iSmashPhone

Pick Up The Phone, Dawg: All About Ultrasonic Ringtones

There are plenty of times when you DON'T want that Top-40-hit ringtone going off in a room full of people.  Oh, you can set your phone on "vibrate," but that buzz is still audible enough to attract attention (and maybe make you flash on the "dildo in the luggage" scene from FIGHT CLUB).

What's the solution?  How about a ringtone that only YOU can hear?

Ultrasonic Ringtones offers just that: ring tones in the 8KHz-22KHz audio range, i.e. right up at the top end of your hearing range.  The idea of ringtones in the dog-whistle end of the spectrum was first championed by schoolkids, who wanted to take cell calls under their teachers' noses.

The site lets you "test-drive" each frequency before downloading it, but also cautions that hearing it on your computer and actually using it on your phone are two different things.  They also caution that anything over 12KHz will probably be inaudible to people over the age of 20.  Still, the 8-12KHz range tones might be right up your alley -- they'll still cut through all kinds of ambient noise, and you won't mistake anyone else's phone ringing for your own.

Also read:

How to Get Free iPhone Ringtones in Under One Minute

Myxer Offers Free, No Foolin', No-Small-Print Ringtones And Wallpapers 

How I Hacked My Summer Vacation

Blessed are the children -- for they shall unlock our iPhone 3GS's...

At the tender age of seven, Ari Weinstein (the kid in the above video) figured out how to do an end run around AOL's Parental Controls.  Eight years later -- after hacking his way through iPod Mini's, iPod Touches, and the 3GS (with a little help from the Dev-Team) -- he claims to have "gone legit" and will spend the summer working on a new iPhone app.

As for the video itself (courtesy of the Wall Street Journal), it's not as rabidly "yellow journalism" as the famous Fox news affiliate piece about Anonymous -- but that ain't saying much.

On the other hand: what the hell were YOU doing with your life at age fifteen?

"I'll Take One Of Everything:" App-onomics Made Simple

Busted Loop wondered what it would cost to buy one of every single app in the App Store?  Well, 55,732 apps (as of July 6th) at an average cost of US$2.59 each (or US$3.34 if you factor out fourteen thousand freebies), comes to:

$144,326.06

They also charted which software houses stood to earn the most.  Iceberg Reader, with 1206 apps, didn't have the highest quantity in the store (Brighthouse Labs has 400 more apps), but Iceberg's grand total of US$16,427.94 put them at the top of the chart -- ten times Brighthouse's bottom line.

Wake up, Donald Trump -- yer missing a (pun intended!) golden opportunity here...

Hooray For Hollywood? Zgrip Is A Pricey iPhone Video Stabilizer

Okay, it's nice that the iPhone 3GS includes the ability to shoot/edit video -- but does anyone think said video-taking should be taken seriously?

Zacuto does.  The company, which offers a variety of grips, stabilizers, and accessories for digital SLR's and the ultra-high-def Red video camera, now offers the Zgrip iPhone Pro handheld stabilizers for you budding "iSpielberg's."  Here's a video clip of the gizmo in action: