Valentine's Day Technology

Is that your way of telling our listeners that you love them? I love each and every one of you except for one person. You know who you are and what you did. But we're gonna talk about love and technology because you know what's coming up. Valentine's Day. Yes, some of us have that burned into our brains courtesy of are significant others and companies, green card companies, chocolate tears, people at the grocery store who put out the Valentine's

Day goodies on December. Yeah, so, um, Valentine's Day, it's coming up. We might be wondering what the heck is tech Stuff doing about Valentine's Day? Well, I'll tell you We're gonna tell you about some tech that you might want to look into as a possible gift for your sweetie. Yes, and uh, would you like to start yourself or would you like me to give? I will? I will start

with my my killer app, your killer app. Yes, this this is the gift that keeps on giving, and possibly one of the things that might give is a restraining order. It's the It's cute Circuits hug shirt. Now, the hug shirt is not new. This is actually a few years old. I remember seeing it when it first came out, and I actually had a nice long conversation with a coworker of ours, candas Keener, about the hug shirt, and she had her own perspective on this, which I only wish

I could repeat. But um, but Candice is so much better at it than I am at then you rate. The hug shirt has a shirt that happens to have within it sensors and actuators, and they're located in strategic points on the shirt, including things like the wrists and the shoulders and lower back and parts of the torso. And the idea here is that when you buy these shirts and pears, and when a person on one end applies pressure to part of the shirt. The person wearing

the other shirt will feel the pressure. And the way this works is that both shirts have Bluetooth transmitters in them, and the Bluetooth transmitter will send data to the person's phone. So you have to use your phone to send the data to the other person's phone, which will then send the data via bluetooth to their shirt, which will then respond. So I could give myself a hug and that data will be transferred over to my significant other, who will

then get hugged by her own shirt and uh. According to the website, the intensity of the hugging actuator depends upon several factors, including how much pressure you use on your end, your heart rate, and your body temperature, and those things will determine the intensity of the hug. I feel dirty just thinking about that. But if you guys want to hug your significant others, I'm just waiting until they come out with hug pants. Hug pants. Yeah, you

know what I'm talking about. When you want to put so yeah, how can I follow that? I don't know. That's why I wanted to get it out first. Um. Yeah, it's it's funny because um, there are a lot of of geek stores on the web now that there weren't just a few years ago. Of course, your mouth, um my one one of my favorites. IM. I'm a semi frequent shopper of think geek dot com, an excellent website. But there are others like a clear gear dot com um,

both of which have some Valentine's Day goodies um. And they're all techy to different degrees. Um. You know, if you were looking for a tech style romantic evening, you both offer the flameless candle, you know, the led lights that you can essentially blow on and they light up. They don't use any sort of you know, flammable element at all. It's so you know, it's a it's a pretty nice way to say I love you, you geek. You know, you have a romantic evening and the lights

very subtle. You can get getting different colors. It's pretty cool. You can set the scene and there's no danger of you excellently burning down the apartment, which is always nice. And uh yeah, yeah I've seen those. These are those are nice. Um. There's nice for other reasons too, but it's you know, for that romantic evening. Uh. Clearly I'm going a more goofy and geeky way than you are. Yeah,

why didn't you you? Uh? Just before we started, Jonathan says, I've got all the goofy ones and I'm going, okay, well, why don't you go hit us with another goofy one? Maybe whould do the goofy ones first? Well no, no, no, no, we can. We can go back and forth. Here, here's another one. This is This is another shirt pair. Oh, this is also from Think Geeky and uh this is

the eight bit Dynamic Life shirt. Yes, yes, So if you've played games like Legend of Zelda, you are familiar that your life bar is represented by a series of hearts, and as you get hurt, portions of the hearts disappear, so you could have maybe three and a half hearts, you know, four hearts whatever as showing your your total health. These shirts have six hearts on them. They're lit by

l e eds and in their rest state. As in, if you are very far away from the person wearing the other shirt or another shirt, because really this will uh, this will change no matter who happens to be wearing the other shirt. If there's a whole bunch of people who show up to an event wearing these things's gonna

