Fashion

Congrats to Michael F. of Titusville, Fla., for winning an iKit NuCharge case and battery pack for the iPhone 5 in last week's giveaway. How much do you love CNET? This week's prize lets you count the ways.

The winner gets a CNET tote, a CNET GelaSkin for the iPad, a CNET T-shirt, two CNET notepads, and some CNET stickers. That's a whole lot of CNET!

Normally this swagtastic bundle would run you about $65, but you have the chance to get it for free. How do you go about doing that? Like this: … Read more

The opposition will congregate in dark corners.

They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles.

The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass?

It won't be easy. Once you've been cybernated, there's no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web.

One site is called "Stop The Cyborgs." It claims to be "fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time."… Read more

I've been having nightmares lately.

Usually, my nightmares involve short people stabbing me in the thigh with sprinter's spikes and calling me awful names. Yes, like "Charlie."

However, lately, I've been wandering the streets in my nightmares, wearing Google Glass and causing serious civic damage.

The problem, you see, is that I already wear prescription glasses. So every time I see promotional puffery for Google's informational eyewear, I try to work out how I could put them on over -- or, perhaps, under -- my own glasses.

My suspicions were aroused further by the idea that I'd never seen Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin wear any other glasses besides these madly scientific ones.

Swallowing what remains of my pride, I contacted Google and whispered: "Look, I wear specs. Do you have Google Glass specs for spec wearers?" … Read more

You've played that "no phones at dinner" game and lost. You can't bear ignoring your messages. Well, this bit of bling could be your new best friend.

LinkMe is a digital bracelet that displays the messages, Facebook updates, and tweets that you need most.

Billed as a world first on its Kickstarter page, LinkMe will "display the messages and alerts you choose, making your entire social life available to you with just a glance at your wrist." … Read more

Your phone isn't always handy. It's tucked away in a purse, on a table in another room, or lost in the depths of your messenger bag slung across your back as you're biking. When it goes off, you can rush to find it, or you could get an Embrace+ smart bracelet and get an alert right on your wrist.

The notifications can be customized for incoming calls, app alerts, and messages. For example, your boyfriend could flash green and your mother could flash red. A calendar alert could flash yellow. You wouldn't even need to hear your phone to know who's calling. You can also set it for low-battery alerts, alarms, and social-media notifications.… Read more

New for spring, jeans maker Naked & Famous is rolling out color-changing pants made with thermochromic dyes. A molecule inside the dyestuff reacts to heat, changing colors depending on how steamy hot or frigid cold you are. The colors fade between blue and white.

The biggest concern with color-change jeans is how the color-changing properties might highlight certain assets you might not necessarily want to bring attention to. You might remember Hypercolor shirts, a fashion fright that boomed in the early 1990s. They had a special way of showing off just how steamy your armpits were. However, Naked & Famous is trying to reassure us by saying, "Don't worry, the jeans change colors all over and not just in your 'happy areas.'"… Read more

If Peter Parker's spider-sense ranks high on your list of coveted superpowers, you may experience a strange tingling sensation at news of a suit that alerts the wearer to the presence of nearby objects.

Victor Mateevitsi, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois' Electronic Visualization Laboratory in Chicago, is the main man behind SpiderSense, a "wearable device that projects the wearer's near environment on the skin and allows for directional awareness of objects around him" in much the same way Spider-Man can detect danger without the benefit of sight.

The suit -- which is for better or worse far less pec-revealing than Spidey's getup -- consists of 11 sensor modules positioned for 360-degree coverage. Each sensor module houses an ultrasonic range finder and a servo motor. The sensor modules scan the environment for obstacles and alert the wearer to them by exerting pressure to the skin via the servo motor's arm. … Read more

It's not easy being a "Star Trek" extra. I can only imagine the cold sweats and terror you'd feel if the wardrobe manager handed you a fresh red shirt from the rack. Your chance of making it through the episode just took a dive. Or did it? New mathematical calculations show that the redshirt death rate may not be as dire as we thought.

Matthew Barsalou breaks down the numbers for Significance Magazine. He sticks with the original series and starts by looking at the casualty rates for the different uniform colors across all three seasons.… Read more

While anyone could dream up a spinning virtual GPS globe constantly updated with a slideshow of global Flickr photos emanating from a hat, competitors in Frog Design's contest for new wearable technology concepts had to keep their designs within the realm of feasibility.

The key requirement that keeps all the designs within reason is that they have to be able to come to market within three years. That doesn't necessarily mean they will come to market, but at least there's a chance.

The global design firm ran its internal competition for new wearable technology concepts last year and just unveiled the results (PDF). They include some fun and fascinating ideas that explore everything from communing with trees through technology to an urban compass that leads you into discovering unexpected parts of a city.… Read more