Moleskine Smart Notebook Turns Your Sketches Into Adobe-Friendly Vector Files

Digital tools may one day replace traditional creative media altogether, but we’re definitely not there yet, and Moleskine is doing a good job of straddling the old and the new with its software tie-ins. A new partnership today brings its sketchbooks support for Adobe creative software, letting you turn your sketches into fully manipulable vectors via the Moleskine Smart Notebook app and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Notebooks that work with the service include special alignment indicators printed on the corners of the pages to help the app better translate the sketches into usable vectors, without distortion or skewed angles regardless of whether or not you can get a perfectly head-on capture with your iPhone’s camera. The resulting vectors will provide both .jpg and .svg output, for use in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

It’s true that there are a lot of different options for sketching digitally these days, including smartphones like the Galaxy Note 4 that sport their own stylus, and stylus accessories like the Bamboo line from Wacom that work with iPhones and iPads. But a Moleskine notebook has significant advantages – besides just offering artists a great tactile experience. It doesn’t require battery power, for instance, or a data connection, or an investment greater than $33.

 

Speaking as someone who likes to sketch, this looks like a great tool, and one of those things that has long seemed a distant dream. If the app can produce really good .svg files, it could amount to a genuinely indispensable tool for the modern artist or designer.

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IllumiBowl turns your toilet into a color-changing party light

If you install the colorful IllumiBowl light, it will look like someone's hosting a party in your toilet.

Going to the restroom at night gets colorful. Matt Alexander

Nighttime trips to the bathroom can be fraught with peril as you run a dark gauntlet of obstacles ranging from cats to locating the toilet itself. Sure, you can turn on the lights and sear your eyes with the sudden illumination. You could also install a nightlight somewhere in the restroom, but that's not much fun. How about lighting up the toilet bowl instead? IllumiBowl on Kickstarter places a nightlight right onto your toilet.

Toilet lights aren't a new concept. Kohler offers a Nightlight toilet seat with blue LEDs that costs $83. The IllumiBowl will set you back only $15 (about £9, AU$17) for a pledge. It also has the advantage of using a color-changing LED, so the light will slowly rotate through different colors every few seconds. This will be especially perfect if you ever plan on hosting a dance party in your bathroom.

IllumiBowl fits under your toilet seat, attaching with suction to the outside of the toilet bowl rim while a hook reaches over the edge to provide the light inside. Motion detection senses when a visitor arrives. The light turns on automatically and turns off once you're gone.

The lavatory gadget runs on two AAA batteries. Matt Alexander, the creator of IllumiBowl, writes in an update, "We are working with the manufacturer to make it water resistant." Here's hoping that all works out, because a non-water-resistant device hanging out near a toilet bowl could face some serious challenges.

Alexander currently has a working prototype of the IllumBowl and hopes to raise $20,000 to go into production. The project is currently up over $8,000 with 36 days left to go. This is probably going to be a love-it-or-hate-it sort of gadget. You're either the kind of person who wants a glowing toilet bowl, or you're not. But if you are, you're most definitely in luck.

Amanda Kooser Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET's Crave blog. When not wallowing in weird gadgets and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto. See full bio

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Sub-$1 3D-printed microscope turns phones into science tools

This little device costs just pennies in plastic. Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET

Smartphone cameras are great for a lot of things, but they're not designed for getting super-duper up close with tiny objects like salt crystals or blood cells. You can give your mobile device a helping hand, though, and open up a world of microscopic adventures. It's not going to cost you much, either. You just need a 3D printer, a glass bead and some free files from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The microscope consists of a 3D-printed clip and a glass sphere. Put them together, slide the gadget over the camera lens of your smartphone or tablet, and you get a cheap, but very functional microscope. The glass beads used in the project are the same kind used in reflective pavements markings at airports.

PNNL suggests starting your explorations with the 100x version of the microscope to familiarize yourself with the system. It takes more effort and practice to get good, clean images with the higher-magnification versions, so training wheels makes sense. If you master the entry-level microscope, you can then move up to 350x and even 1000x versions.

Printer files for multi-platform and iPhone 5S-specific applications are available to download. The PNNL researchers say they've gotten their best results with the 5S, but that the microscope works well with other devices, including tablets.

Among the cool things that can be identified with the 1000x microscope are plague cells and anthrax spores. The lower-power 350x version can peer into blood samples to see parasites. If you're not impressed, then you need to turn in your Bill Nye the Science Guy fan club card right now.

This cool scientific instrument was inspired by a need of the Department of Homeland Security for what PNNL describes as "rapid bio detection technologies." This includes first responders reporting to a scene to investigate things like mysterious white powders. The microscope had to be extremely inexpensive in case of contamination issues so it could be thrown away without tossing a chunk of a government budget with it.

The super-cheap microscope is bound to enable some pretty sweet school science projects, but it could just as easily find a home in the traveling kits of professional scientists or land in the hands of the science-curious public.

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