The kitten has gotten into our closet again. Normally, that might be an innocuous statement that means he’s playing hide-and-peek with an older cat. Not in our household. In our household that probably means he’s tracing patterns with his claws on the clothes he can reach from the floor. And I’m not talking about my blue jeans. I stuff those in a drawer.

I’m talking about my Significant Other’s new suits — the ones she has been purchasing at untold expense over the last three months in an effort to prepare for her first office job in 10 years, which begins next month. (It’s hardly ever a good omen for the family budget when your spouse knows her favorite department store saleswomen by first name.)

No matter how creative they might be, patterns drawn in new suits with kitty claws could spell out a bad ending. Our kitten could end up having to wear infant mittens duct-taped to her paws.

Or my sweetheart could simply do a bit of springtime organization and get some garment bags for her good clothes. In fact, here’s a window closet that would allow her to put those clothes that are out of season into a different room altogether — say, upstairs in the guest room. Until the kitten learns how to work a zipper, SO’s garments would be safe!

Now that Shakey has decided Blu-ray is the way to release his music archive, you may decide it’s time to look into updating your play equipment. Blu-ray, as you probably already know, holds more data than DVDs (five to 10 times the capacity!), offers amazing picture and sound quality and you can update their disc contents via the Internet.

Of course, I’m a hybrid kind of gal. I don’t like to have a bunch of specialized equipment around when hybrids will do the job too — especially if I’m not paying more for the multi-functionality. So let’s look at two “duo” players, electronics that play both Blu-ray and HD.

First up, the Samsung BD-UP5000. Pricing runs from about $380 to about $790. It exploits the interactive features and offers Blu-ray Disk playback at 1080p resolution. Don’t worry; it’s not limited to playing just Blu-ray or HD disks; you can also run your DVD Video and DVD-RW/-R discs too. The software lets you customize your viewing experience.  For example, if you — like I — run subtitles just to understand what those mumbling actors are saying, you can specify subtitles in a different color, you can animate them and you can fade them in and out. Is that cool or what?!

Reviewer pzprods likes the unit, although he or she detects a delay in loading movies.

LG Electronics offers the BH200, which is priced between $422 and $800. The functionality is basically the same as the Samsung, though reviewer bballcards from MO reports that load time for “Superbad Blu-Ray” is speedy compared to alternatives and that bugs reported in the initial release have been repaired in firmware updates put out by the company. Bballcards complains, however, about a short warranty (a year, the same as the Samsung model) and a high price (again, pretty comparable to the Samsung model).

Of course, upgrading from a HD player to a hybrid player almost demands that you run a high-def viewer too. Otherwise, why bother?! So, if you haven’t upgraded your TV to install one of those drive-in-theater hi-def models that take up a wall and form the centerpoint of dinner conversations with your friends for easily a full three months after purchase, not to worry! Your economic stimulus check is in the mail!

I was working a church yard sale a couple of Saturdays ago and was introduced to a technology that makes a lot of sense — and could help generate some extra income for those who like to keep a sideline business going.

A man came up to our book table and was picking up each book, scanning its ISBN with a PDA and either putting it in a buy pile or setting it down and picking up a new volume. We had perhaps 500 books, and it took him about 10 or 15 minutes to work his way around the collection. I asked what he was doing, and he explained that he sold books through Amazon and this was his way to quickly value whether a used book was worth adding to his inventory or not.

The scanner was using a service that would tap into the Amazon database to inform him about what the book was currently selling for. He said he paid about $30 a month for the service. I didn’t ask what service it was, because he seemed in a bit of a hurry to buy is books and move onto the next yard sale. He was buying those books that had a value worth his time. (I’ve heard that some booksellers make their profit even when selling a book for a penny simply by virtue of exploiting the fixed shipping cost that Amazon charges, but this didn’t seem to be an example of that.)

Interested in setting up your own used goods businesses? I did some searching and came across four such services.

Bookhero.com starts at $8.95 per month and checks prices against Amazon. It works with wireless PDAs as well as WAP-enabled cell phones. You can type in the ISBN or work with scanners that are compatible with the service.

ScoutPal starts at $9.95 per month and also looks up prices on Amazon. It can work with cell phones or PDAs with WAP or HTML web browsers and SMS messaging or email. The company promises instant Amazon lookups if you’re using a Windows Mobile Pocket PC device.

ASellerTool is $5 per month and also draws pricing from Amazon. This company seems to like the Socket Communications Scan Cards, which plug into the SD port of a Pocket PC or Palm device.

