HEAVY READING MADE LIGHT
It’s about time to make the annual summertime reading list, and maybe it’s finally the year you tackle those classics you promised yourself to read.
You now have fewer excuses not to. A US$0.99 app called Classics puts 20 books on your iPhone or iPod Touch. All of them, of course, are classics.
The app is a reader that simulates a book, down to pages that turn with a satisfying “fwip” sound when you drag a finger across the screen.
Download Classics and you get access to 20 books like Call of the Wild, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Iliad that appear on a virtual bookshelf.
There are no controls other than a button that takes you to a book’s table of contents and a second button that puts a bookmark on the page you were reading. The pages are a soothing
off-white with easy-to-read type.
Classics promises that more books are on the way. I wonder if Moby Dick will even fit on an iPhone, or will it tax the memory to the point that we get a new definition for Fail Whale?
SCANNER CUTS DESKTOP PAPER CLUTTER
Albert Einstein said, “If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
No offense to Einstein, but an overgrown mess decorating my desk makes me anxious. That’s why NeatDesk for Mac is a breath of feng shui in my house. The NeatDesk eliminated three stacks of business cards; a jumble of receipts; a sheaf of press releases and newspaper clippings and a book project proposal.
This US$500 product for Macs (a Windows version arrived last year) combines a scanner with software that translates each document or whatever into Portable Document Format, PDF. Three feed slots accept business
cards, receipts, and letter-size documents — up to 10 at a time — and the scan operation is fast, as many as 25 pages a minute. I’ve seen the item for sale well below MSRP. At Amazon.com, for instance, it’s priced at US$357. Pretty neat.
A NO-BRAINER SOLUTION WHEN THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPENS
So-called one-touch disk drives, meant to back up a computer’s data and files, have been around for some years. Seagate says its new device, the Replica “appliance,” takes the no-brainer concept a step further, and requires no touch.
The handsome Replica, available in 250-gigabyte and 500-gig versions, works seamlessly in the background. It is compatible with Windows XP and Vista.
So it’s a plug-and-play matter: The hard disk drive sits on a plastic dock and connects to a USB port on the PC (no electrical connection required). Once connected, it begins backing up and puts up an icon on the desktop to access the system. All content, including digital photos, music, movies and documents, are stored.
In the event of a crash — caused by virus infection, just plain carelessness or the inevitable gremlin — the Replica is supposed to prevent panic attacks; if a full system recovery is needed, the drive comes bundled with a boot CD to ease the process.
There’s no excuse these days not to back up data. There are less expensive alternatives to the Seagate product, but avoiding the problem is not an option.
CAMCORDERS THAT DON’T GET IN YOUR FACE
I spent some time with the HMX-R10 at a recent Samsung event, and the Active Angle Lens design is clever. The lens is tilted, so the camcorder is out of your line of sight when shooting. In other words, there is no camcorder attached to your face. Not only that, but the lens angle means you can hold the camera in a more natural position.
RSS