TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

My mother used to tell me and my brother that writing on our hands would give us “blood poisoning.” Years later, I still write on my skin, and I’m still alive (despite also poisoning my blood nightly with whisky). And yet I can’t help the feeling at the back of my mind that my mother was right.

So I might switch to Post-It Watches, these cute little watch-shaped Post-It notes from Montre. They’re gummed at one end of the “strap” so you can wrap them around your wrist with reminders written on them.

Or you could just draw a really cool clock face on there, perhaps permanently displaying 13:37.

Shooting an image in proper focus is a challenge for most budding photographers. Lytro’s revolutionary light field camera, which was officially unveiled today, aims to solve all the pain and heartache.

The Lytro camera is a light-field, or plenoptic, camera. An array of micro-lenses sits over the camera’s sensor, capturing all the light in the scene being photographed (11 million rays of light, to be precise). The Lytro then saves your image in a proprietary file format to deliver a “living picture” that you can manipulate on your computer, much like a raw file.

RIM has decided to compensate its users for last week’s disastrous BlackBerry service outage. How? Free apps, of course. Rumors that it will also send out candy are false.

In order to make amends for the “service interruptions,” which took down BBM, e-mail and pretty much everything else for up to three days last week, RIM will give users free games and utilities. You’ll be able to pick from SIMS 3 and Bejeweled, amongst other games, which will certainly appeal to the stern
business types who still use BlackBerrys.

Not only is Siri shaping up to actually be as good as its hype, but it turns out the Apple and Siri engineers have tucked some excellent easter eggs inside — so many, in fact, someone has already started a Tumblr to catalog them all.

Right now everything is copied from Josh Topolsky’s post over at This is My Next, but my guess is that we’ll see it filling up when more people get the iPhone 4S — and Siri — in their hands. Bonus: The Shit That Siri Says Tumblr doesn’t use an annoying slideshow format.

My favorite is this one, for pretty obvious reasons:

But you’ll also find at least three answers to the question “What’s the meaning of life” (and yes, one of the answers is “42″), along with some genuinely useful results. Tell Siri you need to dump a body and she’ll suggest nearby reservoirs, mines, swamps and metal foundries.

There’s more.

There are still a few things film cameras do that digital cameras don’t. One of those is double-exposures, something easy with every film SLR, and all but impossible in digital without digging into Photoshop.

Enter the Double Exposure Digicam, a straightforward camera with a straightforward name. The tiny digicam is like a pocket-sized Instagram, and lets you snap two photos in the same frame. Some film cameras had a multiple exposure function.

What better way to say “I love you” to the nerd in your life than a romantic candlelit dinner. A romantic candlelit dinner with a Star Wars Lightsaber Candlestick.

The metal candlestick comes from — who else? — ThinkGeek, and the pack contains three red candles to get you started. The holder itself is a replica of Darth Vader’s lightsaber, so while you could slot in a red or blue candle, you’d be teetering on the edge of the Dark Side.

The bade of the hilt unscrews to make the model more authentic. This is probably designed for those romantic after dinner moments when you’ve had just a little too much cognac and decide to leap onto the table and play Star Wars.

Yeah, yeah, that idiot Charlie Sorrel is writing about yet another electric bike. But wait a second: this one is actually super-cool.

Not only does Tony Pereira’s bike look like something Pee-wee Herman would ride, it also won the Best in Show prize at this year’s Oregon Manifest Constructor’s Design Challenge.

Tony works out of Portland, OR (of course), and although he styles the bike after a fifties cruiser, it is totally modern. The “gas tank” is in fact a battery pack hooked up to a 350 watt Bionx electric hub in the rear wheel, and the carbon-fiber trunk up front is lockable and houses a sound system, perfect for annoying everyone on your next critical mass.

The Kindle Fire could be the first truly successful Android tablet. It touts a very reasonable $200 price tag, a well-curated app store, easy access to Amazon’s cloud-based services, brand trust and recognition. It’s Amazon’s most ambitious foray into hardware since the original Kindle’s debut.

And the Fire has the potential to engulf all its Android tablet brethren.

To date, Android tablet sales have mostly been lackluster.

Here’s a great way to win friends and popularity. It’s called the Sling Shot, and it’s a camera designed to make subjects cower in fear as you photograph them. No longer will your (soon-to-be-ex) friends and coworkers crowd around a tiny LCD screen to see how good they look in your snaps. They’ll already know that you have caught them at their most vulnerable, and they will hate you for it.

These Click watches are probably the nerdiest timepieces we have ever seen. And we love them. They come in two main flavors, DIP Switch and Turn Switch, both using switches found on old-school circuit boards like those in 1980s arcade machines.

DIP switches were used to diddle with the way the machine worked.