We’re a watched society. A few nights ago, I caught Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act on DVD, and the plot was sustained by showing the police work involved in tracking down particular cars seen by surveillance cameras planted all over London. (Of course, Jane Tennison’s team kept waving videotapes around, which was rather boggling. One would have thought the London police department would have finally discovered DVDs by the time the series was filmed in 2006.)

There’s something both creepy and cool about the mix of IP cameras you can buy and install these days. No longer do you have to sit on your porch to monitor that the neighborhood kids are stealing apples and having fruit wars in your front yard. Now you can place a digital eyeball there and sit in a back room watching it real time or simply capture it on a hard disk for later filing of criminal charges.

The most highly rated IP security camera on Pricegrabber comes from Toshiba. As its product description points out, the camera captures “live, high-resolution video that is viewable anywhere in the world through a standard web browser.” That’s right. You can be quaffing a grappa in a Milanese cyber-café while checking out what your teenagers are really up to while you’re out of town. (The grappa is bound to help their case!)

A couple of customers weigh in on the Toshiba model. According to one reviewer, the IKWB15a has a limited zoom and setting it up on your network is complicated. He or she notes that it only records JPEG images, rather than video. That means, if you set up the camera to record images on motion detect, “you could have thousands of images you have to go through.”

But Lionhearted, the second reviewer, points out the other value of an IP camera — it can be used for webcamming along with surveillance. He or she uses it at a remote mountain site (and even posts a couple of photos to show just how remote). According to Lionhearted, “We wanted a camera that had features for surveillance like motion detection, yet also had good color image quality for public benefit — AND we didn’t want to spend a fortune… After exhaustive searching we bought this camera and have no regrets.”

When I had a second home, I always wondered what was going on there when I wasn’t around. Should I ever have a second home again, I could install a few of these things, crank up my browser and look for myself.

The first time I came across a memory card was with my first Palm-OS based PDA, the Sony Clie PEG-S300. This was Sony’s first Palm handheld, and it shipped with an 8MB Memory Stick, which was about the size of a stick of gum. This Sony 32MB Memory Stick looks almost identical to that first 8MB Memory Stick. Only a few years later I used a 128 MB Memory Stick with a Sony Clie NX60. A flash update allowed the use of the new Memory Stick PRO format which started at 256MB. From there the Memory Stick spun off into multiple variations (see the “Memory Stick” article in Wikipedia). Nowadays the Sony PSP uses the Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Pro Duo format.
Although the Sony memory Stick is produced by other manufacturers like Sandisk and Lexar, they are almost exclusively used in Sony branded digital cameras, PDAs, cellphones. The Sony VAIO line of personal computers includes Memory Stick slots.

When Sony pulled out of making Palm PDAs, I switched to Palm branded handhelds. These, and most Windows Mobile handhelds use the Secure Digital Card format. The postage-stamp sized Secure Digital Card format supports capacities from 8 MB to 2 GB. The SDHC card supports sizes from 4GB to 32GB (see the blog entry “SD, SDHC Cards, Say what?“).

There is just no space to go into the myriad of card formats here: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, miniSD, microSD and many other variants. Wikipedia’s “Comparison of memory cards” has an extensive table and comparison of memory card formats.

Are you a binary horse — somebody who can look at binary and convert it in your head rather than going to some website that will calculate it for you? If you are, then you need a binary clock, which will keep the connections in your brain snapping whenever you need to know the time.

Each column on the clock represents a different part of the time, with blue LEDs turned on or off to represent a given number. In the picture I’ve provided here, the left-most column represents 1. The next column represents 0. The third column is 4. The fourth column is 8. The fifth column is 3. And the right-most column is 6. Put those numbers together, and you get 10:48:36.

How long did it take you to figure that out? Took me about 10 minutes — using an online binary converter. I’ll never be able to use a clock like this, because it’ll guarantee my late arrival to any appointment in my calendar.

According to the description, you can run it in 12-hour (and look out the window to know which half of the day you’re in) or 24-hour mode.

