In my last bit of blogging, I mentioned computer devices that are useful for kids with special needs. Here’s the world’s largest trackball — the Greystone Peripheral BigTrack.

This monster mouse has a three-inch yellow ball in the center, useful for people who lack fine motor skills. Two huge blue buttons for the left and right mouse clicks are located behind the trackball so they won’t get clicked accidentally. It’ll work with Windows and Mac computers that have a USB or PS/2 port.

If you’re using this in a learning situation, you can hook up a regular mouse for “driver training” or simply for simultaneous participation.

Another version of the same product also works with switches, but not the kind sold by Cisco. These are devices that allow kids with physical disabilities to access computer programs without the use of a mouse. If you happen to have a preference, let us know!

According to those in the know, one of the best Notebooks out there is the Apple MacBook Pro Notebook with a 15.4 inch screen and Intel Core 2 Duo Processor.

I’m not much of a Apple Mac fan, mainly because at $2000 plus the MacBook Pro is way out of my price range. However, if I was in the market for a high-end notebook this would be at the top of my list.

The MacBook Pro has specs which would be fairly good even for a desktop computer: a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2Gb RAM (which can be upgraded to 4GB) and a 160GB Hard drive. There are multiple wireless options, including the new, next generation 802.11n wireless, and Bluetooth. The discreet, or separate dedicated, video card means the video card won’t be competing for RAM with the CPU. At just over 5 pounds this is no “Desktop Replacement” (Desktop Replacement Notebooks generally are over 7.5 pounds). On the downside, the Notebook only has two USB ports, although you get 2 FireWire ports. You also don’t get a built-in media card reader.

Of course the Operating System should be upgraded to Mac OS v10.5 Leopard. Among its many great features Mac OS v10.5 has Boot Camp, which allows you to dual boot your Apple Mac into Windows XP or Windows Vista. That makes it a whole lot more useful for someone like me with a substantial investment in Windows applications.

Kids with unique challenges have been on my mind lately. In the course of doing research for an article, I’ve discovered a bunch of products that cater to their special computing needs. (Many of these things are just plain cool too.)

For instance, did you know that you can turn any standard monitor — desktop or notebook — into a touch interactive screen? Keytec, which developed the technology I’m familiar with, MagicTouch, claims the touch screen can be installed and removed easily without opening the computer case to install a board.

It’s activated by touch with almost anything — a finger or stylus, even a gloved hand. It can be used concurrently with your mouse, and it’s available for USB or serial port interface. Drivers are available for versions of Windows from Vista through ME, as well as NT, and Linux and Mac 9 and 10. Plus, the screen helps reduce that static electricity emanating from the monitor. Apparently, it’s easy to move from display to display and can be cleaned easily.

I can think of a user or two — little and big — who could put this thingie to good use.

In the BlogBytes blog entry “No Computer for Christmas” I mentioned that I was enticed by another gadget instead of a desktop computer. I’ve since been asked by a reader what that gadget was.

Trusted Reviews writes this about it:
“you can dismiss it as an over-priced gimmick…but that would be ignoring the sheer software and hardware engineering genius that’s gone into making this product viable”
and
“Put simply, if you want to experience the cutting edge in interface design, this is the best way of doing it without saddling yourself with a $60 per month phone bill”.
(I altered the price per month from Pounds to Dollars with the lowest Rate Plan for the iPhone from apple.com)

Yes, it is the iPod Touch, less than an iPhone without the cellphone but more than just a widescreen iPod, a whole lot more. I’ve actually only listened to one or two songs on it and watched one video clip (excluding the ones from YouTube). The rest of the time I browsed the internet with my index finger, and searched for web apps I could use on the Touch.

You know the feeling — the sense that maybe you should be concerned because your hard disk is filling up with stuff: important documents, notes, applications, service packs, PST files, PDF files, MP3 files (totally work-related, of course)… To paraphrase a quote attributed (but not really said by) the late senator Everett Dirksen, “A billion bytes here, a billion bytes there, and pretty soon you’re talking real storage.” We can never have enough.

But Fujitsu is working to change that. Come the first quarter of 2008, this company that pops out new models of hard drives like microwaves produce popcorn will be making available the memorably named MHZ2 BH series mobile hard disk drive for notebook and PC use. Why does it matter? Because it’ll come in storage capacities up to 320 gigabytes. Now, I’m not going to go into one of those comparisons that tells you just how much storage that equates to (”This hard drive will be able to hold the equivalent of 1,300 entire BitTorrent show catalogs and still leave you room for your Flickr backups…”), but I will tell you that that size of hard drive is big, REALLY BIG.

Then again, could I be revisiting this same topic in three years, asking just how much storage is enough? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. As poet William Blake pronounced: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Of course, he also did add, “Enough! Or Too much.”

My wireless router at home only has four Ethernet ports, which just aren’t enough. For whatever reason I have four desktop computers in my study. I also have an Xbox 360 which needs an internet connection. So that is one too many wired devices to connect to the router.

To solve my problem I could get a wireless router with more than four ports, like the Linksys Cable Router with 8-Port Switch.

This problem could be solved a any number of ways. I could buy a wireless adapter for the Xbox 360. Another option would be to buy a wireless card like the Linksys WMP54G Wireless Network Adapter or to save the hassle of opening up a desktop a Linksys WUSB54GC USB Wireless Network Adapter for one or more of the Desktop PCs.
Of course I could get rid of one or more of the desktop computers. That is not an option for various reasons, involving software and upgraded hardware and my “don’t throw it out if it is working” mindset.

