I just made a reservation for a flight to Denver for mid-October. It’s a fairly short trip, but I’m still going to be careful! Consider packing one extra pair of shoes or a bulky sweater and you could find yourself breaking the new luggage restrictions being imposed by many airlines. A month ago, when I flew to Seattle with my family, the lady in front of me had to cough up $25 for the extra seven pounds in her bag. That was on top of the $25 for checking a second suitcase.

So, coming back on that trip, we were extra cautious, since we’d picked up a few souvenirs along the way — easily enough to push the weight limit of our biggest bag over our airline’s 50-pound limit. The challenge was weighing the bags once we’d packed them. The friends we were staying with had a marvelous, nuclear-powered digital scale. But setting a thick suitcase on the scale and trying to get a readout at the same time was a challenge in eye-hand coordination.

There oughta be a better way to find out what a suitcase weighs. And that’s where the Balanzza Ergo digital luggage scale comes in. It sells for exactly the same amount as the penalty you’d pay for going over the limit one time.

The little object weighs 12 ounces and is small enough — 11 x 6 x 1.5 inches — to stash in your luggage or carry on with you.

To use it, first, you calibrate it, which means pushing buttons on the gizmo in a certain order. Once you’re ready to weigh a bag, you turn the unit on and let it warm up for 30 seconds, then place the bag to be weighed into the strap. You lift the object until the scale beeps at you, which means the weight has been locked and displayed.

If you’re like me and the weight exceeds the airline limit, you shuffle objects around from bag to bag, remove a few books from the suitcase and cram them into your knapsack and ponder whether you really do need to haul home that special bowling ball-sized rock you picked up on the beach at sunset.

It’s really all about informed choices, isn’t it?

I turn a certain age this year, and to celebrate, I’m going to go away with a friend and do some camping and hiking at a nearby Very Famous Mountain Lake. While some might use this kind of expedition to do personal reflection on the state of one’s life, I expect I’ll while away my hours away from the routine to drink too much, eat all the wrong foods, forget I ever knew how to use a computer, and read a thoroughly trashy novel.

But first, I must pick through my camping gear, figuring out what to take and what to leave. Since we’re car-camping, I can haul our old Coleman stove, which we received as a wedding gift (Thanks, M.A.!), lo, these many years ago, which still does a marvelous job and is built like a tank. But sometimes you just want to boil up a bit of water for a cocoa, or haul cooking gear on the trail for a cup of soup at lunchtime on a cold day. No tank needed.

That’s where the Jetboil comes in. This is a camp stove that’s remarkably efficient and lightweight. According to the company, you can boil two cups of water in two minutes, which is twice as fast and uses half as much fuel as conventional stoves. Plus, it weighs less than a pound. One micro-canister can boil up to 50 cups of water.

The inner-fixins’ involve some kind of patent-pending heat exchanger that — with laser-like efficiency — focuses the heat on the water you want to boil.

The same technology is now being used to create other utensils — such as the Jetboil 3.0 Liter Helios Fluxring Cooking Pot.

The one aspect of the coming week that I dread actually has nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with sleeping. I tend to get very cold when I sleep on the ground — so cold that my teeth chatter, my body shivers, and my skin turns somewhat blue. So I’m rather hoping to hear that Jetboil has got a new kind of sleeping bag in the works. I’ll be the first in line for that kind of heat exchanger.

Batman is flying through the house, trying to “rescue” the kitten, who just wants to escape under a bed — or anyplace out of range of his grabby little bat gloves. I think it’s time for this six-year-old to get into his bath, without a mask on. We must be close to Halloween, because bags of candy are getting stashed in hidden storage places, and suddenly, orange is the preferred color. That, plus the usual play attire — a naked body — prefers to be dressed up like, well, Batman.

So in light of the coming month, here are a few ghoulish gadgets that might help make this the spookiest October 31st of your adult life…

This six-foot witch cackles a spell and swivels her hips like she’s got something truly nasty cooking.

Here’s a ghost with flashing eye sockets, skeletal hands, and a nylon cloak that will float in the breezes outside your front door.

