrency landscape has seen a flurry of activity lately as values have reached eye-watering figures and people scramble to get a piece of the digital pie -- they're even re-mortgaging their homes to get in on the action. But while many are in it for personal gain, there are those using bitcoin for more charitable causes. Namely the Pineapple Fund, a philanthropic fund set up by an anonymous bitcoin millionaire, which has just made a $1 million donation to The Internet Archive.
Here's what it's like to use a watch as a phone
No one wants the smartwatch category to succeed more than I do. As a kid, I dreamed of enjoying TV on my watch, or video calling "HQ" (or more likely, my mum), just like Penny in Inspector Gadget. Most smartwatches offer a taste of this experience, but not the whole enchilada. Enter Neptune Pine. It's a smartwatch by the loosest definition: it's a small Android phone in a wrist-strap. Whatever you want to call it, it'll do both of the above things, and more. It's also a genuine Kickstarter success story -- like, one, where the product came out and everything! It might not be the first smartwatch/phone mash-up, and it's (definitely) not the last. But, it's one of the more ambitious takes on the idea I've seen. I spent seven days with it (and no other phone) to see how my dream stands up to the reality -- and whether a watch could ever replace your trusty mobile. The galleries tell much of the story, so be sure to jump in when you see them.
Neptune's Pine isn't a smartwatch; it's a smartphone that sits on your wrist
When designing a smartwatch, the general trend is to start with a basic timepiece and add features until physics or budgets get in the way. That's not the approach taken by 19-year-old Canadian Simon Tian when he developed the Pine by Neptune. Instead, he took to Kickstarter with the idea of just shrinking a last-generation smartphone down to watch-size proportions. The result isn't really a watch in any sense of the word, but considering that the Pine raised eight times its goal on Kickstarter, there's clearly a desire for this sort of hardware. We got to spend some time with it at CES and want to share some impressions with you.
Pine-scented ASUS F6V laptop gets unboxed, smelled
We're not ones to just abruptly stick our nostrils in someone's business, but we couldn't help but drift over when waltzing by PC Authority's most recent unboxing. The smell we caught was of pine, and given that it's a pine-scented ASUS F6V that's being unwrapped, we suppose that all adds up. On the real, testers took note of an "unmistakable wafting scent of a pine forest, floating on the summer breeze and carrying away their troubles" as they cracked the seal on the carefree machine. For those curious, the scent was far from overbearing, though it was strong enough to separate itself from, um, non-smelly alternatives. Sadly, critics also mentioned that the odor had "almost entirely disappeared" after it had sat out in the open for a few hours, and at last check, there's no way to recharge or refill these things. Ah well, pack a few Christmas Tree Air Fresheners™ and you'll never know the difference.[Thanks, Geller]