After installing the software on two laptops, a desktop and a miniature computer called an “ultraportable,” we inserted the flash drive on one and immediately saw links to all the others. Now, we can be anywhere and use the programs back home. The bad news is we can no longer pretend we’re on a vacation trip and are out of touch with our equipment; the good news is we don’t have to travel with a laptop (they’re heavy).

There’s a free version of LogMeIn at logmein.com. LogMeIn Ignition costs $40, and it’s a bit handier, because you don’t have to type in a user name and password for each computer, tablet or phone you want to control. Your passwords are encrypted and you just click.

By the way, we can’t recommend the tiny Windows XP computer we used to test LogMeIn. It’s called the Umid “Mbook BZ,” and it’s just a little bigger than a wallet. It looks great and worked fine with LogMeIn but the screen is so tiny we could barely read it. The keyboard matched that. Joy’s typing slowed from about 100 words per minute to ten. She had to enlarge the font in Word documents just to be able to see the words. Of course that meant there were fewer words to each displayed page. Bob’s son, however, loves the Mbook. He says it’s just right when you need to work standing up in a crowded room, and it fits in his pocket. It has a built-in webcam, so with Skype or some similar Internet phone service, you can use it as a video phone. It also connects to a projector. You can get a Umid Mbook BZ at dynamism.com for $549. Not cheap.

CloudCrowd has completed over half a million tasks, in such areas as Internet research, transcription, and data entry. Recent clients include the University of Southern California.

The “Litl” webbook is more like a TV than a computer. It has channels and a remote control; it’s close to maintenance-free. On the Litl, everything exists in the “cloud,” another term for the Internet. As long as you have wireless access, it connects automatically, and everything you do takes place there.

Unlike the new Apple iPad, the Litl has support for Adobe Flash, which is necessary if you want to watch videos or play games at sites like Hulu, Webkinz, ESPN, Miniclips, TVGorge and YouTube.  It has a 178-degree viewing angle, which is great if you do exercises on the floor while watching movies.

The latest Litl channel is an all-new recipe station for cooking, powered by BakeSpace.com. It brings 50,000 member-tested recipes into the kitchen.  Put the computer in “easel mode,” to make it even more TV-like. Sitting on the counter, the Litl can help with recipes, photos, music, videos, the news/weather, and an egg timer. It’s getting a “litl” hard to get; the $699 webbook is on backorder at litl.com.

Google Wave is where email was 20 years ago, when Bob was one of the few emailers out there. Joy came along a couple years later and was really into it by 1995, when she started emailing at work. Her boss said to her: “You think this stuff is useful?”  This reminds Bob of his Pulitzer Prize managing editor, who once took him aside and said: “You know, this computer stuff is all just a fad.”

Google Wave is Facebook in a business suit. Facebook is a casual online meeting place for friends and family. You write something on your Facebook wall and people read it and can make comments. Or you share a photo or a news clip. Wave is more organized. Instead of waiting to see who responds to your Wave, you invite people. As it grows, the collaborators can add photos and surveys and maps and video chat. They can also edit what’s been said before, and view the history of edits by pushing the playback button. Waves can be organized into folders to keep them tidy, the way Joy does with her email.

Joy’s Wave experience has been limited to a group of three so far.  But next month, the technology committee for the city of Evanston, Illinois, on which she serves, is going to use the Wave to discuss plans for the city’s website and other tech-y stuff.  She started a second wave for Bob’s University of Chicago alumni book group, but so far only one person has joined and even she needed a lot of help figuring out the basics.

The Wave is easy to use, but it helps to read the getting started suggestions that come in your inbox. It’s early days for the wave, but it’s probably not a fad.  Go to wave.google.com to request an invitation.

Litl Webbook

The “Litl WebBook” is definitely something different. It’s a three-pound laptop that boots into the Internet whenever it detects a wireless access point. From then on, you’re riding on a cloud.

This is a $699 totally web-based machine that uses cloud computing instead of installed programs. The cost is as much as a fully functional Windows computer, but you pay a stiff price to be early. Expect a number of these cloud computing devices to appear in the next few months and prices will drop in accordance.

The idea behind a cloud computer is that most people do everything they want with a computer by going on the Web. Whether it’s email, editing photos, watching videos, checking the news or whatever, they usually don’t need or want installed programs. That’s good for this device, because there’s no way to put them in. There’s no hard drive, CD or DVD drive, just you, the screen and a keyboard. Word processing, database and spreadsheet programs are all available on the web for free at places like Google Docs and Zoho. The Litl WebBook maintains itself by updating security settings whenever you’re not using it, as long as you’re near a Wi-Fi connection.

When you power on this laptop, you see a series of small frames, called “cards.” Each represents a different web activity. You can click on the “card catalog” to look at the most popular websites. The basic ones are photos, weather, online music, games, YouTube videos, Facebook, Google Docs, the New York Times, BBC News, Wall Street Journal, etc. A card called “Media Wall” keeps a slideshow running from your Flickr or Shutterfly account. Click “text size” to get a larger font without distorting the page.

