Apparently, there’s been a wave of buying activity for hands-free headsets in California to ensure that we can continue talking while driving but without facing the wrath of the California Highway Patrol.

Recently, I wrote about the Aliph Jawbone, but I realized that not everybody has a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. An article in the Sacramento Bee listed a favorite, inexpensive headset for people who need it to be wired, as recommended by Elliot Darvick, the editor of MyRide.com. He likes the Jabra C250.

This one sells for under $15 from a number of vendors and sits behind the ear. It includes a microphone boom to optimize voice pick-up.

Reviewer bluepigs26 from CA reports that the headset is designed in such a way that it “doesn’t fall out easily at all, which is a problem I had with some other hands-free headsets.” That said, after a couple of hours, bluepigs’ ear begin to feel a bit uncomfortable.

A slew of reviewers love the sound quality, both for listening and speaking. kkelli2u does report having a bit of a problem with the cord hanging up on doorknobs and drawer pulls, but that’s because kk is using it primarily in an office environment. (That said, watch that stick shift when you get out of your car!) Also, kihiu says that there’s no mute or volume control on the unit, but considers this  a “great headset for a reasonable price.” Several people report buying replacements for it when it wore out and was lost, because they loved it so much.

So there you have it. A great, cheap headset that won’t put you on the side of the road when your kid calls from the nurse’s office or your spouse needs you to pick up a carton of something on the way home from work. 

Imation has just come out with a flash drive that purports to be about the size of a paperclip and that holds up to eight gigabytes of storage. While I was searching around for that on PriceGrabber (not there yet), I noticed this little charmer. It makes up for its lack of roominess (256 gigabytes) with its stylish design: Modeled after a Gumby doll, this one wraps around your wrist, so you’ll never mislay it.

The latter point is an important consideration. According to research from the Ponemon Institute, most people don’t think twice about copying corporate data onto a USB device to move it to another computer, but if that USB device is misplaced, unlike with a missing laptop computer, they won’t necessarily report it as lost to the enterprise security folks.

Eventually, maybe manufacturers will come up with access control cards that grant you entry to your place of employment and that act as a data retainer, allowing you to move information easily and securely.

In the meantime, a low-cost blue Gumby isn’t a bad idea. Wonder if it has “storestrong” imprinted on the rubber.

If there’s one searing memory that will live in my sweetheart’s brain until the day she dies, it’s the moment she realized I had sold all of her LPs to an enthusiastic buyer for a dime apiece at a yard sale many years ago. I often rationalized the loss by telling myself she didn’t have a turntable upon which to play those albums anyway — so what good were they?

No longer. Now I have to own up to my grievous blunder. ION has come out with its Audio LP Dock, a USB turntable that transfers your vinyl collection to your iPod.

The package also comes with software to let you record your records to CD or MP3. But the coolest aspect of this product is the fact that it includes something called Gracenote MusicID technology, which, according to the company, analyzes the record and retrieves album, artist and song information.

You simply play your record and record it with the conversion tool. At the end of each track, you click a button. When it’s finished, the song goes straight into iTunes. Of course, listening to your old tunes may send you down memory lane, making you forget to click that track button.

When you’re not moving music, you can just haul the turntable over to your sound system and play the albums through that.

Look, do me a favor. Don’t mention this one to my spouse, please? It’ll start the grieving process all over again, and, as the saying goes, when mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

There’s not a notebook bag in existence that takes into account that fact that you might be traveling with a mouse. The makers of these accessories must assume you’re relying on the computer’s built-in touchpad. Note me. I’m a big believer in copy and paste, and my fingers absolutely spaz when I try to do that quickly with the touchpad. Yet, packing that mouse — as modestly sized as it is — is no picnic. Face it. Mice tend to be bulbous.

If you’re looking for an alternative to the bulky mouse in your life, check out the Newton Peripherals MoGo Wireless Bluetooth Mouse.