Now, I’m not much into inflatables, like giant Santa train globes, because I think they tend to look cheesy. Plus, they really suck up the power at a time when that’s not what we should be doing. But not everybody feels that way, so here’s a rather intimidating object you might like to use in decorating your front yard (or dining room table, if it’s large enough!) — an eight-foot red and black inflatable spider. Like the ghost, this creepy critter’s eyes flash. But somehow, when you’re talking eight feet worth of spider, flashing eyeballs is really just icing on the cake, no?

And finally, a six-foot realistic collapsible coffin. (Vampire not included.)

This one may be of special interest particularly for those of you with six-year-olds of your own: “Son, if you don’t get into that bath right now, I’m going to have to bring out the you-know-what and put you-know-who inside of it!” And after all, isn’t that what the major holidays of the coming three months are about — keeping the kids in line?

You’re not sick of hearing about the new Google phone, are you? Because, let’s face it: This is even more vital to the future success of our country than our senators and Congresspeople bailing out Wall Street; more compelling than Britney’s decision to remix “Womanizer,” more tortuous a wait than watching for David Blaine’s eyeballs to pop out of his head while hanging upside down over Central Park.

For all of you who haven’t been living in the critical care unit of your local hospital for the last 48 hours, you can ignore the next several paragraphs, in which I describe Google phone basics.

First, the Google phone is actually called the T-Mobile G1, because that’s the company that’s selling and servicing it. Second, the phone will cost you between $180 and $300, depending on if you’re already a T-Mobile customer, as well as a monthly service fee on top of your regular voice plan charges. The extra fee is $25 for 400 messages plus unlimited data access or $35 for unlimited messaging.

In appearance, the gadget looks a lot like a Darth Vader version of the iPhone — all angles and pop-out surprises. It features a one-gigabyte memory card to carry your music and photos. It includes a three-megapixel camera. The display changes from portrait to landscape when you shift the angle of the device.

So what’s Googley about it? There’s one-touch access to Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Talk and Maps. You can drag and drop items to set up your home display with applications, photos or folders that you want quick access to.

Plus, you’ve probably heard about Android. That’s the operating system that makes the phone tick. In the weeks and months ahead, armies of developers will presumably be putting up and selling their applications on the Android Marketplace, a storefront developed by Google that lets you read about, rate and download the apps to your phone.

The G1 runs best on T-Mobile’s 3G network. By October 22, 2008, T-Mobile promises to have 3G coverage in these cities:

Atlanta
Austin
Baltimore
Chicago
Dallas
Houston
Las Vegas
Long Island, NY
Los Angeles
Miami
Minneapolis
New England
New York City
Northern New Jersey
Orlando
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Portland
Sacramento
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco
Seattle

If you don’t see your community on there, it means one thing: You’ll be living on the EDGE. That’s where the slow, pokey, drawn out, long wait-times wireless networks are set up. Whereas 3G freaks will be downloading videos from YouTube like Tang through a straw, the rest of us will be grimacing in pain and desire and pondering a move to Minneapolis, even if it is mid-winter.

But the feature I like best — above all others — is one the iPhone lacks: It has a slide-out qwerty keyboard. The slide-out part is nice, because you won’t do accidental dialing. But more importantly, the qwerty is essential. I’m a touch typist. Put letters into alphabetical order and I can’t find the ones I want when I need them. My brain isn’t wired that way anymore. T-Mobile: Get some more towers up and you’ll have my business.

You’re probably sitting around like me waiting for the official news about the T1-Google phone, which will be arriving in another nine hours or so. But until then, the news doesn’t stop.

For instance, Canon will be coming out in just a few days with its latest PowerShot, the SD990 IS, which features  an astonishing 14.9 megapixels and 3.7x optical zoom, enough to capture every hair sprouting from Uncle Barney’s ears in those family reunion photos you’re responsible for.

If you have a two gigabyte flash card to capture photos onto, you’ll be able to take about 306 shots before you run out of room at the high res settings. Or you could record about 23 minutes and 49 seconds worth of 640-x 480 video at 30 frames per second. If you rely on the 32 megabyte memory card that’s included in the camera, you’ll be able to take four snaps. (Guess it’s there for the sake of demonstration purposes.)

The camera by itself weighs six ounces and it’s a modest 4 x 2.5 x 1 inches.

