By now you've probably come across rumors of the iWatch, a "watch-like device" that Apple is said to be working on. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have all weighed in with reports that Apple is indeed moving forward with the smartwatch project, though no specs, features or release date have yet been offered.

In the absence of solid facts, then, there's plenty of room for speculation! Freshly arrived in the Captain Gadget inbox, we have two cool mockups of the iWatch from graphic designer Nickolay Lamm. Lamm -- whose work you might have seen on Gizmodo and Wired, among other tech sites, and who created these images in a post for the British blog MyVoucherCodes -- based his design on a couple of key Apple patents from 2010, namely this patent that shows a possible desktop-based icon interface for an Apple watch.

As the guide for his take on the iWatch, Lamm used the above patent, he told me in an email, as well as a bit of detective work he conducted. Lamm found that lead Apple designer Jonathan Ive was both friends with and inspired by the acclaimed designer Marc Newson, and so Lamm used Newson's watches as an inspiration for a hypothetical iWatch. Though some previous iWatch mockups have focused more on curved glass -- mentioned by the New York Times as a material Apple was indeed working with for its iWatch -- Lamm's rendering features a far less dramatic curve and appears more like a wristwatch we're accustomed to seeing today.

As you can see, Lamm's iWatch packs in several different app icons into a revolving semi-circle; it's inspired by the aforementioned patent, which addresses display "views [that] can be used to arrange a large number of icons for selection by a user."

Below, Lamm gives us another tantalizing possible feature of the iWatch: syncing with and control by a connected iPhone. In this view, Lamm imagines launching an application on the iWatch using an iPhone connected via Bluetooth or NFC. Connection between an iPhone and iWatch is one of the more common features expected by pundits for an iWatch; the Pebble smartwatch, released earlier this year, has already accomplished this, allowing an E-Ink wristwatch to display many iPhone notifications on its wrist-worn display.

Again, no one who is willing to talk to the press really has any idea what this thing really looks like, nor whether it will actually be released. As with most hypothetical Apple products, we are in the early, rampantly-speculative period of rumors. But it sure is fun to dream, isn't it?

For more mockups, Mashable has a neat slideshow of over a dozen different iWatch renderings from graphic designers around the world.

HTC has unveiled its newest hero smartphone, the HTC One, at an event in New York City. The company has drastically redesigned its Sense interface and has added an improved "UltraPixel" camera to its latest device in its latest attempt to take on Apple and Samsung and reassert itself as a major player in the global smartphone market.

Though the HTC One retains the name of the company's One series from 2012, much has changed from those disparate smartphones. For starters, it appears that HTC will be attacking the market with just a single model, and a single name, unifying its brand rather than releasing several different phones across different carriers.

Though this gives consumers fewer choices, HTC is betting that it has made a device that will please everyone.

"One," then, is a fairly poetic name for HTC's singular smartphone, a 4.7-inch, Android Jelly Bean smartphone that drastically reimagines the smartphone homescreen. Rather than the rows of icons familiar from iOS and most Android phones, HTC has invented a new interface called "BlinkFeed," a pinboard-like design for its homescreen that will deliver a newsfeed from over 1400 news partners, plus Twitter and Facebook, in a constantly-updating feed.

"BlinkFeed" (which you can see in the photos below) greets the One user upon startup; swiping to the side, or pressing the Settings button on the front center of the phone, takes the user into the more familiar view of icons and apps. Imagine if a news aggregation service like Zite or Flipboard were your homescreen, and you get an idea of what HTC is going for with BlinkFeed.

The phone's owner can choose which news services and social networks he or she wishes to include in the feed, selecting by either publication title or area of interest.

HTC's previous campaign attempted to define itself as the leader in audio (with its partnership with Beats) and photography, and those two aspects are also front and center on the HTC One. The One ships with what HTC calls an "UltraPixel camera," which HTC claims captures 300 percent more light than a typical megapixel camera on a smartphone, for better low-light and action photography. There is also an intriguing new photography feature called Zoe, which automatically captures a few seconds of video before your photograph, similar to the app Glmps. Zoe then creates an automatic video montage of your day, stitching together videos and photos from different events, with filters and a musical soundtrack.

The photo gallery has also been redesigned and thought out anew, with a constantly moving, filtering view of your cameras and videos appearing when you open your photo view.

