The MakerBot designer says kids get it right away, and that’s probably because early users are mainly making toys with this thing. Go to thingiverse.com to see 15,000 project plans, such as knights and princesses, rocket ship inhabitants, neckties and so on. (Actually, Bob has a home-printed silk tie made 15 years ago with a Canon inkjet printer.)

Another hand in this game is 3D Systems, which makes “The Cube.”  They invented this kind of 3D printing 25 years ago. They make industrial strength units for sculpting prototypes from drawings, and they sell the units for tens of thousands of dollars. This is a much more sophisticated kind of model making machine and they say they will produce a home version for around $1,300 some time later this year. See some of their solid-printing results at Cubify.com. Design models can be quite intricate, but are limited to 5.5-inches in any direction.

Nano Watch

– Motorola has a new smart watch with enough features to keep a fitness buff humming. The “MotoACTV” is a GPS plus music player wrist watch that figures out which songs make you exercise harder and plays those more often. It does its figuring by monitoring your heart rate. It  tells you how many calories you burned and your average workout pace. It uses Bluetooth to talk to you through a headset. It can also broadcast FM radio. It’s $250 for the 8 gigabyte version.

– You can turn an Apple “Nano” music player into a wristwatch just by adding a strap. We saw some at Amazon for $23. They even had leather ones. If you use a leather strap and fix the Nano face to show the time, it looks like a regular wrist watch. To keep the clock face on top, go into the Nano’s settings, choose the clock app and choose the setting that puts the clock up front when the Nano wakes up from its sleep mode. Voila, it’s a wristwatch.  We just ordered one. See also the TikTok watchband at the Apple store.

– Another way to go is the “Striiv” pedometer, $99 from Striiv.com. Anyone who thought a pedometer was just for counting steps hasn’t seen this thing.  It has games to encourage you to walk past the 4900-step American daily average. You also earn points you can spend creating a virtual enchanted island on their web site. The more you walk, the more money the company donates to saving trees in the rain forest or polio vaccines.

The email messages coming in on the watch, however, are read-only. Answer them with your smart phone.The “I’m Watch” sells for $350 from an Italian company of the same name.

– Sony’s “SmartWatch,” appears to be a similar device, scheduled to come out in March; pricing not yet determined. It will communicate with an Android smartphone through the Bluetooth short range wireless system. It too lets you take calls, see email, or play music and games. Don’t dunk it in water, but it’s OK if it gets a little wet. The display is 1.3 inches and like the “I’m Watch,” it looks bulky on slender wrists.

That’s just one more thing you might worry about when traveling abroad, or shopping right here at home. Do you feel OK giving out your credit card number? To play it safe, you can install a free app on your smart phone that creates temporary virtual cards with payment limits and other controls. The app we liked is called “Global V Card,” but it works only with Mastercard accounts. (Visa card users can visit entropay.com, for a similar app.)

To set this up, you start by filling out a form and faxing it to MasterCard. They want a fax or scanned document so they have your signature. You can then create a short-term credit card for yourself or anyone else. The presumed use is for businesses to provide a limited credit card for employees, but it can be set up by and for individuals as well. You can limit the spending to any amount you wish: say, no more than $500.

After creating the virtual card, you can send the details by email or text message. What the email recipient will receive is a picture of a credit card with their name, the expiration date, card number and link to a three-digit “CVC” number. More info at GlobalVcard.com.

You install the tiny camera using your license plate bolts, and use the Magellan Roadmate 9055 GPS device as your screen. At seven inches, it’s a smaller screen than the ones that come in many new cars but larger than most GPS screens. The Roadmate gets great reviews because of its favorites menu, lifetime traffic alerts, points of interest info and member assistance from Automobile Club (AAA).

We saw the camera advertised for $150 and the Roadmate GPS viewer for $257 at Amazon. That makes it a bit over $400 plus some handyman skills to set this up. Some wiring to the taillights is involved because you want the camera to start broadcasting what it sees as soon as you put the car in reverse.

– Yola.com and 350.com offer web hosting, site creation tools and ready-made templates. Try out the free version online and see if you like it. Joy used the free one to create a site for an educated but non-tech-savvy husband and wife. For $500, Yola will build a site for you. You should be kind of tech-inclined, however, to be able to update and expand it.

– WebEasy 9, or Xara’s Web Designer, both $50, are nice website creation programs that you can download to your PC. Unlike Yola, WebEasy only includes three months of free web-hosting, so you’ll need to choose a web-hosting company. We use 1and1.com. But GoDaddy.com is popular and may be the country’s largest hosting service for individuals and small companies.

– Another way to go is have someone do it for you. Visit elance.com and hire a freelancer to build a basic site. Then you can use editing software like Adobe Contribute ($100), which makes web editing as easy as using Microsoft Word. When we had a special job, we got lucky and  found KerCommunications at Elance. The owner, Nick Ker, always seems to understand exactly what we want and responds quickly, usually doing the job in a day or two. Other freelance websites include the new “CoffeeAndPower,” as well as Guru.com and Odesk.  This is a nice way for people to pick up income and all but one of the people we’ve tried turned out to be pretty good.

The Kinect reads your body motion, allowing you to bat a ball or follow a dance lesson as if it were happening in your living room. Having a computer recognize body movements could lead to several applications. Doctors already have begun interacting with a computer without touching it, saving them the trouble of scrubbing up after contact with dirty keyboards. (You can read about some of the experiments using this device and software by Googling “Kinect effect.” See also the “Kinect and motorized skateboard” brief video.)

Microsoft is giving the software away free to developers, a big switch from last year when they were threatening to sue anyone who tried to develop Windows/Kinect applications. Developers will have access to the software and hardware starting February 1, but it could be some time before the rest of us get our hands on one. The new Kinect will be $250, compared to around $150 for the older version that works with the Xbox.

In a survey of more than 1,200 adult consumers, nearly half the people who admitted to cheating in social video games also admitted to cheating in real life – compared to just 14% of those who don’t cheat in social video games. This fits with many previous studies in clinical psychology that have found people tend to act in patterns.

Here’s a look at some of the other findings: Eleven percent of British players regularly cheat, compared to seven percent ofU.S.players.  Men are slightly more likely to cheat than women (54% to 46%).  Seventy-two percent of cheaters are under 40. British cheaters were more likely than Americans to cheat on their taxes (58 percent versus 33 percent).

This is one of the most famous entertainment programs in computer history. In fact it was such a combination of sophisticated programming, animation and skill that it was typically kept running on autopilot, so to speak, in the show windows of Microsoft stores.

Back in those days – back when there were lots of companies making Microsoft compatible computers – some with wonderful names, like “Kentucky Fried Computers,” the true test of whether or not a system was compatible was whether it could run Flight Simulator.

Those early versions trained you how to land at airports like Chicago’s Meigs Field, which no longer exists (a nostalgia trip). This Spring you can download a light version for free. You can fly around Hawaii in an “ICON A5,” an amphibious plane with cockpit space for two, and designed by the same engineers who did the Voyager spacecraft, SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo. If you want more aircraft and more locations it will cost you, though Microsoft hasn’t yet announced the price. Sign up for a free “Windows Live” account, and go to the games section to download it when it’s available in a few months.

This is the first new flight simulator from Microsoft since 2006, when Flight Simulator X came out. The whole flight simulator programming team was laid off in 2009. We like the new approach. It’s always better to let people try something out before asking them to buy something extra.