In idle moments between jobs, I grab a magazine and read an article. Perhaps this little product would be a nice change of pace. Hmm. Or perhaps I could take up Spider Solitaire.

I’ve noticed lately that many of the people I talk to who work with computers have become a nostalgic lot. We’re all getting older. We speak fondly of our first Apple, lovingly recall reading our first issue of PC Magazine or PC Computing and chortle at the memory of attending some computer event where some now-bygone industry luminary was blind to his own company’s future downfall.

I’ve learned about a website for people like us: Old-Computers.com. You can read up on practically any ancient computer that ever existed and watch a 75-minute demo — perhaps the first ever recorded — given by Doug Engelbert and other researchers at Stanford in 1968 showing how computers could share information. (You’ll recognize such concepts as the mouse, hyperlink and email.)

Are you old enough to remember the Kaypro? I lugged one around in the mid-80s, thinking I was really cutting edge with my portable. (It had the heft of a sewing machine.)

Young people don’t talk about their first computer. The computing machines themselves are irrelevant. It’s all about the services they use. But you watch. Someday they’ll get that same  dreamy tone in their voices when they remember their first iPod or cellphone.

In my last blog posting I mentioned passwords and Biometric Security. One thing I failed to mention was strong passwords. You don’t only need passwords for your computer(s) at home and at work, you probably also need passwords for numerous websites which require a user name and password.

Microsoft has a set of guidelines on strong passwords here: “Strong passwords: How to create and use them“, which not only covers what a strong password is and how to create one, but also how to use passwords and some general security tips. The article has six steps to creating a strong, memorable password, which is important, as it doesn’t help if you create a strong password and then cannot remember it.

I particularly like the “Password strategies to avoid” section, as they are very important, and bear repeating here:

“To avoid weak, easy-to-guess passwords:

Avoid sequences or repeated characters. “12345678,” “222222,” “abcdefg,” or adjacent letters on your keyboard do not help make secure passwords.

Avoid using only look-alike substitutions of numbers or symbols. Criminals and other malicious users who know enough to try and crack your password will not be fooled by common look-alike replacements, such as to replace an ‘i’ with a ‘1′ or an ‘a’ with ‘@’ as in “M1cr0$0ft” or “P@ssw0rd”. But these substitutions can be effective when combined with other measures, such as length, misspellings, or variations in case, to improve the strength of your password.

Avoid your login name. Any part of your name, birthday, social security number, or similar information for your loved ones constitutes a bad password choice.

Avoid dictionary words in any language.

Use more than one password everywhere. If any one of the computers or online systems using this password is compromised, all of your other information protected by that password should be considered compromised as well. It is critical to use different passwords for different systems.

Avoid using online storage. If malicious users find these passwords stored online or on a networked computer, they have access to all your information.”

The main problem of course with multiple passwords is how to remember them. Microsoft suggests writing them down on pieces of paper. I would use caution with this method and keep written down passwords in a secure place. Keeping your work password under the mouse pad at work is asking for trouble.

You could of course buy a HP iPaq hx2795B PDA, which has a built-in fingerprint reader, and store your passwords on it.

In a previous Blog Posting, “Stop Malware!“, I mentioned ways to keep malware out of your computer, but what about keeping unauthorized people away from your computer, and more importantly, your sensitive information?

First of all, determine whether your computer actually needs protection. Is there any sensitive data on it, like banking information or personal information? Obviously if you use a computer to simply browse the internet or play games, and don’t have any confidential information on it, then there is not much to gain by even password protecting it. On the other hand, if it is a laptop with client data including Social Security numbers, you need more than a password.

You can buy a Notebook computer with a built-in fingerprint reader, but what if you already have a Notebook which doesn’t have a fingerprint reader. This is where the APC Biometric Personal Password Manager may come in useful. It simply plugs into a USB port and is apparently easy to use. It can also be used to remember user names and passwords for websites. There are also numerous software password managers, for example Roboform.

