magazines

The boys and their high-end audio toys in Las Vegas

Stereophile magazine's excellent coverage of the high-end audio scene at CES '08 at the Venetian Hotel has kept me on the edge of my seat since Monday. So many great new products, from old and new companies say a lot about the thriving, worldwide audiophile market. I've picked five products to show you, but Stereophile's site has dozens of really cool sightings.

Steve Jobs tops list of business power people

Five of Fortune magazine's top four most powerful businesspeople in the world are very familiar to the tech world--and one of the names you might have expected to crack the top five isn't there.

Yeah, I said five of the top four, but this is Fortune's list, so blame the magazine for the accounting. But we'll get to that later.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs came in at the top of the list, which was posted to the magazine's Web site Tuesday. The magazine noted that Apple's chairman and CEO "twice altered the direction … Read more

Read free magazines on the iPhone or Touch

I've always loved e-books (I read 'em on my Palm), so I had more than a passing interest in Amazon's new Kindle gizmo (unboxed over at Crave). But $400?! Come on. And then I got to thinking: Man, Apple should really, really get into the e-book game. How cool would it be to flip pages by swiping a finger on the iPhone/iPod touch screen?

Until that glorious day arrives, Zinio Labs is offering free (for now) magazines for iPhone and iPod Touch users. The Zinio Mobile Newsstand includes titles like Car & Driver, Men's Health, and … Read more

Geeking out: Gorgeous digital edition magazines

Who says magazines are dead? Not Fortune Small Business Magazine, Hearst Magazines, or Red Herring. And certainly not Olive Software, the Santa Clara, Calif., company responsible for creating the interactive digital twins of their print issues.

Like the best discoveries, I stepped into Olive Software's work by accident, while flipping through the digital leaves of Fortune Small Business Magazine. As a champion of downloadable and Web apps for consumers, I wouldn't normally seek out this kind of story, but the experience was too gratifying not to share. After all, would I hold back from you?

Click once and the magazine blooms in its self-contained online reader. Click again, this time on the right arrow, and the cover unfurls to reveal a faithful representation of the magazine's glossy, full-page interior, down to the shadowed hollow where the pages meet the binding. Flip through to read articles horizontally across multiple pages, each one adhering to the original layout, rather than dive-bombing into a vertical scroll that makes do with the Web's predilection for linear storytelling.… Read more

Fabricators descend on Maker Faire Austin

AUSTIN, Texas--If you've never seen a machine that makes 3D models out of sugar, you should.

But unless you're part of a relatively small group of people who went to the Maker Faire in California in May, or are one of a few other people who know the machine's creator, you probably have never even heard of the device.

Similarly, you may not be aware--or at least the general public probably isn't--that there is a whole movement going on right now to build advanced, digital, relatively inexpensive personal fabrication and robotics tools that can do or … Read more

Jamming TVs in Austin

AUSTIN, TEXAS--I'm sitting in the lobby of the Radisson hotel downtown with a bunch of the folks putting on Maker Faire.

One of them is Make magazine editor Phil Torrone, who, among other crazy ventures, was the co-genius behind Roomba Frogger, when he and fellow hacker Limor Fried modified a Roomba vacuum cleaner and wirelessly directed it to run back and forth across an Austin street like the iconic classic video game during South by Southwest 2006.

This morning, however, Torrone is tired, as it's only 8 a.m. But he's got a goal, and it's … Read more

Sunfire CRM-2 Cinema Ribbon: The biggest sounding tiny speaker you can buy

Nowadays it seems like everybody wants tiny speakers. Catch is, most small speakers sound small--they squash dynamic range, can't play at all loud, and produce a lot more distortion than large speakers. I've always been frustrated by the sound of really tiny speakers--until I reviewed Sunfire's CRM-2 satellite ($800 each) in the May, 2007 issue of Home Theater magazine .

With its grille removed you notice something unusual: the CRM-2's front baffle is almost completely covered by a 6-inch "ribbon" tweeter (essentially a lightweight aluminum foil, suspended between neodymium magnets). The ribbon's ultra-low moving … Read more

Rolling Stone and Playboy now on DVD

In 1953, Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy. Fourteen years later, Jann Wenner published the first issue of Rolling Stone. Today, both magazines have published hundreds of issues and made an undeniable mark on American culture.

Now, instead of spending months and thousands of dollars on eBay, you can read those iconographic issues on your computer. The Bondi Digital Publishing Cover to Cover series collects back issues on DVD, which can be searched and read with the company's proprietary software. The first two "Cover to Cover" collections are Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First … Read more

'Effortless perfection': Much Photoshopping required

Girls and women are under all sorts of pressure to look perfect--and to make it look easy in the process. Duke University identified this new unattainable standard as "effortless perfection."

As individual women, it can be easy to wonder why we fall into the trap of trying to live up to an unattainable standard. It's something we absorb on an almost subconscious level. Deconstructing this month's Redbook magazine cover shows us just how manufactured the images of beauty we see really are.

I didn't think twice about the cover image of country singer and actress Faith Hill when I first saw it. But an untouched original photo obtained by Jezebel shows just how much "digital magic" even a certified star needs to be ready for her close-up. … Read more