There’ve been a lot of gimmicky gloves made to deal with capacitive touchscreens like the iPhone’s, but it turns out Apple had patented one of their own way back in 2007.

Apple’s patent called for an outer layer that could be pulled back to allow the inner layer to touch the device.

Are you still watching television in standard def? How humiliating. Because Brother has just announced the world’s first sewing machine with a built-in camera to display your work on an “HD” screen.

While we don’t do much sewing ourselves, the QuattroT 6000D seems to have some good ideas.

Here’s a beautiful, earth-friendly, waste-free wrapping alternative for your holiday gifts: ZenWraps. Based on the Japanese technique called furoshiki, these gorgeous, reusable, biodegradable fabric wraps (made with 100% organic cotton, hemp, or silk) make gift giving an eco-pleasure. The ZenWrap website provides simple online wrapping instructions, and there’s no tape, ribbon, or tools required.

While most people use a Twitter client of some kind nowadays, your profile page is still important if you want to attract new followers.  Usually those who have just discovered you will visit your profile (as in http://twitter.com/”username”) before deciding to follow you.  Twitter pages look really chic already, but you might want to take some extra steps to beautify yours.

First of all, there are some quick and easy options built right into Twitter.  The site recently underwent some structural changes and one of those included the removal of some custom elements.  At first I was distraught about this, but now I really like the new layout and their new options have definitely made up for it.  For instance, you can now go into the Settings/Design tab of your profile and edit much of the page’s look and feel.

The easiest thing to do is to pick one of 12 prefab wallpapers that all look like Threadless t-shirts (not a bad match for Twitter, actually).  If you want to add your own wallpaper, hold your horses, we’ll get to that in a bit.

To match up your fancy new background with the general page elements, simply click “Change design colors” and you can pick each element’s color from a palette.

Getting back to custom backgrounds as promised, there are a couple of options for you.  Some people find really fantastic photographs to use as their backgrounds.  Usually they are epic landscapes that will do well even when you scroll down a ways.  Also, it doesn’t hurt to just have something neat in the upper left-hand corner.  Personally, I am artistically inept, so I use services like TwitterPatterns and BgPatterns to find new backgrounds.  The former is interesting because the designs are specifically for Twitter profile pages.

If you’re not feeling like a fabric-backed Twitter is right for you, look into BgPatterns.  They focus on a single shape or object and tile it over and over for an attractive, uniform look.  Personally I found a nifty little star pattern that I use for my own page and it has served me well.  With the new layout, though, I may play around with my element colors here and there until I find something new and snazzy.

Once you have a new background picked out, click the “Change background image” link and browse to your image.  If it is like one of the above, make sure “tile background” is checked (if you went that way) or you’ll only get one lonely iteration of your background.  Click “save changes” and you’re all ready to go!

Once you’re done configuring the layout, there is still one more thing you can do to jazz up your Tweets.  In fact, your Tweets are specifically applicable to this next service.  It’s called TwitPic and I can’t believe we haven’t mentioned it before here on MakeUseOf.  While it probably deserves an entire article unto itself, TwitPic will essentially allow you to upload images and associate individual Tweets with them.  It’s kind of like a micro-Flickr for microblogging.

Because seeing is believing, I made up a little sample:

The process of uploading is essentially two steps (choose and customize) once you’ve signed into your Twitter account through the API.  The service has mobile options and works through several clients as well, so definitely take a closer look when you get a chance.

Lastly, Epic-Fu just dedicated an entire podcast to Twitter, so be sure to check it out, as they mentioned a lot of services I’d never heard of before.

P.S.