Chris Herbert

730 posts on MacStories since September 2010

Vector & pixel trafficker for Seymour Midwest LLC, regular MacStories contributor, Hip-Hop junkie all day long; Apple addict circa 1976.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

Is your wallet surviving all the holidays? Here’s some great deals for today on iOS & Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! iOS apps price drops are starting to show up again too!

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iPhone Controlled Mini Fridge Beer Cannon

Whaaaa? That’s right kids (of legal drinking age), ‘personalbeerrobot’ has created what every man only dreams about - a mini fridge that can be remotely controlled to adjust temperature, pivots and uses compressed air to fire beer cans into your thirsty grip for a shot of hoppy refreshment. It’s controlled using an iPhone web app; select what kind of beer you’re thirsty for, use the built-in cannon cam to aim, and fire away! The iPhone web app can also control and monitor the mini fridge’s temperature as well. There’s even a twitter account set up for the beer robot: @MyBeerRobot

Features:

  • Vends 4 types of beer
  • Broadcasts temperature
  • Adjust temperature via iPhone
  • Aim via webcam
  • Auto tweet video per shot
  • Fire beer with 50psi of deliciousness

Video after the break…

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iPhone 4 Gets NFC ‘Sticker’ from Softbank

Japanese carrier Softbank is responding to complaints about the iPhone 4’s absense of an internal NFC chip by issuing a ‘sticker’ that gets applied to the back of the iDevice. It covers most of the backside along with looking ugly and covering up Apple’s own logo. Now granted many people slap cases on their iPhones anyway, but this is how the FeliCa payment system is going to work (for know). The ‘sticker’ does not communicate with the iPhone so its abilities are limited. The beautiful set of ‘stickers’ go on sale in February for a cool ¥2,980 ($36).

It works pretty simply: Japanese iPhone users attach the “sticker” to their iPhones (Apple’s bumpers still fit) and it adds FeliCa RFID smart card functionality to the iPhone. Once the ‘sticker’ is charged with e-money, users can tap their iPhone on card readers in train stations, restaurants, convenience stores and other places in Japan to make payments.

[via Engadget via Softbank (translated)]




#MacStoriesDeals - HUGE Wednesday!

TODAY is the last day before iTunes Connect shutdown for the holiday, so we’re re-running a few things you may have missed -> Here’s some great deals for today on iOS & Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em before they’re gone!

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twttr.mediaTypes - A Great Safari Extension For #NewTwitter

A while back I stumbled upon a few Safari extensions by Norio Nomura that embedded extra image service viewing into newtwitter that it didn’t yet support. There was originally one for dribbble and another for Instagram when it was still unsupported. I am a dribbble member and use Instagram so they were no brainers for me. I use the twitter.com website with Safari when I am at work (and sometimes at home), so it’s always open. Last week I visited Nomura’s github page and noticed he had combined the 2 extensions and added even more including post.ly, withings, moby.to and a few more, it’s now called twttr.mediaTypes. I tweeted a few days ago that this extension was my Safari extension of the day and it had a very good response and was retweeted a lot.

After yesterday’s huge Camera+ news / update, I wondered how easy it would be for him to add Camera+’s image hosting service to this already great extension. It took him less than an hour to get back to me with an updated version supporting Camera+, it even interested him enough that he bought the app as well. It works fantastic, just like it did before, placing the image into the details pane of twitter.com’s timeline.

twttr.mediaTypes is not a must-have for everyone but anyone that uses twitter.com as their client of choice with Safari or Chrome (yeah, he has a version for that too) should really check it out. I have also asked him to add img.ly support as well, but no word back yet.