This one is sleek — meaning flat — and about the size of a business card. Plus, it’s Bluetooth enabled, which means no cables, no wires. It recharges inside a PC card slot, not via USB. (I’ve always wondered what I could do with that PC card slot, which sits unused on my notebook.) That’s also where you can stash it when you’re traveling. If you don’t have a PC card slot, you might want to seek an alternative, because those tend to cost more than the mouse. It runs on both Macs and PCs and can be made to work for righties or lefties.

Best of all, as itsalesguru points out in his or her review on PriceGrabber.com, this device is a conversation piece. “Every time I bring it out in a meeting, people think it’s really cool.” I like that in a product.

Twice as fast. Half the price. That’s the tagline for Apple’s iPhone 3G. The new device will be surfacing a month from tomorrow — on July 11. Pricing will start at $199.

No doubt you’ve already read something — a news article, blog entry or the back of a cereal box — extolling the virtues of this new mobile offering. So I’m going to focus a little bit on 3G and what that brings users, then extol virtues.

3G stands for third generation of mobile phone standards, and the networks that support it are wide area. Think fast and full of capacity. These networks can deliver more services. For the iPhone, that includes faster web surfing, faster email and better video delivery.

These have existed practically forever in Asia, but finally found their way to the United States on a slow boat piloted by Verizon in 2003. (An earlier implementation withered on the vine — or should I say, wire?)

3G phones already exist. The AT&T Tilt 8925 Smartphone, the Nokia N91, the Sony Ericsson K800i are just three examples.

What sets the iPhone apart from these others? It’s not price. The Motorola RAZR V3xx ranges from $39.99 to $99.99 — with a two-year service contract. The Palm Treo 750 SmartPhone, a $500-$600 phone, is only $149.99 with a two-year service plan.

But, as Treo reviewer y2kinfos points out when talking about his or her phone: “…Most of you guys know when u have a PHONE + PDA + CAMERA + BLUETOOTH + WINDOWS MOBILE + UPGRADABLE MEMORY, there is nothing else you would need more apart from GPS…”

Mr. Jobs has delivered the GPS. Plus, the iPhone now supports Exchange, which makes it much more enterprise-friendly. And you get an iPod built in. That’s a sweet package.

But service is still restricted to AT&T. And AT&T’s 3G coverage doesn’t exist in my part of California. In fact, if you look at AT&T’s service coverage viewer, you’ll discover that 3G is mostly a big-city feature in the United States. That means your iPhone will revert to poky old 2G in the byways of Sante Fe, Lubbock, Wichita, Lansing and hundreds of other small and mid-sized communities. It’s like having a really great toy and not being able to get the batteries to run it. Steve, can you hear me now? That’s the problem I want you to solve next, please!

Oh, oh. We’re in that mode again — purging anything that isn’t nailed down or moving out of the way fast enough. My beloved is in her spring cleaning mode and that means eliminating objects we haven’t touched in a year.

But what to do about all of those videos stacking up and gathering dust? Sure, the ones that are pre-recorded can go off to the public library and my son’s schools since video still has meaning for them. But what about the ones we recorded ourselves? Our commitment ceremony, family gatherings, a copy of a video about midget racing that featured a brief tribute to a grandfather. Pretty precious stuff that I don’t want to hand off to the over-sized garbage bag.

Here’s an interesting offering: VHS to DVD 3.0 Deluxe from Honestech.

The package, which includes hardware and software, allows you to take the data contained on those VHS videos and convert them to DVD, MPEG-4, even PDA or mobile device format. Or, you can convert audio from cassettes, LPs and videotapes.

The software is easy enough to install, the “VidBox” slightly more complicated to use. About the size of a tin of Altoids, it has five ports or connections. You plug the USB cable in the box into the VidBox. You plug the other end into your computer. Then you take the composite and audio cables from your VCR or camcorder and connect those to the back of your VidBox. (A handy start guide with color photos shows you how to do this.) If you’re doing audio, you need to get a 3.5mm audio cable that links the two devices — the VidBox and the boombox or whatever you’re playing from. It plugs into the headset jack.

That’s it. Then you crank up the software, choose audio or video and go through the paces: capture, edit, burn. If you’re a novice, you can choose the wizard, which will walk you through the steps of conversion.