Another new feature: BoomSound, with two stereo speakers on the front face of the device, which deliver "sound you will not believe comes from a phone," per an HTC exec. BoomSound also comes with a new visualizer for your music, which features a lyric display that scrolls along with the song as it plays.

Finally, the HTC One could be your new remote control, thanks to a new feature set wrapped under the umbrella label of Sense TV. The One includes infrared technology to sync with your television and act as your remote -- to change the channel, power on and off your television and adjust the volume. Within the Sense TV app, too, you can load in your cable provider to view your local listings and; tapping on a television title will change the channel on your television set to your selected program.

Spec-wise, the HTC One features a 4.7-inch 1080p display in an aluminum body; a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor; 4G LTE; 2GB RAM; and Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean," with HTC's Sense interface layered on top.

The HTC One will be available on AT&T;, Sprint and T-Mobile and will ship in March, in either 32GB or 64GB varieties.

Updating...

Just in time for the Day After Valentine's Day comes this: A pencil sharpener-like device that transforms any long, cylindrical object into a dildo.

Francesco Morackini, the device's creator, calls his dildo-making gadget "the Dildomaker." On his Cargo Collective website, Morackini lists as his inspiration the original hand-cranked Loewy pencil sharpener that might be familiar to you from your school days. You know the one: That old-fashioned sharpener mounted on the wall whose crank you would turn in order to shave your pencil to a sharp point?

Morackini's dildomaker is just like that, but instead of sharpened pencils, the dildomaker churns out homemade dildos:

Now, before you get too excited and run out to Trader Joe's, you should know that the Dildomaker is at this point nothing but a concept, nor is there any indication that the innovative device is going into production any time soon. Right now it appears that the Dildomaker is but a beautiful exercise in creativity and graphic design.

We've reached out to Morackini in Austria to find out if he has any plans to release a Dildomaker, or if he's built a prototype. We'll update this story when we learn more; for now, however, you can bask in the world of possibilities that the Dildomaker foretells, and the Brave New World of homemado pleasure devices that we may soon find ourselves living in.

Read (and see) more at Morackini's Cargo Collective.

Hat tip: Incredible Things.

Last February we wrote about what was then the most expensive single-drink Starbucks order ever: A $23.60 caffeine monster that the orderer described as "tolerable, but not good."

Now, one Washington man claims that he was rewritten the record books with a $47.30 order from Starbucks. It's loaded up with add-ons, fruits, whipped cream and more, all poured in to a 52-ounce mug. Check it out below, via Geekologie:

And how'd it taste? According to Beau Chevassus, writing on YouTube:

It was rather delicious and extremely sweet. However I must confess the bananas made it awfully fragrant. But they were $1 each, so we had to just to up the price.

So, there you have it. If you have a $47.30 burning a hole in your pocket, you can order up an absurd amount of "delicious, extremely sweet Starbucks coffee" for the entertainment of the YouTube hordes.

Either that, or you can donate that money to charity.

Let's say, as a pure hypothetical, that you are a lazy, no-account lover who has yet to book a restaurant for Valentine's Day. The most romantic dinner of the year is happening in a matter of hours, and your significant other is going to be very unhappy if you two end up eating at Arby's again. How can your hapless, slacker behind get your gears in motion and score a last-minute Valentine's Day reservation at a restaurant that doesn't serve its condiments in small, tearable packets?

See What's Available On OpenTable

Your first stop, by necessity, is going to be OpenTable, the most thorough and well-designed site for reserving restaurant tables on the Internet. Select your city (and perhaps neighborhood within that city), your date (2/14, stupid) and the time you want for your reservation. Then click "Find a Table," and OpenTable brings up all the restaurants that can accomodate you and your darling valentine on Thursday.

If there are a lot of resturant openings in the results, you can use the controls on the left side of the page to filter for price or type of food; a tab at the top of the page also allows you to view your results on a Google map of your city.

However, you're not going to want to book a table based purely on availability and cuisine -- that table for two at the place with the Italian name might not be a candlelit meal with red wine, but rather two barstools at a pizza parlor with Orange Crush from the soda fountain.

It's time to do some detective work, Dick Tracy, and find a restaurant that's actually romantic.

Yelp Is Your Friend. So Are Foursquare And Foodspotting.