For securing sensitive data on a password-protected computer, Winzip can create password protected archives, or with free open source software like TrueCrypt you can create an encrypted partition on your hard drive or on a USB key.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to securing information.

Mother’s Day is coming up soon, so I’ve been shopping for some digital picture frames to load and send out to the multiple moms in my family. Boy, are they pricey! Local stores are selling them for around $99 apiece. That’s too much for my budget, which hovers around $50 apiece. So I’m heading online to see if better deals can be found.

PriceGrabber says there are about 160 digital picture frame options listed in its database.

For example, there’s the miniature Axion 1.1-inch mini-digital picture frame that’s heart-shaped and comes in pink. No idea how many images the heart-shaped frame holds, because the description doesn’t tell. But I do know the resolution is 96×64 and that you need to load it from a PC, the way you’d load files onto a USB drive — by plugging it into a USB port. For $20, it’s a bargain, until you realize that the product name appears front and center, which kind of makes it look like something you’d pick up for free at a computer tradeshow. Sweetness rating: 1 heart.

Now, here’s an interesting addition to the offerings — an egg-shaped picture frame from Tricod. This also is about 1.1 inches in size, but it comes in a more tasteful silver — or blue, gray, pink or red. Since it has a tiny ring at the top, it can hang from a pendant or be used as a keychain. This one holds 56 images and includes software that will resize your photos automatically for you. It costs about $30. Sweetness rating: 3 hearts.

If you want to offer a wallet too, here’s a useful $40 item: The Women’s Digital Photo Wallet. The memory stores 55 color images, which show up on a screen that’s 1.4 inches on the diagonal (as are all the sizes I’ve referenced here). Also, the viewer is rechargeable, which means you don’t need to buy new batteries. The disadvantage of this offering, however, is that it’s wallet-based. Wallets are usually something you can pick out for a guy, in my experience (think Father’s Day), but not something most of my female friends and family members would cotton to. They have their special needs. Sweetness rating: 2 hearts.

For the more traditionally minded among us (and those of us who spend time trying to figure out appropriate Mother’s Day gifts could truly be called traditionally-minded), here’s a sub-$50 frame from Matsunichi (Mitsubishi’s less well known cousin). This is a 5.6-inch frame with 320×234 resolution. Here’s the tricky part to this frame though: You have to load your own memory card into the frame. It doesn’t have built-in memory. That’s great if you already have memory cards to hand over to the gift recipient. If you don’t have extra cards, that’ll be an extra expense (but it does allow you to supply a new card every year without having to worry about supplying a new frame too). Also, reviewers report that if you lose the documentation, you’ll never figure out how the frame operates because it’s not intuitive. On the other hand, they say the resolution is excellent for the price. Sweetness rating: 2 hearts (because for that price it only comes in black).

After a bit of pondering my options, I’m thinking the egg is my choice here. Why? It’s totally, weirdly appropriate for Mother’s Day, no?

The iPod Touch is all the rage, deservedly so, but there are other touchscreen Portable Media Players available.

Many have heard of the Archos 605, which was covered in the Blog posting “Internet Browser: $30“. Here are two other players which are well worth mentioning:

The first is the feature-packed Cowon D2. The Cowon D2 is a compact 3 by 2.2 by 0.6 inches with a 2.5 inch (diagonally) touchscreen. The touchscreen can be operated using an included triangular stylus or a finger. The player supports multiple audio file formats, as well as JPG photo display and video playback. It also has an FM radio along with voice, radio and line-in recording. The battery is rated for over 50 hours of audio playback and 10 hours of video playback. Firmware updates have added extra functionality including flash-based games and an optional flash based interface. There is also an SD Card slot which supports High-Capacity SD Cards.

The second is the Samsung YP-P2, which is closer to the iPod Touch in size, although about half an inch shorter and slimmer, but almost as thin, and sporting a 3 inch screen. Whereas the iPod Touch has Wi-Fi, the P2 has Bluetooth. This is where it gets interesting. The P2 can be paired with Bluetooth headphones or speakers. It also can be paired with a cellphone and the built-in microphone used to for a conversation (a non-hands free device?). The touch interface of the P2 supports finger tapping and swiping actions, although is not that precise according to several reviewers. The menu is customizable, and Samsung have released a number of firmware updates with new features. It supports a couple of common audio and video file formats. The P2 is currently available in 4GB and 8GB capacities, with a 16GB version having been announced. Unfortunately it does not have a memory expansion slot.