Last is the MediaScouter, which is $40 per month and requires a Windows Mobile Enabled PDA or phone. The device needs an SD slot as well as well as Bluetooth connectivity or a CF compact flash. The company recommends a 2Gb Sandisk SD memory card, because it says this brand “can retrieve information up to four times as fast as other cards.”

I’m not ready to give up my day job, but if my Grandma Dot were still alive, I’d set her up in a business like this. I can imagine it now, her cruising around in her gold Maverick, running her scanner while chatting up sellers, getting good deals, spreading goodwill as patron saint of Kalamazoo yard sales.

The time for spring cleaning is upon us. I’m the kind of person who usually prefers moving things around than actually getting rid of them, so anything that’ll help me compress the space an object takes up is a good thing.

In that spirit, I’m going to share a few devices that will do just that. Today: the Veho Film and Slide Converter.

If you’ve been holding onto boxes of family slides and you’d like to put them into a form where they’ll actually be seen by family members, digital is a natural. According to the company description for the Veho, this “negative” scanner hooks up to your computer via USB 2.0 port. It works with Vista and XP and features five megapixel resolution. It includes photo editing software too, to let you do some editing and cropping on the fly.

If you’re on a Mac, one reviewer suggests looking at the 8800F color image scanner. And that brings up a good point. Can you use a regular flatbed scanner to capture a slide and convert it into digital form?

I picked one at random: the Epson Perfection V500 Photo Flatbed Scanner, which sells for about $70 more than the Veho. Its description mentions working with slides. One reviewer points out that it includes holders for slides and negatives, which eliminates the problem of having to figure out where the slide should go for optimal conversion.

So it comes down to this: Do you go with an addition to your household arsenal that addresses a single solution and takes up a little bit of space or spend a bit more and get a solution that has a bigger footprint while tackling more jobs for you? What’s your take?

I don’t know about you, but I’d have trouble laying out a few hundred dollars for a WiFi Internet radio. Yet that’s what Sangean is asking for its WFR-20. What exactly does that get you?

According to the product description, this radio offers direct access to 6,000 Internet radio stations in 250 locations from 60 genres. (Maybe it includes my personal favorite, KVMR.org, the community radio station that broadcasts from my little town, Nevada City. If it doesn’t, the company says I can get it added with a request.)

Apparently, you can find your favorite stations and upload them to a My Stations folder on a special website. Once the stations are there, you can play them from the radio. If you don’t have a computer, it works as a stand-alone unit, but the advantage of tying it to your computer is that it can play the music you have stashed on your hard drive. All you need for either set-up is an Internet connection and a wired or wireless router.

It includes a socket for plugging in your iPod or other MP3 player and another socket for a headset.

But we’re talking truly geek in design. It looks like something your great-uncle would crouch in a kitchen chair next to and listen to the ballgame with — except because it comes with a remote control, he can flip stations without sitting up. It comes in a “high-gloss piano-black finish,” includes a “large, easy-to-read line display,” and weighs in at whopping 6.1 pounds.

Didn’t anybody tell these people that Moore’s Law mandates that technology is supposed to get smaller? Aren’t we supposed to be able to fit our devices in our pockets these days?

So what gives? Is it the audio quality that’s spectacular? Is it so bleeding-edge, I’m incapable of appreciating its inner beauty and elegance? Could it be that I don’t listen to enough music that the idea of paying more than 99 cents for a song grieves me? Dear reader, if you can explain the magic and charm of these machines, I’d appreciate an education. Add your comment below.

Have you ever wondered how those 360-degree product or people shots are put together to show on websites? For example, check out t-shirt vendor the-affair and this iPod site.

Now I know. The marketing mavens behind those memorable images could be using a sub-$1,000 tool from Ortery Technologies called the PhotoCapture 360XL. This kit includes a turntable that holds up to 500 pounds and image creation software.

You hook up a compatible camera (including many PowerShots from Canon and C Series Olympus digital cameras).

You compose the pictures you want by zooming in or out or cropping through the software. Once that’s done, the software synchronizes the picture taking and turntable movement as the object rotates 360 degrees. What it does, apparently, is take a whole bunch of photos in sequence — between four and 72 pictures for a single revolution of the turntable. Finally, the software stitches those together to create an animated GIF or flash file.

If you’re not into the 360-degree idea, you can also use the software to synchronize the workflow of photo shoots. (I wonder if Annie Leibovitz used one of these on that Miley Cyrus job from Vanity Fair. Doesn’t Hannah Montana strike you as the kind of girl who’d get a kick out of spinning around?)