Despite some persistent complaints that its reviews are tainted (both for and against the restaurants!), Yelp remains, on the whole, a valuable, often-accurate resource for diners seeking information about a location before eating there. Search any restaurants you're considering on Yelp.com, and read several of the most recent reviews to get an idea of what kind of experience you can expect.

You might also find Foursquare's online database helpful. The Foursquare app allows patrons to check into any restaurant; leave tips about the service, food or drink; and post public photos of the experience. All are good clues as to whether or not the place will be right for a Valentine's Day meal, and all of that information is now available on Foursquare.com. If you're concerned about the quality of the food itself, meanwhile, you can search Foodspotting.com; recently purchased by OpenTable, Foodspotting is a social network for diners to take photos of their meals, and it contains a rich trove of non-retouched food photography, shot by real people on real smartphones.

Finally, if you want some direct advice, try a local community like Chowhound, which features a message board where local foodies discuss the merits of different nearby establishments. If you sign up for an account, you can post a question -- such as, "Will my wife hate me if I take her to RESTAURANT X for Valentine's Day?" -- and generally expect fairly quick feedback.

Take A Look Inside With Google Maps And Bing (Yes, Bing!)

If you need a bit more reassurance that your restaurant's ambiance is indeed V-Day-appropriate, point your browser to Bing, which has been stockpiling interior photographs of establishments around the country for its Maps section. On Bing Maps, type in the name of your restaurant and click on the corresponding page; if you see a photo with a "Step Inside" tag on it, you'll be able to virtually walk into the restaurant and "spin around," thanks to interior panorama photos that Microsoft has commissioned through the app Gigwalk.

Google Maps can also provide an on-site preview of the location. Enter your address and then drag the little yellow man on the left side of the map onto the screen for a Street Level view. Clicking on the name of the restaurant itself will take you to its profile page, which should include some interior photos and more user reviews.

From there, if everything looks peachy, head back to OpenTable and lock in your reservation. You should get an email confirmation, and once that arrives -- hey, congratulations! You somehow managed to not ruin Valentine's Day once again.

There's no easy way for us to say this, so we just will: That Taylor Swift and Harry Styles sex tape link that's been all over Facebook is nothing but a big, fat, fake.

It's a phony. A hoax. Not real. Don't click on it.

Via the always-educational website Hoax Slayer, the Facebook posting probably looks something like this:

Taylor Swift's iPhone Hacked - Sex Tape LEAKED!

The famous singer Taylor Swift had her iPhone hacked Monday and a sex tape between her and former boyfriend Harry Styles has been leaked on the internet. Taylor's publicists are trying to take down all of the websites hosting it, but we found a working one! Watch the video before it's taken down! CLICK HERE --------->

When you click on the link to watch the video, however, you are asked to take a survey; and when you complete that survey, you are asked to fill out another survey; and when you're done with that one, you must complete another survey; and so on and so forth. The Swift-Styles video never appears. You simply take survey after survey after survey, ad infinitum. (Presumably the scammers make money for each survey you fill out; an alternate version of the scam, per Hoax Slayer, asks you to install a presumably virus-laden application or toolbar).

If common sense didn't tell you that a salacious Facebook teaser for a Taylor Swift-Harry Styles porno "hacked from her iPhone," then let this article serves as your notice: It is indeed a hoax, and clicking on the link in the hopes of seeing any such thing will only end in disappointment (and perhaps a virus on your computer).

While we're debunking Facebook hoaxes, here are a few other videos that you probably shouldn't click on if a friend posts about them on a social media network:

- Miley Cyrus Sex Tape
- Vanessa Hudgens Sex Tape
- Selena Gomez Sex Tape
- Sex tape involving pretty much anyone from the cast of "Spring Breakers"
- Video of Osama Bin Laden being killed
- Video of the second shooter in the Grassy Knoll
- Video from Ford's Theater, 1865
- That Gangnam Style/pistachios commercial from the Super Bowl (not virus-related, just an awful video)
- Justin Bieber sex tape
- Sex tape featuring you, having sex

What have we learned? Well, it's probably a good idea to just never click on any Facebook link promising a sex tape, ever. If you see a titillating possibility on Facebook, do a quick Google search of "celebrity name + sex tape + Facebook hoax"; chances are good it's nothing but a pathetic scam.

