Cooking doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but luckily it’s a skill that you can learn. A high-tech pan – the first of its kind – is ready to make you into an expert home chef. The smart frying pan is called Pantelligent, and other than its built-in sensors and Bluetooth connectivity to an associated app, it cooks just like any other frying pan.

No matter what you’re cooking, the Pantelligent keeps track of the cooking temperature so you never have to guess when your food is cooked. The normal methods of checking doneness – cutting the meat open to check the color and using a meat thermometer – are unreliable and too much of a pain, respectively.

The Pantelligent app comes with a built-in cookbook that includes lots of recipes as well as tips on buying and prepping the food before cooking. It leaves no room for interpretation or mistakes as it guides you step-by-step through every detail of cooking your own homemade meal. It tells you when to flip or stir the food, when you need to add ingredients, and when the food is done.

The smart pan doesn’t limit you to its pre-loaded recipes, however. When Mom is visiting and teaches you how to make one of your favorite dishes, the Pantelligent app can be set to “record” mode. In this mode, the pan and the app record the temperatures and steps you take during the course of cooking the meal so you can replicate it whenever you want.

The creators of the Pantelligent are funding their venture on Kickstarter and have already raised more than their initial financial goal. They have high hopes for their creation, predicting that it can even help relieve tension in some relationships where one partner usually does all of the cooking. The retail price of $249 might cause a little tension of its own, though.

The post Smart Pan Gets Your Recipe Exactly Right Every Time first appeared on Gajitz.

We’ve all heard of (and a lot of us have probably used) the “rescue call.” It’s when you ask a friend to call you half an hour or so into your date just so you have a way out if things aren’t going well. “Oh, sorry, a pipe burst in my apartment and I have to go right now!” A new system called Dorothy will let you initiate that rescue call yourself without having to plan ahead with a friend.

The system is named after the Wizard of Oz character who clicked the heels of her ruby slippers three times to go home. Appropriately, the small wearable device that fits into your shoe is called Ruby, and it communicates with the Dorothy app to help you get out of a tight spot.

Dorothy is still in development, but so far it can either make your phone ring with a fake pre-set contact name (like “Boss” or “Mom”) or notify three friends of your exact location via text message. That second option could literally be a life-saver if you find yourself in a truly squirrely situation.

In the future, IStrategyLabs wants to incorporate even more functionality into Dorothy. One of their ideas is using Dorothy to summon an Uber ride for you. It might not be the most humane way to end a horrible date, but when you’re really stuck all you’ll have to do is click your heels three times, excuse yourself to “use the restroom,” and then slip out of the door and into a waiting car.

The post Click Your Heels + This Device Gets You Out of a Bad Date first appeared on Gajitz.

There’s nothing wrong with posting a picture online of a fun night out with friends. But since geo-tagging and automatic facial tagging have become commonplace, it’s easier than ever for just about anyone to figure out where you are and what you’re doing. If you aren’t at least a little freaked out by that, you should be. We aren’t the only ones: buffer Renaiss Inc. has released an iPhone app to block the faces in your pictures to prevent auto-tagging.

The app, simply called Anti Tagging, works by putting glitched-out images over the faces of people in your pictures. You can use it at the time you take the picture or afterward by pulling pictures from your phone’s photo library. If you don’t like the random glitch images the app comes up with the first time, you can always shake to re-scramble the image.

Although the app is cool and we appreciate the fact that it’s trying to preserve privacy in some small way, it doesn’t address the bigger problem. That is the over-sharing of personal information, including pictures. It’s pretty simple: if you don’t want your face noticed by Facebook, don’t post your picture on the site. Maybe the app is meant as a statement on the increasingly absurd measures we have to take to maintain privacy, which we can dig. But it would be much more useful if you could choose whose faces to scramble and whose to leave untouched, just in case that guy you accidentally snapped a pic of doesn’t want his face popping up on your social media accounts.

The post Don’t Book My Face: AntiTagging App Foils Face Recognition first appeared on Gajitz.

The Internet of Things is real, and it’s already started to slowly change the way we do things at home and in the workplace. You can control your thermostat, lights, and even your door locks from a remote location via mobile apps, and other home functions will definitely join up in the near future. Bttn is a simple but brilliant design meant to make controlling the Internet of Things a bit simpler.

Bttn is programmable through the IFTTT platform, which lets you program actions based on triggers. In the case of bttn, the trigger is pushing that little button. The action could be calling a taxi, turning off all of the lights in your house, texting you when your kid gets home from school, or even a string of commands. For example: when you wake up in the morning, you could press the bttnto turn on the hallway and kitchen lights, turn the thermostat up or down, and start the coffee maker.

The bttn is connected to the internet via wifi or 3G (if a microSIM card is installed). It runs on four AA batteries which are said to keep the device going for an entire year, but if you don’t mind wires you can also plug it into a MicroUSB adapter. You get visual and aural feedback when you push it, which lets you know that your action has been registered, but quite frankly is just really satisfying.

Actions for the bttn are programmed through any web browser. The setup is simple enough that even tech novices can use it, but robust and customizable enough that it feels fun and satisfying to the hardcore tech junkies. A number of actions are already created and can be activated through the bttn website with a single click (after you activate and register your bttn).

Although we think that pushing a big red button is probably the coolest option, bttn also comes in blue, yellow, and green. As of the time of publication they are available for pre-order for a $99 pledge on Indiegogo.

The post My Finger is on the Bttn: Single Control For All Your Stuff first appeared on Gajitz.

There are few things that can make your heart drop faster than seeing the check engine light on your dashboard blink on. You might wait for a day or two to see if it goes away, but it taunts you – just glowing all smug and ominous until you finally give in and take it in to get checked out.

Fixd is a tool that you can use at home to decide whether your check engine light indicates a serious problem that needs to be addressed right away or one that can wait. It’s a small device that plugs into the OBD-II port on your car to read whatever error messages are causing the problem light(s) on your dashboard.

This is the same type of diagnostic tool used by mechanics, but it will save you the “diagnostic fee” they typically charge. The app that accompanies Fixd tells you where the problem is, what the consequences of the problem might be, and approximately how much you can expect to spend o the repair. The app, which communicates with the plug-in dongle via Bluetooth, also helps you track scheduled maintenance and service.

The app stores information on multiple cars so you can keep track of important information on the state of all of the cars in your household. Fixd is raising money on Kickstarter to fund the production of the dongle and development of the iOS app (the Android app is already up and running). As of the time of publication, the project has already surpassed its funding goal.

The post Car Diagnostic App Tells You What That Dash Light Means first appeared on Gajitz.