January 2007, Week 1 --  Whole Lot of Talking Going On

   We used to think that people walking by talking to themselves were schizophrenic. But it turns out they were on their cell phones and using some hands-free system. Well, most of them were.

   A new wireless earpiece from Cardo Systems has been getting great reviews from the walk-and-talk crowd, so we thought we'd try one too. Sure enough, we're giving it a great review.

   The gadget is called Scala 700 and uses Bluetooth technology to connect with your cell phone, which presumably is nearby -- like in your purse or pocket. It weighs less than half an ounce and is worn looped around one ear. It felt comfortable enough.

   The sound quality is excellent, incoming and out-going, and you can use voice commands to dial, redial, initiate a conference call or reject a call. If you have more than one cell phone, you can switch between them with the touch of a button on the tiny earpiece.

   You can also push a button to find out how much battery life you have left. Normally, the battery is good for 10 hours of talk and 10 days of standby. If you put the earpiece down and can't find it -- and with something this small, that's pretty easy to do -- you can activate a location buzzer with a call from your cell phone.

   The Scala 700 lists for $70 at the company's Web site, Cardowireless.com, but we found it for $42 at Amazon.com, and it's a good bet that other online discounters will be selling for around the same price.

Just Scrolling By

   Joy has discovered a neat free program from Roxio that lets you scroll photos, cartoons or news feeds along the bottom of your Windows PC screen. It's called Roxio MediaTicker 2.0, and you can get it at Roxio.com.

Add the latest headline news, sports results, cartoons, photos and a lot more from sites like Flickr.com, Yahoo.com and MSNBC using an RSS 2.0 feed. "RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication," and it has become increasingly popular for transmitting digital content to a wide audience. Roxio has apage on its Web site that allows you to add the most popular RSS feeds to your scrolling ticker automatically. MSNBC uses thumbnail photos to represent the day's top stories, which look a lot better scrolling by than text would. You click on the photo to get the story. 

   This scrolling ticker is a ton of fun, and will even clean some junk from your hard drive. When you start off with scrolling pictures, the program finds the images already on your hard drive. As the pictures scroll by, you can click on any of them to enlarge it to full size and you can then e-mail it to someone, print it and even make it your screen wallpaper. Some of the images scrolling by will be junk you don't want anymore. You can click and delete those.

   Roxio claims this free program is the ultimate media ticker, and we guess it is. It's very nice, but unfortunately for some, it's for Windows XP and Internet Explorer only.

Skype and Vonage

   Skype, our favorite service for making Internet phone calls, just came up with a $30 calling plan that allows you to make unlimited calls to people who use regular phones and don't have Skype. That's $30 for the year, not a month!

   Calls are restricted to the United States and Canada and can be made to either landline or cell phones. If you sign up before the end of January, the charge is only $15 for a year of unlimited calls.

   You have to sign up at the Web site: Skype.com. You cannot use this service to make calls to emergency services, like the 911 police number.

Competitor Vonage (Vonage.com) says it has fixed this problem for emergency calls made by about 93 percent of U.S. callers. When you make such a call, however, the service reports your location as the one you used to register with them, which may or may not be where you are when you make the call.

Lost in the Mac Latitudes

   An editor alerted us to a problem Mac owners may have opening old files when they buy a new Mac or upgrade to the OS X operating system. They often find they can't open documents created with Mac Write or Write Now. The solution, we found, is an $80 program from DataViz.com  called MacLinkPlus 15. This gives Mac users the ability to convert PDF files to plain text, put documents on their iPods, and open e-mail attachments from PC users.

Oxford Online

   The Oxford English Dictionary, or "OED" as its fans call it, is, by definition, so to speak, the last word in definitions. The printed edition -- 20 large volumes in all -- sells for $895 a set at OED.com  until the end of January. We got ours a few years ago for $1,750 at Barnes & Noble ( www.barnesandnoble.com), but we notice they're also selling it for the sale price now, or $805 if you're a B&N member.

   There is a two-volume set, the Compact OED, with type so small the books come with a magnifying glass, that sells for around $400. Or you can subscribe to the online version for an almost affordable $295 a year.

   But if you go to OED.com, you can get the "word of the day" sent to you by RSS feed or by e-mail. That part is free. Be forewarned: these definitions usually go on for pages.

NOTE: You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol.com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp.com.