A few days ago my colleague, Mia Aquino, put out the following call for urgent iPhone assistance on Twitter:

Home button isn't working on my iPhone. Can't get back to home without shutting down. Any ideas?

— Mia Aquino (@SocialMia) February 5, 2013

Mia's not alone: Complete home button malfunction is one of the more common maladies befalling iPhones, if Apple's support forums are any indication.

There are all sorts of suggestions for fixes in the link above: Recalibrate the home button; blow in the charging port like it's an old NES game; dab some WD-40 on the button itself. Or, the old reliable: Visit the Apple Store and cry helplessly until the Geniuses give you a new phone to make you leave.

Any of these might do the trick for you. Failing those, though, there is a sure-fire way to gain access to your home button without tinkering with or possibly damaging your hardware that I've had friends employ and enjoy in the past.

Fact is, you can get your home button on the touchscreen, available for you at any point that the screen is powered on. Go into Settings, and then General, and then Accessibility, and then Assistive Touch. Turn Assistive Touch on, and you'll see a persistent white dot in the top left corner of your screen.

This is your new home button, and more: Tapping it will open a menu that can take you home, launch Siri, lock your screen and turn the volume up and down, among other features.

You can drag that button anywhere on the screen you desire, pinning it down wherever you find most convenient.

It's a fantastic feature for those who find themselves with a malfunctioning home button, and also seems far safer to use while driving. Those who have difficulty with the iPhone's home or volume buttons -- men and women with arthritis, for example -- might also find it much easier to navigate their phones with an on-screen button.

Got any other tips to fix or circumvent a broken home button? I'd love to read them below. And if you have any other personal tech questions, drop me an email at captaingadget@huffingtonpost.com and I might just feature it on the site.

Reader's Digest. Angry Birds. A Sharpie to scrawl some graffiti on the stall walls.

Few things have so successfully revolutionized the American toilet experience; but now the British company Dyson, perhaps best known for its gee-whiz vacuum cleaners, appears to be looking to add its name to this vaunted roster, with a new product called the Dyson Airblade Tap. Its game-changing pitch: the Tap combines a working faucet and a hand dryer into a single fixture that sits above the sink, so that you do all of your washing and drying above a single drain, no floor drippage necessary.

Unveiled at an event in New York City Tuesday night, the Airblade Tap can dry a pair of hands in about 12 seconds by "scraping" the moisture from the skin, according to Dyson. The system uses a new, smaller motor that the company says has a much smaller carbon footprint than larger hand-dryers or paper towels. It's also loaded with a "Helmholtz silencer" and a HEPA filter, installed to make the drying as clean and quiet, respectively, as possible.

The big news, of course, is the combination of faucet and dryer. You can watch (and hear!) the Dyson Tap in action below, and check out the proper form you're supposed to use to achieve perfect in-sink hand dryness:

In a speech at the event, British inventor and Dyson founder James Dyson talked up the advantages of the Dyson Tap over traditional hand-dryers, boasting that the Tap is faster and eliminates the pesky need to queue up for the dryer. Also eliminated, Dyson said, is that trail of water you inevitably leave as you walk from sink to wall.

The product is going to face some obvious obstacles. Cost will be one: A single Dyson Tap will run £1,000, or more than $1,500, far more expensive than a combination of a standard faucet and paper towels. And the Dyson Tap might be the only bathroom cleaning/drying solution that comes with a learning curve. It's not entirely obvious that the faucet is touch-free, and you're in for quite a surprise if you try to adjust hot and cold water using those two air-blowing handles jutting out from the faucet.

Dyson engineer Marcus Hartley told HuffPost at the event that the Tap was designed to be intuitive, however, and that the company's research showed that after cleaning your hands in a sink, you naturally shake off the excess water to the side of the faucet, where the Tap's air blows and the handles are positioned. Even if you didn't immediately know that the Airblade Tap contained a hand-dryer, in other words, you would after you finished with the faucet portion of your wash.

Still, at the event on Tuesday night, there were a few tentative, confused hand-washers at the demo stations, unsure of where to position themselves. Dyson reps are confident, though, that once people start using the Tap, the action will become second nature -- much the same way the Dyson Airblade dryer may have been confusing at first but is now a staple of public restrooms.