The box includes the camera, a lithium-ion battery pack and charger, the memory card, a wrist strap, software, a USB interface cable to hooking up to your computer, and an AV cable for connecting to your TV.

Gadgenista says the camera will come out in red too, but the Canon site only shows black and silver models.

 I think Ansel Adams would be impressed with this one.
 

If you read this blog much at all, then you know one thing about me: I’m no brainiac. And so the science behind the following product briefing eludes me. But according to a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, which always tells the truth even at the risk of offending advertisers (just ask your dad), the Halo 3280 UVX vacuum really works!

And they’re not just talking about its sucking power, although apparently, that’s good too. They’re referring to the ultraviolet light that’s built into the vacuum, which does a ray-gun-like zapping of micro-organisms, such as fleas, dust mites, lice, mold, bacteria, and viruses, while you sweep your floors. This is the kind of stuff that exacerbates allergies and asthma.

The Halo isn’t just the invention of a bunch of domestic engineers with nothing much to do but add bizarre gizmos to their vacuum designs. Ho-ho, no! The company hired the services of Dr. James R. Bolton, a PhD in vacuumology (or somesuch) to test the effects of UV rays on the miniature vermin that populates your carpets but is so diabolical that you can’t see it. In a presentation of his findings to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, he concludes: “We have found that as little as one second of UVC from the Halo Ultraviolet Vacuum bulb chamber results in the death of the American dust mite (AHD) eggs, and five seconds resulted in nearly 100 percent mortality.” That is a serious death ray.

The bottom line is that millions of mites are trying to reproduce under your feet at this very moment. Are you going to take that sitting down? Well, if Dancing with the Stars has started, you might. But once the commercials come on, the Halo vacuum will enable you to go on a murderous rampage and protect your family’s lungs.

An external hard drive died the other day. Fortunately, it was my backup drive, so I didn’t lose anything. And, boy, did I learn something. You turn your back on the tech business for a few months and everything’s different — smaller, faster, cheaper, more capacious.

So here’s a drive that I think I’ll be getting my hands on next: The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini, which you can buy for a hundred dollars or less, if you’re shopping carefully.

These come in sizes 320 gigabytes, 250 gigabytes and 160 gigabytes. They plug in via USB cable. But best, the Mini is small, about five inches by three inches by half an inch. It weighs about six ounces. That makes it highly portable.

It’s embedded in a steel case, which means it’ll probably weather the dings and “damn!s” of a mobile life fairly well. The interface on these OneTouch devices is simple. You plug the thing into the machine that you want to keep backed up, and you push the button the front to make it do its thing. There isn’t much configuring you can do. Also, if you’re accustomed to backing up multiple computers to the same external drive, you’ll have to change your practices — the OneTouch only works on a single computer.

Reviewers seem to mostly like it. Geoff08emd writes, “Maxtor has set the bar higher for ultra portable drive. The size is unbeatable. Also the past experience with Maxtor won my trust at its mini products. Very reliable and handy backup tool.”

Sokoloff sees some real advantages to the drive, even though he or she found it slightly more expensive than some of the competition: “First, it is bundled with disaster recovery software as well as the usual backup file software that works [on] both with XP and Vista. For those of you using Macs, while the drive will work, the software is not Apple compatible. For those of us not fortunate enough to be using Vista Business or Ultimate, the imaging capabilities are not built in and we all need to look for alternate disaster plans (such as Ghost, Acronis or some other third party software). Second, the unit is made from aluminum like metal and rubber and seems to be quite small and sturdy.”

Several reviewers like the fact that the warranty lasts for five years, a veritable lifetime when it comes to computer components.

I tell you, not since Apple introduced its iPod have storage drives been so cool!

Just read my copy of the email newsletter Children Online, which keeps me up to date with resources and news about children and their Internet use. Experts Marje Monroe and Doug Fodeman, both educators, consult to schools and parents about such topics as online bullying (major problem), the appropriate age at which a child should be allowed to text (they say it’s 14 years), and how to manage what sites your kids get exposed to.

These days, I know that parents struggle to figure out what to do about the cell phone issue. That is, at what age should I give my child a cell phone and what should the expectations be? In most cases, the parents want to give it for safety reasons, and the kid wants to receive it because it’s fun and another means of staying in touch with friends.