This is a pretty slick device that’s reasonably priced. Adios, brown tape!

Did you ever make little claymation movies? My brother did. I remember one he made, just a tube of clay inching its way along the table, like a friend of Gumby’s. “The Worm” was shot with a new Super-8 camera my folks had given him and a production budget of about seven cents for the clay. From those humble beginnings, my brother made a career in the movie business — driving his own camera truck and doing keygrip work (and complaining about chucklehead Hollywood “types” and which stars have souls and which ones are jerks, but that’s another story).

And since I’m always pondering my next career move, here’s a cool software program I’d like to try: Claymation Studio from honestech.

The idea with Claymation Studio is that you create the images, then capture them into the software using a digital camera, webcam or DV camcorder. Then you apply small changes, add background images and music and there you have it: You could become known as the next Walt Disney.

What do you need the software for? An onionskin feature lets you view the previous frame in transparent overlay to help you create the next frame or image. A rotoscope feature lets you take one image and overlay another image to create a third image. Finally, a chroma key (that blue screen you see behind weather people on TV) lets you change the background so that it looks like your character is standing on your desktop, for example.

The program runs on Windows XP or Vista and doesn’t require any majorly intensive processing power, but the manual does suggest you defragment your hard disk before installation — a suggestion I’ve never seen in documentation before.

Who knows where it could lead? I hear Pixar is hiring animators. And as we all know, the actor who played Mater definitely has a soul. I hear he gave everybody on the shoot these really great Car crew jackets.

I was once again putting out big bucks for ink cartridges and bemoaning the day I bought into the idea that color printing was a revolution in personal publishing. And a thought struck me: Who said I had to use a color printer for everything?

If you’re like me, it’s possible that color is rarely essential to your work. (In fact, the last time I needed to do color printing, it was because I was in charge of printing out flyers about the neighborhood springtime picnic potluck, and the person who made the flyers used red in the headline.)

HP puts out a slick little laser printer by the name of P1006, which reviewer hugocharmichael calls “an excellent black and white laser printer for the home.”

It connects via USB cable to your computer (Mac or PC), has a compact footprint and is engineered to use the smallest amount of power possible to get the print work done. Plus, it spits out up to 17 pages per minute. The warranty lasts for 12 months. The printer uses the 35A toner cartridge.

Geofreeyz2000 likes how it can produce that first page in “less than 4 seconds” from the time you turn it on.

Be forewarned: Reviewer Fastor says that the starter cartridge you get with the machine is only good for about 700 pages, compared to the 1,500 you’ll get with a replacement cartridge.

Have you checked out the Asus Eee PCs? My blogging buddy Mervyn over at BlogBytes has covered this device a couple of times (see “A Second Laptop” and “Budget Notebooks“).

The attractiveness of the Eee resides in its weight and its price. For $400, you get an XP or Linux notebook that weighs two pounds. A slice of pepperoni pizza from Costco weighs more than that! The display is seven inches on the diagonal — smaller than your desktop flat panel to be sure, but larger than that iPhone screen you squint at every time a new message comes in. RAM is 512 megabytes, a bit on the pokey side if you’re running major apps like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Office; but that’s where you have to think outside the box. The Eee isn’t intended to be a primary computer — it lets you compute on the go.

Storage comes in the form of a solid state drive — from two gigabytes to eight. SSDs tend to be hardier than standard hard drives, which means you can lug them around inside your notebook without being so concerned about the normal dings and dents of a life well-lived. Plus, they’re easy on power. The four-cell batteries in the Eee will give you about three hours of compute usage.

The WiFi 802.11b/g is built in for wireless connection. The system includes a bunch of software for writing (Google Docs), emailing (Web Mail), chatting (Skpe and Messenger) and listening (Internet Radio). It includes a built-in card reader, camera, speakers and microphone.

This is the kind of computer you could take with you on your travels around the world. You can post photos, do blogging, chat with family members, and stop worrying about whether it’ll get ripped off or dented on that crowded bus in Uganda.

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?