Geek News

The Griffin Woogie. Your kids will never give your iPhone back again.

Griffin Technology today announced a partnership with ScrollMotion, makers of the Iceberg Reader. The result? The new Griffin Woogie.

woogie 1 318x101 The Griffin Woogie. Your kids will never give your iPhone back again.

The Woogie is a soft and huggable iPhone enclosure that is part stuffed animal and part protective case. It has two built-in speakers1 to play with Iceberg Kids eBooks, music, videos, and more. The Woogie’s six appendages are made from soft, non-toxic fabrics and allow for easy carrying and tuck underneath to prop your iPhone up for handsfree viewing.

If the bright screen and fun apps weren’t enough to keep your kids fixated on your iPhone, stuffing it inside this fuzzy green asterisk from Teletubbyland will certainly ensure that your phone will soon be indelibly regarded as theirs. But at least it will keep them quiet.

The Woogie, $19.99 USD, is now available from Griffin’s website. The free Woogie Sesame Street Sampler is available in the App Store. Additional apps and content from Iceberg Kids are available in the App Store.

mzl.bummczgy.320x480 75 318x212 The Griffin Woogie. Your kids will never give your iPhone back again.

  1. powered by included AAA batteries []

Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

4946299399 a0cee67139 318x211 Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

San Francisco photographer, Joey Celis ( @joeyjoeyjoey ) has turned his iPhone 4 into a Leica M9 with this ingenious skin. I had to look this up, not being a photography geek, but the M9 is “the world’s most compact full-format digital camera system” according to Leica. So, I would imagine that this skin would be highly sought after by every iPhone-4-using Leica fan.

With this skin, the photographic “business end” of the iPhone 4 is quite convincing as the compact M9 at a passing glance and can actually take pictures…although, not from the Leica’s lens. If you follow along with Celis’ iPhone 4 Leica M9 conversion photo set on Flickr, you’ll see how it looks in the wild as well as its humble beginnings as a Photoshop document.

While, at first, Celis had no plans to produce the skin for sale, response has been so positive that he posted this along with the picture you see above hinting that ordering information would be on the way soon:

Been getting lots of emails on when I’ll be taking orders for the Leica M9 skin and I think I finally settled on how I would like to release this and it will be in the form of donations to NF1 .

I’ll post information here and here once I skin the other phone.

Stay tuned and thanks for the support!

  1. Neurofibromatosis []

Teleport …and a Feat of Geek Strength

If you don’t know about Teleport from Abyssoft, you should. It’s a donationware application that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control many Macs—a virtual KVM switch of sorts. In the video below, I show how I am able to drag a single folder from one iMac across the screens of two other Macs to a fourth Mac situated across the room from the mouse I’m using to control it.

You probably have no use for such a Feat of Geek Strength, but one situation where I’ve used Teleport with great success is when I’m sitting at my desk using my iMac for some serious video rendering while my MacBook Pro sits in front of the iMac’s screen. I use the mouse and its built-in keyboard to control the MacBook Pro and also use them to control the iMac. With Teleport configured to let me move my mouse to the top of the MacBook Pro screen as the portal to the bottom of the iMac screen, the interface is slick and seamless.

I have to admit and caution that, when using Teleport to control another iMac to control a MacBook to control another MacBook as I did in the video, it can become very easy to lose your cursor and become confused as to which Mac is in control at any given time. But, hey, that’s why they call them Feats of Geek Strength

Have you accomplished any Feat of Geek Strength? Let me know in the comments. Better yet—challenge me!!

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