everyone's affected. Yeah, but if you are by yourself, you're not near anyone else who's wearing one of these, Your hearts will be at two and a half, and as you get closer to someone else wearing the same kind of shirt, the hearts start to fill up until you're around you know, hugging distance, and then they should be showing up in full. They do this with radio frequencies that transmit over a pretty short distance. But again, it's not like these are tuned to a specific you know

mate shirt. It's anyone who's wearing that same shirt. So if you go to a Jonathan Colton concert, there's a good chance that you'll be lit up all the way because it'll be like eight other people wearing that same shirt somewhere in the audience. But still, I think it's cute. I uh actually looked into getting those for me and my wife at one point, and then realize that as

big a dork as I am, my wife's not. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm married a pretty geeky woman and she's incredibly tech savvy, but she's content to keep that internalized as opposed to wearing it and letting the entire world know automatically wearing it on her sleeves, so to speak exactly. Well. Um, Actually, in going with the light up hearts uh theme, you can also get the

two stores that I mentioned before. Um, you can also get u a l E D kit that has Um it's a heart shaped kit that you can make l E d s and with l E d s and once you put it together, the heart flashes, which is something you can you can actually make for yourself. Um. The Maker shed actually the folks overt O'Reilly who published Make magazine also have an l E ED Heart kit. This one is is smaller and the LEDs are actually

closer together. Um. And but you know, if you want to do something, uh, you know, you could actually make something very much like that shirt yourself, and you know, or make some kind of jewelry and and enhance it with the the L E ED project, which would be pretty cool. The think geek version and I assume it's also has twenty eight red l A D s you can use and and yeah, and the circuit board itself

is heart shaped. And yeah, you just need a little soldering experience really to put the thing together, to to uh, to get all the L A D s in place and area. Yeah, so if you don't have, um, if you don't have soldering experience, it might well, I mean, you know what, L E D kits not a bad way of learning how to solder, as you know, and as long as you're careful and you're just paying attention, um, it's it's a pretty good way to get the basics

of how to build an electronic circuit. So you'll you'll learn, you'll love, you'll laugh. All right. I'm not going to get one though, because last time I burned the apartment down. Here's a here's a geek shirt for you, all right. Roses are pound f f zero zero zero zero. Violets are pound zero zero zero zero f f All my base are belonged to you. That's the that would be the codes for roses or red. Violets are blue, all

my bass or belonged to you. A supposed geeky as it gets folks, UM, I don't necessarily recommend that you get this for your your female sweetheart. But but ladies, if you're listening and you happen to be dating a really geeky guy who likes to drop the geek references all the time as a guaranteed winner, right there. Hey, um, speaking of Candice who we mentioned, Yes, Candice, I hope she doesn't listen to this episode. Didn't you say that?

She said there she had found some conversation hearts. Yes, the conversation hearts um have changed each over the years. These, of course, of the ones that say things like hug me and I like you, or I love you, or be mine, you are cute that kind of stuff, don't ingest me. I taste like chalk. That's what I think they should say. Yeah, exactly, like I am. I am stuck in a factory and they won't let me out.

Help me? Right. Well, some of the more recent ones actually have tech kind of phrases on them, including things like text me and tweet me. So even our candy is moving into the twenty first century. Uh yeah, well it's actually because of that. I'm you know, I actually thought of that when we were talking about Candice earlier. But um, Sweet Tooth Designs has some emoticon jewelry that you can say, um, there's a a heart with the less than three sign, which is the Asky version of

the heart. Um. Also you can buy some with the you know, smiley emoticons and things like that. But I really like the heart shape pin in with the Asky emoticon. Heart's kind of a nice, sort of mildly techy touch to it. But as an actual piece of jewelry, it's not you know, right, I like the I like the various kinds of jewelry and shirts and things you can see with the less than three Yes. Yeah, nice, Um, you got another one for me? Not for me, Chris and I, I should add, we are not each other's

significant other. That's true. Yeah, it's just clear that up because earlier today one of our coworkers suggested we were a great historical couple that would be chuck by the way and stuff. You should know, that, wasn't it. Yeah. Uh, Actually I ran across something that you know, the speaking of weird Cisco. Yes, the the hardware manufacturer. You know they bought three Calm not too long ago, very very large company that makes things like you know, internet infrastructure routers.