The screen is 12 inches; the processor seemed plenty fast to us.  You can plug it into your TV with an HDMI (High Density Multichip Interconnect) cable and watch the Web on the big screen using a supplied remote control. It can be folded to stand on its own. The manual is just a collection of cards with notes, but you can click on Litl support and chat with a tech support person Monday through Friday.

This strikes us as the right computer for newbies. And it puts the fun back into the computing experience for old timers, since there’s nothing to go wrong. Litl uses the Linux operating system, but all of that is invisible to the user. All you see is the card catalog. The device turns on and off by pushing a button.  Battery life is about 3 hours, but most people will just leave it plugged in.

We connected it to our TV and went to Clicker.com to watch a biography of Mark Twain on “Biography,” a channel that’s not part of our regular TV service. It came right up.

You can rent access to clouds from lots of big companies, Microsoft, Google or Hewlett Packard, for example. But what if their cloud goes down? What if it’s a rainy day? Maybe you should have your own cloud.

What you need is a really big hard drive that has its own address on the Internet. No matter where you are, if you have access to the Internet, you just go to the hard drive’s web address and log in. Your computer at home or office doesn’t have to be on.

We’ve been trying out one of these big drives, the “Stora,” from Netgear. For $200 you get a shiny black box that weighs about two pounds and can store a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of information. It sounds like a percolating coffee pot when it’s running.

You start by connecting the Stora to your router with an Ethernet cable. To get your files onto the Stora, you log onto your account at mystora.com and drag and drop the folders you want to store from your computer or use their mirroring software to back up everything at once. The Stora gives you a web address where you can play or download your files, videos, photos, and music files, or share them with others no matter where you are.  Any device that connects to the Internet will do. You can move your entire computer system over to the Stora, which will allow you to restore it if disaster strikes– as long as the computer will still turn on.  It took a few calls to tech support to get everything working, but it wasn’t too bad compared to other devices we’re reviewed.

People are using the Wave  to organize an event, plan meetings, write a report, brainstorm or share photos and video. Instead of sending a document to someone who 1) edits it and 2) sends it to a third person who 3) copies the first person and so on, the whole conversation can take place in one space. And there are links to all the documents involved.

Watch these videos to get the idea.

Google Wave

You can request an invitation to the Wave at wave.google.com, but there’s still a long waiting list. If you need one now, drop us a line and give your reasons. We can award one of our  invitations to the lucky recipient.

Once you’re in, click on “help” to get the idea of how to use it. Basically, to jump into a wave, just click “reply.” To   edit something that’s already been said, either by you or someone else,  you click the down arrow next to the time stamp on any of the conversations.

Not everyone knows about Google Templates. Too  bad, because they’re nice.

The templates are part of Google Docs and are like Microsoft Word templates: ready-made designs for making business cards, shipping labels, form letters, fax covers, invoices, etc. They’re handy and we’ve used them many times. Now, Google is letting template users add their own designs. These include clever designs for advertising flyers, calendars, calculators, business forms, etc. There are thousands.

Google Docs is like an online version of Microsoft Word. You get there by typing docs.google.com in your browser’s search field. You can then write, create presentations similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint, use a spreadsheet and pretty much do whatever you would do with Microsoft Office. You can also use it to store documents to your own private storage space; you can share them with others and collaborate in real time. If you want to skip the documents part and go directly to the templates, you can type docs.google.com/templates. To use a Google template, browse the categories until you find one you want and then click “use this template.” The template automatically becomes a Google document, ready to use.

To add your own template to the Google gallery, click the “Submit a template” link in the top right corner of the gallery page. You might, for example, have created a great spreadsheet for planning a family vacation or a good form for collecting customer feedback. Once you submit your template,   anyone using Google Docs can use it. Users can also rate your templates. You can embed a thumbnail image of your Google template into your website or blog; this lets people know you are hip, fast-moving and aware.

If you go to mashable.com and search on “online collaboration” you’ll get a list of 60 programs for doing this. There are differences among them. With Scribblar, for example, each person sees a simulation of a white-board, where you can draw connecting lines, circle important points, make sketches, and so forth.

Privacy is sometimes a problem, so a new cloud collaborative tool called “Ecofiling” is aimed at business users who want extremely private workspaces. It uses Amazon’s storage system, which has first class security. Cost is $3 per month per user; each user gets a gigabyte of storage. You can get a free version at Ecofiling.com/free, limited to two users.

Microsoft’s “Office Live Small Business” is similar but is slightly more costly. Although it gives you 500 MB of free storage to start with, it costs around $5 per user per month for each additional gigabyte. And unlike Ecofiling, it isn’t widely available outside the U.S.