It’s a tech subject that allows us to rant on one of our favorite pet peeves:  that something as vital as health care is still in the dark ages. You can rent a movie 24 hours a day, get email notifications from any company, and get lower prices on better products every time you visit an electronics store. But when it comes to medicine, prices continually rise and problems abound. There are at least three reasons:

• The over-used insurance system (If car insurance were like health insurance, we’d use it for tune-ups.) This makes people less price-sensitive, because after all, “insurance is paying for it.”*
• Frivolous lawsuits.
• Lack of competition among doctors. Physicians’ assistants and nurses, for example, can’t open their own practice.

*In the U.S. in the 1940s, there were wage and price controls. Employers who wanted to raise wages were stuck. So they started offering insurance benefits instead of wage increases. A few years later, the I.R.S. started taxing them for this and there were howls of protests. So a law was passed that gave employers a tax break for offering benefits. Gradually Americans started using insurance for everything and became less price-sensitive.

Wiretape is a ribbon meant to replace the old cables and cords. Cut it, fold it, glue it to the wall and paint it, splash it with water, let it get cold or hot, and It’s still fine.

In September, according to a report by Gizmodo, you’ll be able to get it in two sizes:  for smaller connections like USB and audio, and wider widths for HDMI and VGA.

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.

We tried out the new high-definition version of the “Seagate FreeAgent Theater.” This is a small box that connects to your TV to bring movies and photos from your computer to your TV screen. The catch is that you have to download them to a hard drive first, and then pop the drive into the FreeAgent.  When you want new programs, you take the drive out, plug it into a computer, and the Seagate software will find everything playable and put it on the drive for you, in the right category. When you’re back at the TV, you can use the remote control to cycle through channels.

The FreeAgent Theater also has its own channels. Click to start a slideshow on your TV, check the weather or stocks. If you want to use the Theater wirelessly, you have to buy an adapter. You can find the Seagate FreeAgent Theater for $150, or $290 with a 500 gigabyte “Go” drive. We got one without a hard drive because we have an extra drive.  Almost any hard drive will do for collecting pictures and movies.

The Flip has 13 percent of the world market for video cameras and is far and away the No. 1-selling camcorder at giant online retailer Amazon.com. Why? Because it is the video equivalent of point-and-shoot.

The “flip” that gives the camera its name is a finger that flips out of the side of the camera. You plug the finger into a USB socket on your computer. Right away, a menu comes up with some easy choices: save to computer, e-mail the video, upload to sites such as YouTube, Amazon and MySpaceTV.com.

No more cable to carry around, no more rewinding a tape or “finalizing a disk.” You do need an extra cable if you want to watch your Flip videos on a TV, but it comes in the box. If you want your video burned to DVD, you can take it to a retail store that will do it for you (see theflip.com/dvd ) or use the software that came on your computer.

A button on the side turns it on. Push the big red button on the back to start recording video and sound. A screen above the button shows you what you’re recording. To play back what you recorded, hit the play button that’s next to the red button. That’s it.

Flip is the same size as a cell phone, only thicker and fits in a shirt pocket. It runs on two AA batteries.
There are limitations, which wouldn’t bother most users but would make it unacceptable for others. The main one is a recording limit of one hour. That seemed like plenty to us, but if you’re a video fanatic, you want more. You can’t stretch the one-hour limit because the memory is built into the camera and you can’t simply add a larger compact flash card. When your hour is full, or anytime before that, you can unload the memory contents to a computer and start over with another hour. The Flip is also not so good for zooming. You can zoom in 2X (two times closer) but the result is a little blurry.

The Flip works with Windows or Mac and you can see lots of reviews and comments on use with a simple web search on “Flip.” Joy said it’s the first time she’s had a video camera she actually wanted to use.

The $170 package from Corinex.com is targeted at game players who have poor wireless connections in some parts of the house. Like any other power-line networking system, it can be used to connect computers as well as game machines. The kit comes with two adapters that plug into electric sockets and the computers or game machines are in turn plugged into those. Set-up was a snap and took us about two minutes. The kit come with a disk of software that appears to be totally useless; drop it in the circular file, you don’t need it.

Our past encounters with equipment from Genius has left us with the impression that “right around average” would be a better name, but this radio combo is a step up. In addition to the CD and iPod dock, the iTempo 800 has an alarm clock and an S-Video connection, so you can display photos and videos from your iPod on a big TV screen. A wireless remote lets you control all this from the couch. Sound quality was good and plenty strong. For some reason it seems to be selling well in India, but we found it at a-power.com, for the odd price of $153.47.

The oddly named “Asus Eee PC” comes with the Linux operating system. This is the best Linux implementation we’ve seen and we like it better than Windows.   (For those now frowning in disappointment, future versions of the Asus will come with Windows XP.)