They have a video on their you Tube channel that suggests that if you really want to wow your sweetheart, you should buy them an a s R nine thousand router because and I'm quoting here, nothing says I love you like six times the mobile back haul capacity. Really nothing says I would like a divorce. Then a massive piece of tech hardware that is an awesome shows an awesome s is a humor. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it's

funny because I was going, is this really Cisco? And the videos on the rest of the channel are all about the the equipment. It's it's like, uh, white papers and other things that you'd want to know if you were going to invest in this, uh, this type of corporate, heavy duty high tech routing hardware. And then they posted this little sixty second video about how to uh to

win your sweetheart by buying them a router. And I just thought it was one of the funniest things when I went certain speed day tech stuff, well, um, I got quite a few others. Okay, let's let's how about the USB Plasma Heart from USB dot Brando dot com. Oh wait a minute, you're talking. You're you're talking like the plasma balls where you put your hands on the outside of the sphere and the plasma streams light up your hands. It was like ne version of you know,

we're turning this spaceship around there exactly exactly. So they've got some that are heart shaped and they connect to your USB ports very computer, and so you can get someone a nice little tool that will consume lots of power and absolutely do nothing useful of any nature, which is exactly what Valentine's Day is all about. But you can put your finger on it, it will ye yeah, but really there's no use for it. I mean, it's

pretty okay. I saw it and I was thinking I kind of want one, and then I thought, yeah, do I need another? I've already got enough USB gadgets. Maybe that's why you doesn't work. It could be it might be my e key has been sapped to use uselessness because of all my USB accoutrement. Uh else, how about the USB Speaking of USB, USB Panda heated gloves Okay, that one I totally didn't see. This is also with

the USB dot Brando dot com. So they have several different kinds of heated gloves that fit on your hands. You plug the gloves into your USB for it and it provides heat. So in case you're one of those freaks of nature people people who get cold hands. In the office for no apparent reason. It will allow you to to get some more within your hands. Now, in this case, the gloves look like little panda faces. Um,

and it leaves your fingers free. Obviously, if you had your fingers covered up by gloves, would be really hard to type. So you know you've got these little panda faces on the backs of your hands as you're typing away. Um. I'm not saying that it's a gift that you should buy your wife. I'm just saying it's out there. Someone must be buying them. I'm sure they are. Uh. Or how about the beating hearts stress relief pillow? When you see this one either heart shaped pillow, and it simulates

the sound of a beating heart. It actually throbs in different um speeds. It's never the same twice, or at least never the same twice in a row. And the idea is that by cuddling up to this, you are comforted by the feel and sound of another human heart beating close to yours, drifting off to sleep gently, and it shuts off automatically. So I guess we can assume that the heart eventually undergoes cardiac arrest and uh, it

runs on batteries. Nothing says love like the gift of artificial cardiac arrest, speaking of of cardiac um heart attack

in a heart attack. In the geek year shopping sites, you're if you really want to, uh to give your your loved one a piece of candy that says I love you, and they happened to be of the uh the geeky persuasion you you could find them, you know, a gummy heart that's actually like a human heart as compared to you know, the typical heart shaped Valentine thing that would that would be a very subtle and fairly

inexpensive thing. Of course, It's also I don't know that anybody is going to just gnash into a a heart shaped heart that's you know, probably gummy. I just it seems like it might be a little too hurt, Like, yeah, we might actually cause heartburn. It's possible. On the other hand, gummy feet, you know. Never mind, Well, I have I have something here that I have actually seen one of these in person. I'm about to potentially cause embarrassment to

someone because I am going to name her. But if none of you tell her that I said this, it'll all be okay. A certainly. A certain miss Natalie del Conti of c net was wearing one of these at c S. I happened to spot it and I brought attention to it because I thought it was so amusing. She was wearing a net cluss that had her Twitter handle on it said at Natalie Dell County. And she then told me that it was a gift. So she was just being nice, I assume, and not actually showing

