Gadgets

Just as we feel nostalgia for the music of our youth, so we feel equal attachment to the video games played during our pot-smoking college years. For me the console that most often appeared through the smoky haze was the SNES, with games of Super Mario Kart and Streetfighter II played until we were too tired and stoned to taunt each other any longer.

OSX Lion has already begun to blur the lines between Mac and iOS. But in a note to investors today first reported by Barron’s, a Jefferies & Co. analyst believes the two will completely merge by 2012.

How will this be accomplished? On the hardware end, analyst Peter Misek posits that Apple could use the A6 quad-core processor to unify its mobile and computing devices.

Given that Leica’s D-Lux 5 is little more than an overpriced re-badging of the Panasonic LX5, there might actually be a market for Colorware’s re-painted version. If somebody is willing to pay an extra $370 just to get Leica’s red-dot logo on their camera, surely they’d also be dumb enough to pay another $400 to have the thing resprayed?

The premium point-and-shoot will go from dull black to pretty much any combination of nausea-inducing colors you like.

Our notebooks, ultrabooks and desktop PCs are all getting thinner — thin enough that Kate Moss in her heroin-chic heyday could have sported something like the 13-inch MacBook Air down the runway and it wouldn’t have overwhelmed her almost nonexistent frame.

It’s no surprise. We’ve been seeing computers slim down ever since those giant room-sized computers that spawned the digital age, and the introduction of the first PCs in the decades that followed.

Facebook’s iPad app could be a lot closer to launch than we thought. A full-sized, fully-functional version of the iPad app is hidden inside the current iPhone app. That means that, if you are running the iPhone app you already have the iPad executable on your phone.

Discovered by M.G Siegler, Apple writer for AOL’s Tech Crunch, the iPad app is a lot more modern-looking than the tired old iPhone version, and looks a lot like Twitter’s official iPad app.

Both of the new Macs that Apple shipped today come with the latest version of OS X: 10.7 Lion. The update brings many new features, as you’d expect of a new operating system, but there are some fundamental changes both to the user experience itself, and the way Apple has chosen to deliver the new OS. One — the lack of any physical install media — is both convenient and annoying.

Readdle’s PDF Converter will do just that. It takes pretty much any file on your iPad and turns it into a PDF. There are a few hard-to-use web services that will do this for you, but PDF Converter takes care of everything on the iPad itself. This is both more secure, and way more convenient.

There are lots of ways to get documents into the converter. The main one is to use the “Open with” command in other applications (like Dropbox, Mail or MobileMe).

The trouble with being a hipster is that you end up looking like all other hipsters. Take, for instance, the Urban Fixed-Gear cyclist or — as Bike Snob NYC calls him — the Nü Fred. This freshly pierced and tattooed trust-fund kid will show his allegiance to the tribe in many ways, one of which is the Kryptonite Evolution Mini D-Lock.

The familiar orange-headed shackle is usually seen peeking out of a rear jeans pocket, a mating display similar to that of a baboon’s bright-red rear.

It seems impossible, but apparently nobody has ever made a chocolate-laying 3-D printer before now. Thankfully, that oversight has been remedied by Dr Liang Hao and his team, of the University of Exeter in England.

The printer works like any other additive 3-D printer, building up the design one layer at a time, only this one works with delicious chocolate which can be eaten afterwards.

In addition to the new top-end EP3, Olympus has also announced a pair of smaller Micro Four Thirds cameras. These are more like Sony’s NEX range, or the new Panasonic GF3 than their big brother, but they’re still pretty capable cameras.

First is the EPL3, and update to the EPL2. It has a new tilting three-inch, 460,000-dot LCD in a slimline metal body. It also sports the same new 12.3MP sensor and processor found in the EP3, which means 1080i video capture and low-light shooting at ISO 12,800.