The choice of operating systems affects the price. Most computers of the Asus size and complexity cost over $1,000 but you can get this one with the Linux system for $300. Computers that use Microsoft operating systems have to pay licensing fees and that raises their price. A major cost saving for the “Asus Eee PC” results from its having no disk drive. Instead, the small computer uses flash memory cards and the cheapest version comes with 2 GB. This is expensive storage, of course, but getting cheaper almost by the month, and flash memory makes the computer more durable. Eight and sixteen gigabyte cards are currently available for less than $100. Alternatively, you could plug an external CD/DVD drive into one of the USB ports.

This small computer seems more than adequate for most users while traveling and its small keyboard might be just perfect as a regular computer for children and people with delicate hands. With those users in mind, the Asus was drop-tested from desk height onto a hard floor and lived to tell about it. Battery life is 2.8 hours, not as good as the 5 hours we get with our expensive Sony Vaio, but pretty good for the price.

The Asus comes with 40 built-in applications, including the free Open Office, which is like Microsoft Office, having almost all the same features. There are a number of educational games, a paint program, and built-in speakers and microphone. We tuned in the “Beethoven Only” channel over the Internet and the sound quality was fine. We tried typing a page and printing it with our Canon inkjet; the Asus with its Linux operating system had no problem running the printer. Should there be a problem with a printer, you can download new drivers over the Internet.

The only serious problem we had using the Asus was the touch pad that substitutes for a mouse.  In general, we hate these things. We recommend that users get a miniature optical mouse, like ones offered by Belkin, Logitech or Kensington. They typically cost less than $20 and you will save a ton on psychiatrist bills.

If you get a new version of the Asus that uses Windows XP, (coming out later this year), or you install XP over the Linux system yourself, you can overcome the storage limitations imposed by the use of flash instead of disk drives by adding some Mojo. We wrote about this late last year. Mojo is free software you can get from MojoPac.com and it can be loaded onto any flash drive. Once loaded you can then load in any programs you use on your desktop or laptop computer and use those same programs on another computer simply by plugging the Mojo drive into their USB port.

The ION was supposed to make it easy to transfer your old phonograph records to digital files that could be burned to CD. But we followed all the instructions and got nothing, so we just used it as an ordinary record player. The new Audio-Technica, on the other hand, was a breeze to set up and worked as advertised immediately.

There are tens of thousands of phonograph records still around, and for many of them, there is no CD or tape version. Fortunately, they can still be saved by transferring the sound to a computer that can convert those sounds to a digital file. You need software to do this, and some of the best that money can buy comes free in the box with the Audio-Technica; it’s Cakewalk’s Pyro 5. We set everything up in five minutes. We installed the software and connected the record player with a USB cable to our Sony Vaio laptop and started burning Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass to a CD.

The Audio-Technica turntable we used has the catchy name of “AT-LP2D-USB LP-to-Digital Recording System,” and we found it for $95 at Amazon.com . (List price is $229 at audio-technica.com.) This thing screams quality all the way. The turntable platform is heavy and belt-driven, which is what any audiophile wants because it eliminates wobble and flutter as the record turns. A hinged plastic dust cover keeps the records clean, and the pickup arm returns to its resting perch and shuts off the player when it comes to the end of a record.

You can plug the record player into the jacks on the back of almost any stereo system. These are typically labeled “audio in,” “TV” or “aux,” which stands for auxiliary. The cable for doing this comes already attached to the record player. If you plug the player into a stereo and the computer, you can listen to it as an ordinary phonograph at the same time as converting your record to digital.

Pyro 5 is great music software. It will handle the transfer of your old record to a new CD and can do the same with audio tapes. It can be used to remove the hiss and crackle that often comes with old records, and it also can transfer the music to DVD or iPod or any other digital player, either as one continuous stream or in separate tracks. (The Audio-Technica turntable also came with a free analog-to-digital transfer program called Audacity, which you’ll need if you have a Mac. Pyro works only with Windows.)

We want to praise the short manual that came with the Audio-Technica turntable. It was clear, easy to follow and came with color diagrams of how things fit together. This kind of manual has not been our usual experience.

We also want to comment on the expected question of why bother to convert a phonograph record to CD when you can often simply go out and buy the CD version. The simple answer is that the sound is different.

Many professional musicians and songwriters, most notably and recently Bob Dylan, have complained bitterly about the sound quality of CDs. We have noticed the same thing; CDs lack the warmth and mellowness of phonograph record sound.

Part of it is what is called “dynamic range.” A digital recording records the full dynamic range of a piece, from the loudest loud to the softest soft, while a phonograph record has a restricted range. In practice this means that in order to hear the soft parts of a digital recording you have to set the volume so high that when the loud parts come on you get blown out of the room.