Speaking of which: Also debuting Tuesday night were a lighter, more energy-efficient Airblade, as well as an "Airblade V," a smaller, more stylish wall unit that blows hot air out of a small aperture on the bottom of the device, more like a traditional hand dryer.

The star of the show, however, was clearly the Tap, and its combination hand-washer-and-dryer-in-one functionality. A representative from Dyson said the first units should start appearing in the United States in the next few months, at locations like Harvard University, Disney and Universal theme parks and the new Delta terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York.

And in case you're wondering, though the new Airblades are intended for use in larger facilities, all models will be available for individual purchase from Dyson. Hartley assured HuffPost that each was quite easy to install in a home restroom.

"Jennifer Aniston owns one," a Dyson representative chimed in.

We have more photos of the Airblade Tap, Airblade V and new Airblade hand dryers below.

If you gave them a quick glance, you might think that Apple and Dyson have a lot in common. Both are hugely successful personal technology companies that emphasize clean, simple product design, closely associated with an iconic inventor and visionary; both have websites that feature their products on stark white backgrounds, with simple sans-serif descriptions written in plain English; both have found their successes, broadly, by disrupting stale, entrenched industries with attractive designs, intuitive interfaces and enjoyable user experiences.

When I talked to Dyson's Marcus Hartley (the lead engineer on the new Dyson Airblade Tap, and a Dyson employee for the past 9 1/2 years), however, he politely rejected my comparison of Dyson to Apple. As obvious as the pairing may seem to me, Hartley doesn't see it:

"[With our products] form follows function," Hartley said during a brief interview. "Apple makes a stylistic product; we don't have any designers at our company. We start out with the internals first and then match the style to it."

Hartley explained that the guts of the product, the engine that drives its utility, always comes first at Dyson, which he wasn't sure was always the case at Jony Ive's Apple. He doesn't mean this as an insult; rather, he thinks that the engineering process at Dyson follows a fundamentally different path than it does at Apple.

For example, Dyson's Airblade hand dryers (which you can read about here) came about as a small group of engineers at the company were working on a totally different problem and realized that the motors they had created were very efficient at blowing air-- specifically, blowing water off of surfaces. So they asked themselves: What product could we create that uses a motor that powers air that can blow water off of a surface?

A few years later, the first Dyson Airblade hand dryer made its debut; and as slick as the Airblade, and its new cousin the Airblade V, appear, the product concept began with a functional part that performed a specific operation: A gizmo in search of a purpose, in other words.

That difference, of course, is the opinion of just one Dyson engineer; the constant comparison between Dyson and Apple still persists. James Dyson has been called "the Steve Jobs of Suction" and has expressed his admiration for Jobs, and the way he simplified his products and made them enjoyable. When James Dyson unveiled his new Airblades at an event Tuesday night, he evoked the iconic Apple keynotes we've become familiar with over the past decade: We heard about how many hours had gone into testing, designing and engineering the new products; we saw the products up-close, in excruciating detail, including the insides, with plain-English descriptions of everything that made them run; we listened as Dyson detailed, monologically, all of the benefits of the new products, and what made them must-have devices for any modern buyer.

And then there were the products themselves which, clean and minimal as they were, at the very least suggested Apple's dominant (and oft-imitated) design philosophy.

Or maybe that's just my opinion. In any case, Apple's products are generally both critical as well as consumer favorites; so even if you don't agree with the basis for comparison, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be compared to Apple...

...until they sue you.

Have you ever thought you missed your true calling in life? That instead of flipping burgers/washing dishes/defrauding investors you should have been a heart surgeon?

Well, now one simple computer game by Bossa Studios is giving you the chance to live out your fantasy. Via Kotaku, the game is called "Surgeon Simulator" and it quite simply simulates open-heart surgery, from the comfort of your laptop or desktop.

Gameplay is fairly self-explanatory: You control the hand of an amateur surgeon who must successfully perform heart surgery, "complet[ing] the operation in the quickest time possible, with minimal blood loss."

Here's a (pretty graphic) trailer for the game:

Let's go ahead and add this to the list of things on YouTube you shouldn't try at home, okay?

You can play the game online here. If you have a weak stomach -- or a shaky hand -- you might want to skip it.

Everyone in America hates their phone bill and wishes it was lower. And most everyone in America, too, likes the idea of giving a little money to charity.

