Ahoy, Space Pirates, Spend Your Booty On This Crazy Watch

Arrr! Here be space pirates and where there are space pirates there is need of a $230,000 mechanical watch. Wild watch makers MB&F have just announced their MB&F HM6, a watch based on a 1970s cartoon called Capitaine Flam (Captain Flame). The bulbous watch is built of titanium alloy and you can tell the time using the little curved bulbs on one end of the piece. You can see more photos here.

What the heck is going on here and why is this important? Well, in terms of materials science this is pretty cutting edge stuff. To create a working watch in this shape and size, using curved metal and carefully curved sapphire crystal, is a feat in itself and could point to future design cues in consumer electronics. The biomorphic design looks like something laid eggs on your wrist and is a huge departure from MB&F’s previous spaceship-themed watches. The central tourbillion – the little bit in the center that spins – can be hidden with an eyelid-like cover and the watch winds itself automatically.

Thanks to devices like the Apple Watch, watch design is a hot topic these days and the tools and techniques used to create high-end watches like this one will soon trickle down into cheaper watches. While this object is made by hand – hence the price – a mass produced curved crystal isn’t impossible and titanium bodies are already popular in phones and computers. While MB&F might not like it, we can expect to see this design language in wearables as we move away from blocky and bulky to more organic systems. Duplication, as they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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