Earbuds should obviously make your music sound good, but there's no reason they can't also look great doing it. These House of Marley in-ear buds are quite stylish and sound excellent to boot. They're a bit on the bass-heavy side, but I'm okay with that. The buds are fashioned from earth-friendly materials such as recyclable aluminum and polished FSC-certified sapele and maple…
The t-shirt designers at United Pixelworkers have teamed up with Fiks:Reflective to produce the super-reflective Active Duty II shirt for nighttime cyclists and runners. Made from soft black American Apparel poly-cotton 50/50, this tee sports UP's classic UNTD PXLWRKRS design (I snagged this one a while back) in reflective black and red on the front, with black reflective stripes on the lower…
In the middle of running a Kickstarter for their Simple Syrup Kit, the industrious guys at Studio Neat have redesigned their website and they've made their Neat Ice Kit available for public purchase. This kit allows you to make beautifully clear ice in your own kitchen. It involves an insulated, block-shaped ice mold that freezes water from the top down, pushing impurities…
The guys at Lickability have released Quotebook 3 for iOS. Quotebook is the best way to capture your favorite quotes—whether they come from books, tweets, songs, movies, your kids, conference talks, or anywhere else. I've been a fan of the app for a while now. (I still miss those black leather accents...) With today's update, this universal app is better than ever.…
Our friend Federico Viticci and his girlfriend Sylvia Gatta have released Perspective Icons 2, a lovely set of 100 icons for use with OmniFocus 2 for Mac. These icons are available in various colors and resolutions (including Retina), and allow you to add a touch of personality to your OmniFocus custom perspectives. Once installed on your Mac, they will sync to the…
Hugo's Amazing Tape is a reusable, adhesive-less tape that clings only to itself. I've heard it's popular with board gamers and embroiderers who need to keep a lot of small items neatly organized, but since it's so easy to remove and reuse, it's also quite useful around the house and office. These are just a few of its uses: Cable management (more…
Hong Kong-based company Barton 1972 makes a lot of cool camera straps. The braided leather models are particularly stylish, and they have a sort of soft stretchiness with lots of surface area, so they're also quite comfortable to wear. Perfect for micro 4/3 cameras. There are several braided straps to choose from: Braided Style ($79) — Depending on how tall you are,…
Okay, owners of Olympus mirrorless cameras. You've got the 25mm f/1.8 lens. Maybe you've got the 40-150mm f/4-5.6 too. Now you're ready for another addition to the lineup, maybe something for portrait work. How about the 75mm f/1.8 lens? This lens -- equivalent to a 150mm focal length when used with a micro four thirds sensor -- sports an all-metal construction with…
This Delta 9-spray handheld showerhead is pretty great, for several reasons: It's strong enough to feel like I'm getting clean (2.5 GPM flow rate) without feeling like my skin is being melted off. As the name suggests, there are 9 different spray settings to choose from. Variety is the spice of life! It has a "pause" button that basically reduces the shower…
Matt Gemmell has long been a favorite writer of mine on the web. He writes about a number of things: software development, productivity, technology, etc—but his deeply personal essays are always the most captivating to me. He has collected a number of these essays into a Kindle ebook called Raw Materials. In it, Mr. Gemmell introspects about various aspects of his life's…
Speaking of Studio Neat, did you know they wrote and published an ebook about indie entrepreneurship a while back? It Will Be Exhilarating is all about the ins and outs of starting and running a small business in a Kickstarter-fueled world. Dan and Tom give details about manufacturing hardware products, launching a Kickstarter project, and they give a few marketing tips along…
After a highly successful Kickstarter campaign for their Neat Ice Kit, the boys at Studio Neat are back with a new Kickstarter project: the Simple Syrup Kit. Simple syrup—a concoction of sugar and water—is great for sweetening both iced coffee and cocktails. We almost always have a jar of the stuff in our fridge. To use Tom and Dan's words, the Simple…
This leather ruck sack from Alabama company Loyal Stricklin is as beautiful as it is functional. Made from 4oz rich tan Horween Leather Chromexcel, it sports a large primary opening with two smaller pockets on the front. When the enclosure flap is rolled up, the bag measures 12"x19"x5"—plenty large enough to carry one's daily essentials—and extends to 25" tall when unrolled. Each…
One of the best reasons to pick up a micro 4/3 camera like the Olympus E-M10 is portability. Olympus' 25mm f/1.8 lens complements this idea nicely, but maybe you need something with a little more versatility. We recommend the Olympus M.Zuiko 40-150mm f/4-5.6 R zoom. This entry-level zoom lens gives you the extra oomph you need to capture subjects somewhat far away…
Mike Rohde's new book, The Sketchnote Workbook, has officially launched. This is the follow-up to his popular introductory book, The Sketchnote Handbook. In the original book, Mike taught us how to use sketchnotes to visually capture ideas and remember key bits of information. In The Sketchnote Workbook he expands on those concepts, showing how to adapt your sketchnote skills to all sorts…
This is a guest post by our friend, Bradley Chambers. Scanning from my iPhone has really made a big impact on my ability to go paperless in my life. Scanbot is my current go-to app for this. It's extremely fast and simple. Some of the included features: Automatic upload to many cloud services (Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Box, OneDrive) Ability to edit…
Sony has announced their upcoming mirrorless camera, the a5100. The tl;dr is that it's basically the a6000 in a more compact package. The a5100 has no electronic viewfinder or any physical control dials to speak of, but it does contain the same 24.3-megapixel CMOS APS-C sensor and BIONZ X image processing engine as the a6000. In other words, it still focuses on…
If you're like us and enjoy quality leather bags and such, you know how important it is to properly care for and maintain the leather's finish over time. Chamberlain's Leather Milk is the right tool for the job, and is even what Saddleback Leather recommends for their products. There are actually five versions of the stuff, each with a different purpose: No.…
The features that set the Panasonic LUMIX GH4 apart from its much cheaper competition aren't the 16MP micro four-thirds sensor, WiFi connectivity, weather-sealed body, fully-articulated rear LCD, or even its excellent battery life. It's the fact that Panasonic managed to squeeze 4K video recording (!) into such a compact package. The non-video specs are still perfectly respectable, but I wouldn't pick it…
Wherever you stand on the Pluto reclassification issue, you may get as much of a kick from this t-shirt design as I did. If you can't read the front-facing text in the image above, it says: Demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet was a reasonable decision, although the choice of nomenclature was flawed. As of this writing (Aug 14th, 2014) there is…