everyone that that is in fact or Twitter accountant. But if you want one of these, you can actually go to Survival of the Hippist dot com and there you can fill out a little form and create a customized Twitter handle um necklace. Uh. They also allow you to do it as a key chain, a bracelet, anklet, pen, or tie clip. And it doesn't have to be a Twitter idea. It could be a hashtag, or you could have no symbol at all and just have it be

a name. But I think if you happen to have a significant other who loves to be on the Twitter, check it out the Twitter, the Twitter check it out. Yeah, so it's Survival of the Hippis dot com. All right? Then should we talk about stuff that you you know, that's on the less uh that that's tech techy type, but maybe you know, if you really want to do something actually nice. I got a couple of other little kind of cute goofy ones. These are not These are

not tacky. I think necessarily they're more cute. So, for example, motion box dot com, if you you can send a fifteen second video to motion box dot com and have

it converted into a flipbook. So imagine creating a video of yourself holding up a little sign saying you know, I love you, and then as long as it's fifteen seconds or less, you can send a motion box dot com and purchase a flipbook where they will print out a flipbook of the photos images of you in sequence, so that when you flip it you get the effect of the video, which I think is a really cute, little personal way of showing someone something really nifty that

they wouldn't expect otherwise. Um. There's also there's the whole chocolate thing. Let's talk about chuck o mes. Chocko means like the Nintendo. We mean exactly like the Nintendo. Wean you can get a chocolate version of your chocolate. Actually it's not I think it's more of a generic, but it's it's from Paul Pape Designs, who will make a chocolate me figures and the message on the box says,

we w I I belong together. You and me am I I. But you can also get me avatar as an Xbox Avatars, a little big planet, World of Warcraft or custom game character cake toppers for your wedding. He will design them, he'll customize them for you. So if you're getting married on Valentine's Day and you're a geek and you want those special geek cake toppers, Paul Paper Designs has them for you. Now, granted they're not cheap.

They run between two hundred and four fifty dollars because in a lot of these cases these are the customized figures. So he will customize your cake toppers to look like your me or your avatar or your World of Warcraft character, which is pretty cool. So those were the other goofy ones. But yeah, we can talk about some gifts that you know, maybe less less um whimsical, let's say, and more practical. Well, because you know that's how I started act, Well, hit

me one more time. You know, I was thinking that that a nice techy gift if you were trying to show someone affection, might be a digital picture frame. Excellent choice, you know, because that that's something that you can put on your desk with you know, however many photos it will hold and you know, swap the mouth from time. Oh yeah, and they've they've come down in price and they've gotten a lot more energy efficient as well. I'd like to specifically mentioned the Kodak Pulse. Yeah, this isn't

This isn't necessarily me endorsing a particular digital frame. There are others, as we can't. Yeah, there are others that do the similar things, but the Kodak Pulse in general one of the reasons why I like this this frame, and again there are others that do the same thing. You can create an email address specifically for the frame, hook it to your WiFi, and then email photos directly to that frame. So let's say that you have a camera that has that ability where you can take a

photo and send it via email wirelessly. Uh, there are cameras that do this. In fact, Kodak makes another one. They were doing this at c S, which is why it's so fresh in my mind. They had the Slice camera that would allow you to take photos and send it directly via email or or uploaded to a photo sharing site if you wanted, well you could you could send it to the frame's email address, so you could give one to your sweetheart and then occasionally update the

frame with photos, hopefully nice ones, so that you remain sweethearts. Yeah, that's very That shouldn't be necessary to say, but I thought I would say it anyway. All right, then, um, did you have? I mean, you were just I think that I have two other other gadgets I think of as nice, really nice Valentine's Day gifts. Now these are more expensive ones, but like the Amazon Kindle, I think is a great one if you have a If you have a sweetheart who loves to read and does not