Now, one startup is offering a tantalizing combination of the two: A service that, in one fell swoop, lowers the amount of money you fork over to your mobile carrier, and then donates the resultant savings to a microfinancing fund that benefits women entrepreneurs around the world.

It's an initiative called SaveLoveGive, recently launched by the mobile analytics firm Validas. SaveLoveGive offers two services in one, the second stacked on top of the first. First, Validas compares your smartphone plan to your actual usage, and spits out a suggestion for a cheaper alternative plan on your current carrier that hews more closely to your needs; and, second, it shows you how much money you would save by switching to that plan, and offers a platform to donate that money to the Seven Bar Foundation, the well-regarded non-profit that has funded microloans to women for over a decade.

The first part -- reassessing your mobile bill -- is a service that Validas has offered for almost four years now. Founded by former Verizon salesmen Tom Pepe and Todd Dunphy, Validas recently launched a web platform called VERA to help customers visualize their mobile usage more clearly (and beautifully).

Now with SaveLoveGive, Validas gives users the opportunity to feel the dual satisfaction of denying their carrier money AND being charitable.

The service is free and can be accessed on almost any computer or mobile device, so long as it is capable of running HTML-5 applications.

For now, Validas only analyzes the data of AT&T; and Verizon customers, though Dunpy and Pepe told me more carriers are on their way. And just in time, too: According to an analysis by Validas, Americans wasted an eye-popping $52.8 billion on phone service in 2012 -- enough money to completely fund the cleanup and repair of the Northeast following Hurricane Sandy. Worldwide, Validas estimates that we are wasting $926 trillion on mobile phone services we never use.

(Validas actually put together a neat site called the Wireless Waste Index that visualizes the amount of money each continent overspends on wireless service per year, per the company's calculations. You can visit it here.)

Dunphy and Pepe said that they tried to make the process as simple as possible; the entire operation takes less than five minutes. On the Validas website, you enter your wireless credentials (your User ID and password for either your Verizon or AT&T; account) and your most recent mobile bill is automatically fed in to the system and analyzed. If Validas finds a lower plan, it prepares an email to your carrier laying out which parts of your plan you want to switch over to, with the relevant data. You then send off the email, and a representative should (hypothetically!) get back to you about making those changes.

Validas doesn't compare your current plan to plans on other carriers; it's about saving you dough with your current provider, Pepe and Dunphy say.

While Validas has, for a few years now, let you pocket the cash from the savings it ferrets out, the philanthropic aspect is new. After you've switched your plan, the service asks if you'd like to donate the money -- though there's no imperative to do so. If you'd rather keep the money, or donate to another charity, you can -- but a partnership between Validas and Seven Bar Foundation makes it easy to give from the checkout page.

It's a feature that distinguishes Validas from competitors like Ratemizer and BillShrink.com, which also automatically pores over your mobile bill for inefficiencies. Yet there is still more that Validas needs to accomplish before it reaches its goal as the "Mint.com of mobile bills," as the company aspires to be, and can truly claim to be the king of cell phone bill analysis.

Most glaring: Validas currently only analyzes one month of cell phone bills, making its recommendations based on 30 days of usage. Because one month of usage might not be representative for your normal usage, that's a problem; you don't want to be making decisions about your monthly cell phone bill based on an uncommon month. It would be better to make that choice based on your monthly averages, which is why Ratemizer analyzes at least three months of bills in its own algorithm.

The addition of Sprint and T-Mobile -- and perhaps a cross-carrier comparison -- would certainly go a long way toward making Validas more helpful to all customers.

For now, though -- what do you have to lose? Validas is free for individuals for use, so long as you know your User ID and password for your carrier's website. You can run your bill through the Validas system here, and achieve that holy union of charity and screwing over your carrier in a single, glorious moment.

The New York Times has a front (web)page story this Tuesday about streaming services like Spotify and Pandora and the paltry payments some artists report receiving from them. (Cue massive guilt trip for everyone using any of those services).

Central to the story is one Zoe Keating, an "avant cellist" (GUYS) whose Hypebot post about streaming music posts went semi-viral last year. The money quote (PUN INTENDED) from the Times article:

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as "avant cello," the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.