Monroe and Fodeman suggest buying a cell phone for children and younger teens without surfing and texting capabilities. But phone companies don’t make that easy. When was the last time you talked with one of those young cell phone studs they hire in the wireless stores? You just know he’s texting something snide behind his back while you ask politely about getting a phone with big numbers and buttons and no features.

That’s why they suggest looking into the Firefly, a phone designed specifically for kids.

The phone stores up to 20 numbers, including dedicated keys for reaching parents. You can use PIN protection to limit incoming and outgoing calls to those stored in the phone book. No texting. No surfing. However, you can get some pretty cool accessories to dress it up. My guy’s preference would probably be the Urban Camo Shell or the mesh pouch, which he could tie to his knapsack.

AT&T charges about $60 a month for its family-friendly two-line account phone service. Or you can buy pay-as-you-go minutes, which can be recharged to a credit card.

But I’m going to wait a couple of years before I outfit my son with his own device. Why? At age six, he’s still too innocent to learn about the fine print in AT&T’s service contracts. And until he can spout the meaning of that back to me, he’s going to have to yell to be heard by his buddies.

The number 10,000 refers to how many steps you should take in a day to stay fit. And even though you may feel like you surely walk 10,000 steps between your desk and the printer every day, it’s probably closer to 90 steps, and that’s why you need a pedometer — to help you do the math.

Having an inaccurate pedometer is just as bad as having none at all. I once went to a conference in a large convention hall. As a little gift to attendees, the conference host handed out cheapie pedometers that we could use to measure how many miles we walked in a day, as we slogged along from one seminar room to another. A friend and I were comparing numbers, and we realized that we could easily hit the many tens of thousands of steps simply by doing jumping jacks a couple of times. Suddenly, that second brownie we thought we’d earned during breaktime sat heavy in our stomachs.

That’s why I’m curious about the Fitbit Tracker, a new product that launched during Techcrunch 50 and that will be available early in 2009 for $99.

This wireless, wearable gadget automatically tracks and wirelessly uploads data about your activities, such as exercise intensity levels, calories burned, sleep quality, steps, and distance. It’s tiny and clips onto your clothing.

The Tracker uses some kind of motion sensing technology to capture all moment-to-moment physical activity throughout the day and night. It also measures sleep quality to show how many hours of sleep you actually got in the night (vs. tossing and turning). The Tracker displays how you’re doing against goals in the form of an avatar that changes as you advance toward or fall behind in your goals.

The data that’s accumulated is uploaded to a free website, where you maintain your history and track your progress. It also lets you create groups to help spur each other on in your fitness endeavors.

According to the company that created the Fitbit Tracker, it’ll be accurate to about 95 to 97 percent for step-counting. In 10,000 steps, which represents about five miles of walking, you could still be off by around 500 steps at the most. But my thinking is, if you get that close to 10,000, chances are, you’ll still deserve that second brownie.

I’m no game player, but I remember the first time I rode on Star Tours at Disneyland, I cried because it really felt like I was riding in a spaceship, and it was breathtaking.

That’s why the 3rd Space Gaming Vest appeals to me. You put the vest on, and you can feel the same stuff your avatar is feeling — or as the company text puts it, “you can now experience the physical consequences of your actions in the virtual world!” When somebody shoots you, you’ll know it. When somebody vaporizes in front of you, you’ll feel the pressure of the heat.

The PriceGrabber.com description says, “Gaming Vest features Impact Generating Technology.” What the heck does that mean? According to coverage in the February issue of Popular Mechanics a few months ago, the vest has eight pneumatic cells that “produce pressure whenever (and wherever) your onscreen avatar takes a midgame blow.” Oh. Why didn’t’ they say so?

The tricky part is that software has to be coded that enables the vest to interface with a particular game. At release almost a year ago, software patches were developed that enabled Quake 3 and 4, Doom 3, Incursion and Call of Duty II to interact with the vest. Now the list includes two dozen titles, which you can read off the vendor’s site.

Best, for those of you who like to play dress-up, it comes in a rather perky gray camouflage color. Hit me with your best shot! Fire away!