Both the Cowon D2 and the Samsung YP-P2 have excellent sound quality.

My neighbor, a retired physicist, recently bought Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs. I almost told him that he didn’t need to spend money to create PDFs — that free utilities such as PrimoPDF can do the same thing. After all, both turn documents into highly portable documents. Then it occurred to me that maybe there were features in his product that I don’t get in my product. After all, he’s a smart guy. The only thing I see him spending money on needlessly is really great wine. But since I’m frequently the recipient of some of that wine, I’m hardly in a position to complain.

So what’s Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional have that I don’t get with my software?

Adobe’s utility allows you to sew together multiple documents into one cohesive whole. Instead of sending a jumble of Word and Excel files as email attachments, you can compile them into one entity, ordered or reordered as you wish, and send that.

With Acrobat you can create forms that people can fill out using Adobe Reader and return electronically. Then you can export that data into a spreadsheet and do analysis. Right now to do that, I would have to use some other program, such as survey software or some kind of spreadsheet-based form, which is much more time-consuming to create.

When multiple people need to work on a document together, Adobe lets you do this. Sure, Word allows the same kind of use, but this goes beyond text. You can use sticky notes, stamps, highlighting and other tools to mark up a document. Review participants can see each other’s comments and track status of review. You can sort comments by author, date and page. And every time you open the shared document, you see the updates to it.

Ever created a PDF, then noticed just as you were about to send it off to your client that a typo crept into the first paragraph of text? Drats! Adobe lets you make small changes in the PDF, including to text, spacing, images and tables.

One thing I’ve noticed: This software is pricey; but the prices are all over the map. Some vendors are charging considerably less than others for the same edition. That said, when you’re ordering, make sure that you’re not ordering an upgrade edition — unless you truly are upgrading.

Maybe I’ll go over to my neighbor’s place for happy hour this week and see what else Adobe Acrobat offers that I’m missing out on.

Does it make a difference whether an electronic device has a user-replaceable battery or not? By “electronic device” I’m including everything from a Bluetooth headset to a Laptop.

When buying a Bluetooth headset, the fact that its battery will eventually go flat and cannot be replaced is no big deal. By the time that happens better ones will probably be available anyway.

How about the MacBook Air Notebook? Apple’s ultra-thin notebook is really impressive. However, it does not have a user-replaceable battery (See Engadget’s article “MacBook Air doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery“) After paying well over $1500 for a notebook, when the battery eventually goes in 2 to 3 years time you won’t be able to replace it yourself. Instead, according to Engadget’s article”MacBook Air battery replacements: $129, free install!“, you would have to send the MacBook Air into Apple, and for the price of $129 for a new battery, they will replace it for free.

So as not to only bash Apple, most Portable Media Players, including all iPods, do not have user-replaceable batteries. Even for manufacturers who used to make Portable Media Players with user-replaceable batteries, the trend also seems to be towards batteries which are not user-replaceable – SanDisk is one example.

Handheld computers seem to be split at the Palm/Windows Mobile line. Apart from their smartphones, none of Palm’s handhelds have user replaceable batteries. Windows Mobile devices generally do. Cellphones have user-replaceable batteries of course, except for the first Treos, and the iPhone.

The cost of replacing a new battery is not much when the device was designed to have the user replace it. Although you can buy a new battery for the Palm Tungsten C, it is tricky to replace it yourself. and you could damage it if you are not careful. I have an old Dell Axim X30, and I’ve replaced the battery once, simply by buying a replacement battery like the Lenmar Replacement battery For Dell Axim X30. Apart from proper disposal, it is not much of a problem when the Axim X30’s battery no longer charges.