(Not listed: How much money Keating made from iTunes, Amazon and other MP3 sales. We'll assume it is significantly above $550).

Criticizing services like Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody for not ponying up enough cash to independent artists has become something of a genre unto itself over the past couple years, ever since Spotify's splashy U.S. launch in 2011. See here, and here, and here, and here.

Many artists, especially indie artists, are unhappy with the milli-pennies they receive from each song stream on these trendy new services, and some have taken to various web publishing platforms to register their displeasure at the cash that is and is not coming in.

You might be wondering, then, at what point you should start feeling guilty for listening to music on Spotify, or Deezer, or MOG, or what have you. Just when you think you're doing something good -- you aren't illegally downloading! You're using a service that serves you ads, or that you pay a monthly fee for! You are contributing to the health of the recording industry!-- you find out that you are supporting your favorite artist to the tune of $0.004611 per listen.

How are you supposed to feel good about yourself at those rates?

Well, you probably can't feel good about yourself, but you can feel not bad about yourself if you think about it in a certain light!TechDirt can show you how, from an explainer published six months before the Times piece. Their argument is that Spotify is nascent, and that as more and more users sign up for the service, the payouts to labels will become larger; already, some data shows, that transformation is occurring, with Spotify sending more and more money to the labels as its business has expanded.

You are an early adopter, and as more of your Facebook buddies sign up -- and as you get more and more of those email notifications that you are now "connected" with a friend on Spotify -- artists will reap in more and more money, both in terms of frequency and in amount per stream.

You might also argue, too, that a false binary has been set up: You're not either streaming or downloading; you're either streaming or finding music through piracy. Spotify and Rdio and the like aren't alternatives to iTunes; they are alternatives to What.cd and The Pirate Bay and torrent trackers. Those fractions of pennies artists are receiving are better than the zero dollars they would get if Daniel Ek hadn't started Spotify in the first place, right? And Spotify has caused a great decline in your music pirating activities, correct?

Another argument, via TechDirt: If you're going to be mad at anyone, you should be mad at the record labels who are, in the end, the ones negotiating contracts with the services and divvying out the income to the artists. Spotify's secretive payment algorithm, and mysterious, label-by-label negotiating strategy, probably isn't helping, and artists on smaller labels appear to be getting the shaft; that system could use some changing (and just might stanch the steady flow of artist discontent with the service somewhat).

Another seemingly important point that can mitigate your guilt: Spotify and Pandora aren't even profitable companies, so asking them to pay out more money seems a bit premature. Spotify lost almost $60 million in 2011, per a leaked report; Pandora is projecting millions in losses through 2013.

In other words: This is an ongoing story, as they say in the news biz. No one is quite sure yet how these streamers are going to affect the record industry in the long-run; whether physical media will disappear; whether iTunes will shrink to nothingness; or whether Spotify and Pandora and MOG and Rdio and Rhapsody will peter out as unprofitable artifacts of yet-another pie-eyed tech bubble.

Or, hey, maybe they'll figure out a financial model that will enrich the independent musical community in ways that Stephen Malkmus and Black Francis could have never imagined. Stranger things have happened.

[Read "As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle" on the NYT website; for more on the subject, check Times author Ben Sisario's coverage of the digital music scene here].

Via Dvice, here's a man that I am glad is not my neighbor. He built a slingshot, out of wood and brawn and manliness, that can fire live chainsaws:

His name is Joerg Sprave, and his YouTube channel is definitely worth a subscription -- especially if you like sharp projectiles fired quickly at targets out of homemade bazookas.

3D printing is one of the most intriguing advances in personal technology, partly because the possibilities are just being discovered. We've heard about 3D-printed meat, and 3D-printed clothing, and now, a third exciting use case has arisen: A 3D-printed pez dispenser topper of your own face.

Dezeen (via Dvice) has the story of Hot Pop Factory, a Canadian agency who figured out a way, using the Xbox Kinect sensor and a 3D printer, to create Pez toppers based on specific employees' faces. The Kinect sensor was used to scan in accurate models of human heads, and the 3D printer was used to -- well, print out the toppers that could snap onto the top of a Pez dispenser. Behold:

You can read the whole story at Dezeen, or at Hot Pop Factory's website. Now if you'll excuse me: I've always wanted to eat a sugar pellet vomited out of a 3D simulacrum of my own face.