already own a Kindle. Um, I would say the Nook. But in general everything I've been looking at, the Kindle seems to have a better performance than the milk does. Well, you'd have to say it might kindle an old flame. There you go, You've got the whole pun thing going for you, as Pilett has pointed out exactly. And then the flip video camera. I was going that you might allow your sweetheart to flip out c two can play that game Pillette. But yeah, the Flip video camera again,

it's it's very portable. It it takes you know, pretty good video and it's not hard to use. It's not hard to to poort that video over to a computer. So even if your sweetheart isn't that tech savvy, it's a nice thing to uh, it's a nice present to give. Now. Granted, again, these are the gifts that are more expensive. So it's if you've got the cash to burn and you're not gonna be just like, hey, I got your key chain with your Twitter handle on it. Well flip Yeah, flips

aren't very expensive. Neither of the Kodak cameras with the z I eight what is similar Yeah, wait a minute, isn't flipped by Cisco. Maybe they're getting into the romantic tech business and maybe and of course, if you want to, uh, if you want to indulge in the stereotypical girls like anything that's pink. Pretty much every single manufacturer out there has a pink version of whatever it is they're selling. Personally, I don't care for that very much. I think it

actually is sort of pandering in a way. I'm not granted, if your significant other loves the color pink, there's no reason not to go out and buy a pink version of whatever. But um yeah, I think personally, I think saying pink is for girls is a little suspect. I don't like that marketing push. So, uh, I never buy anything that's pink for my wife, which is also, by the way, how we ended up with food poisoning at that time with the salmon. Oh okay, I'm sorry. I

shouldn't go into that story. She's gonna kill me probably with salmon. Yeah, I don't really have a Well, I think the ultimate gift of love still is the HTC G one phone. Um even't even after the release of the Nexus one. My wife gave me the HTC g one phone, and that's how I knew that we were meant to be. It wasn't the previous twelve years of marriage. It was the htcg one. Well. Frankly, all kinds of gadgets like that, you know, are are great for it's

something that actually the person actually wants. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a Valentine's Day theme, Yeah yeah, if there, If if they're really into video games, get a video game. They like that they've been talking about. You know, don't you don't have to theme it? Perhaps Kingdom Hearts nice. That's a good one. Yeah, I was thinking that that that game I showed you of the guys who are chasing each other and you have to do um different muscle poses in order to fit through the hole in

the wall. Oh yeah, oh man, Okay, yeah, I'm I'm just throwing it out there, Okay, okay, So anyway, um, yeah, that's that's kind of a roundup of some of the gifts that we've looked at. And uh, and you know, if so, if you've got someone geeky in your life, take a look at sites like like think ache and um, they have all kinds of other stuff too, I meane T shirts and gizmos and and uh and remember do not tell Natalie del Kanti I said that because she

already uh she's going to find out. Yeah, well eventually, but I'd like to prolong that for as long as possible. All right, So that leads us to some listener mail. This listener mail comes from nath Angel. Nathaniel says, Chris and Jonathan, I've finally taken the time to write you and tell you how great your podcast is. I've been listening for months now and learn at least a tidbit every time. Most of the time I gained an entire

gig of new knowledge. Any who, I was spurred to actually write because of an interesting event that occurred one cold Wisconsin night. As I was on my way home from work. I was listening to my iPod and wanted to change the volume, but was not willing to take off my toasty warm gloves. I then remember Jonathan saying he had been guilty of licking his iPod, and I know my spin wheel on my Classic has the same

touch sensitivity. So much to the addition of my dorkiness to the tenth power squared and divided by one point to two three seven, I licked my iPod. There, I said it. I'm out of the closet. Keep up the good work, Nathaniel, fellow iPod liquor, Nathaniel. I hesitate to say this, but I was kidding. I have never licked my iPod. How did it taste? So if any of you have any confessions you want to send us, remember our psyches are delicate, but you can do so at

our email address. Which is hex stuff. At how stuff works dot com, you can check out our live show every Tuesday at one pm Eastern, and you can look at our blog posts, which often include our hilarious misadventures through tech. Check them out, check out the site, have a happy Valentine's Day, We love you for moral this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage.

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