March 2005, Week 1 -- Whole Lot of  Spinnin' Goin' On

   Seagate has a portable hard drive the size and shape of a yo-yo. It even has a string, which turns out to be a cord with a USB plug on the end. Plug the USB into a Windows or Mac computer and you have a whopping five gigabytes of storage available to drop in your pocket and walk away.

   The yo-yo holds five gigabytes, which would be enough to store everything Bob has on a Windows XP computer. These days it is common to see 50-100 gigabytes of disk storage on a new personal computer but that much storage usually ends up being filled with junk. It's amazing what you can get onto a five gigabyte drive. Five year's worth of these columns would fit on one floppy disk, for example. Every column we've written in the last 26 years -- well over a thousand columns, would take up only one-fifth of a percent of this Seagate yo-yo. Sobering.

   As with any hard drive, you can store anything that's in digital format: photos, music, text, or plans for the new ray gun from the Purple Planet. To recover the material, plug the yo-yo cord back into a computer and unload. Comments from early users have been gonzo, five stars all around.

   This is the cheapest portable storage you can get, and it's from the world's leading manufacturer of disk drives. Prices for the Seagate five gigabyte pocket drive are running $115 to $161, depending on where you shop. Check the usual suspects: buy.com, froogle.com, shop.com, amazon.com, pricegrabber.com, nextag.com, etc.

Share a web site

   You can create a web site for free at www.multiply.com. You sign in with a user name and a password and that creates the site. Click on tabs on the site's home page to add commentary, photos, a calendar, messages, etc. The site can be visited and added to by friends and family, and part or all of it can be restricted by passwords.

   Main activities are "share and print photos," "write a journal or a blog," "buy or sell used stuff," "schedule events. Multiply.com runs ads on your site and that's how they make their money; we thought the ads were unobtrusive.

The high-tech tinkerer

   O'Reilly Publishing has launched a quarterly magazine for the high-tech hobbyist. It's called "Make" and the price is $15 an issue or $35 for one year.

   Think of Make as a kind of Popular Mechanics for the wired and plugged-in generation. The first issue has articles on how to make a steadicam (the kind of expensive camera used for professional news and sports coverage) with some pipe fittings. Other articles cover doing aerial photography from a kite and how to build a reader that can scan the code embedded in the magnetic stripe on credit and security cards. Careful with that last one.

   You can get more info at the O'Reilly web site: www.makezine.com. Lots of commentary from users

More make-it at home

   While we're on the subject of "how-to-do-it," check out the web site at www.howtoons.com. They have cartoons that teach children how to make fun stuff, like an underwater viewer, a marshmallow shooter,  a light bender, an ice cream maker, etc. For smart kids.

Internuts

-- www.objectdock.com Walk like a Mac. Or at least have a task bar that looks like a Mac's. A task bar floats at the top of the your screen and each item magnifies as you pass the cursor over it, just like a Mac. The task bar automatically puts up a new icon for any program you have opened. Click on the icon and that program opens again. Cute. Also free.
-- www.gotmercury.org How much mercury is in any kind of fish or seafood. The information is much more specific than what you get from government sites. They give you intake limits adjusted for your weight.
-- www.snopes.com Debunks urban legends. For instance: giving a toddler dog food and baby formula does not cause their stomach to explode.

Fun and Game tryouts

   TryGames www.trygames.com is almost as good as its name. You can try out dozens of Windows or Mac games in many categories. You can play for free for one hour and if you like the game you can click to buy it online or on disk.

   We noticed that they do not have the very latest and hottest games. Some have been around for a year or more and are the kind you often see in the bargain bins at office supply discount stores. Basically these are like remaindered books, the kind book stores put out on tables for a dollar or two. We looked at "Putt Putt Saves the Zoo," for example, a very good children's game. TryGames was selling it for $10. We did a search for the same game at www.froogle.com, a site we regularly scan for best prices, and found it for $1. We found many good quality games for $1 at www.crazyape.com; they had "Backyard Baseball," a really great kids' game, for $2.

   Still, when all is said and done you get to play a game for an hour for free at TryGames. If you like it, then you can search for your best price.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the "On Computers" web site: www.oncomp.com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol.com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp.com.

Copyright 2005 Universal Press Syndicate