At the moment it actually isn’t too much of a problem though. I simply unplug cables when a PC is not in use as it would be rare that all four PCs would be running at the same time. Also, when the Xbox 360 is running, only one PC will be running at the same time, as I tend to crash my racing car or get shot by aliens if I look away at my PC screen for too long while playing on the Xbox 360!

Have you ever had a notebook computer stolen? If not, it’s probably that you — like I — have just been lucky up to now. So here’s a product that’s making the press-release-oriented website rounds that sounds pretty useful. It’s called LoJack for Laptops.

You can buy a subscription for both Windows and Mac machines.

Here’s how it apparently works. You load it as just another software application. When the computer has Internet access, it contacts a monitoring center at Absolute Software Corp., the company that sells the service, in the background. If the laptop gets ripped off, you file a police report and notify Absolute’s recovery team. Absolute puts the signal from your computer on “high alert” so that the recovery team can identify its location as quickly as possible. That information is transmitted to the police agency handling the theft, along with document for getting a search warrant, and presumably goes about recovering the computer.

If you’re giving a new notebook to a student, this might not be a bad sub-$50 program to throw on there. But do some price grabbing. Looks like you can get good deals on multi-year subscriptions with a bit of keyboard work.

Hewlett-Packard has gone against the grain and released a couple of Windows Mobile devices which do not have phones! One of the new iPaq models they released a few months ago was the HP iPaq 111 Classic Handheld.

At first I had thought that HP had named their PDA “Classic” in the same way Apple labels their only hard drive based iPods as “Classic”. It is more likely that it comes from the name of the Windows Operating System it runs. This PDA runs the latest Windows Mobile 6 Operating System, called “Windows Mobile 6 Classic”.

Now, apart from being a Classic, this handheld has some impressive specifications. It features a 624 MHz processor, has 256MB Flash ROM (of which over 190 MB is available for storage) and 64 MB RAM. An interesting note about the use of ROM is that this means the data stored there will not be lost if the battery dies. While 256MB doesn’t sound like much when the iPod Touch has 16GB of Flash Memory, the HP iPaq 110 has an SDHC card slot, which means that you can add an extra 16GB of storage, with 32GB SDHC cards being on the horizon. The iPaq has a 3.5 inch touchscreen and built-in Wireless, both 802.11b and 802.11g, and Bluetooth.

On the software front, the PDA ships with Office Mobile 6.1 (consisting of Word, Excel and PowerPoint Mobile), which enables compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007. Along with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile and the usual PIM applications there are Messaging, Internet Explorer Mobile, Solitaire and many more. Of course there are also numerous third-party applications available for Windows Mobile Devices.

Just to clear up some possible confusion, the HP iPaq 110, 111, 112, and 114 are all the same device, according to a review in Brighthand.com:
The 110 and 111 are available in the US, the 112 is the version for Asia/Pacific, and it’s called the 114 in Europe. They may vary slightly in terms of languages pre-loaded, and including the proper AC power adapters for their localities of sale, but the hardware itself is the same.“

If you’re using Microsoft Office 2007 on a personal computer, you’ll want to download a copy of the company’s first service pack, which came out a week ago. To find it, go to www.microsoft.com/office and look for the service pack headline link. (If your machine is a business PC, wait until your corporate IT department has issued the A-OK on installation.)

The service pack is free and contains 400 bug fixes, security fixes, stability improvements and performance enhancements. Some of the new stuff has been issued as separate updates, but this 219-megabyte download consolidates those and adds more. You’ll find fixes for Access, Excel, InfoPath, the overall Office application, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project and Project Server, Publisher, SharePoint Designer, Visio and Word.

Among the interesting problems the service pack addresses:

— When you try to use Word 2007 to open a document that uses a ZIP format, Word 2007 does not consider the file format converter for the ZIP format. When this problem occurs, the File Conversion dialog box does not appear. Instead, you receive an error message that resembles the following: The Office Open XML file cannot be opened because there a problems with the contents.

— You open a PowerPoint Show (.pps) file in full-screen view two times. Then, you close the file. In this situation, PowerPoint 2007 stops responding.

— A user’s computer may hang if the user runs Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista and connects over a slow connection.

— When you try to use arrow keys to move the cursor in a text box in Excel 2007, the cursor moves in the opposite direction.

As somebody who has difficulty with the smallest of binary problems (one that comes to mind: loading toilet paper in the right direction), I always marvel at the magic performed by developers — and the rich variety of problems they introduce into software with their coding skills.

The last desktop PC I bought had a LightScribe CD/DVD writer. This is really a neat idea. I was never really one for printing labels for CDs and just wrote on them with a permanent marker pen. A colleague who used to print labels for backup CDs eventually gave up when the labels begun peeling off after several months. Since I’ve had this LightScribe writer I’ve printed a number of labels.

The way LightScribe works is that instead of having to print paper labels for your CDs or DVDs, once you have burned the CD or DVD, you just turn the disk over, pop it back into the writer and burn a label on the special surface area on the label side of the disk. Of course, you need special LightScribe writable media to do this, as well as a LightScribe compatible writer. The CD and DVD media have been coming down in price and are often on sale.

If you do not have a LightScribe Writer, internal or external ones are easy to come by, like the internal LG Electronics LG 20X DVDR DVD Burner with LightScribe or the External LaCie d2 External Dual Layer DVD±RW Writer with LightScribe.