June 2007, Week 4 --  Magic Fingers

   Those little flash memory drives about the size of a finger have become so common they’re often used as promotional gifts by companies, much as they give away pens and coffee cups.

   You see them in movies and TV shows now. Instead of the scene where the spy is trying to download the secret information onto a disk, he pulls out a little flash drive. Disks are slow; why wait? There are at least a dozen makers of these tiny flash drives and there doesn’t seem to be any difference in what you get. That’s only the way it seems, because there are some big differences. We’ve found that the quality names do seem to work better, and the one we like best these days is the “Lexar Jump Drive Lightning.”

   The main reason is they have what they call “Power to Go” already on board. This is software made by Ceedo (Ceedo.com) and it allows you to carry not just data but applications on the flash drive. You can install and run most of the standard Windows programs right on the Jump Drive Lightning. When you plug it into the USB port on a Windows computer you are ready to run your own programs with your own data. Pretty nice.

   The “lightning” part of the product name refers to the speed of data transfer. The transfer rate is 20-22 megabytes a second when the computer is writing to the drive, 30 megabytes a second when it’s reading from the drive. That is very fast – much faster than a regular disk drive can operate, but that’s understandable because a disk drive is mechanical and a flash drive isn’t; it has no moving parts. This technology is coming to computers late this year or early next.

   The Lexar Jump Drives costs $40 for the one gigabyte version (the one we use, and more than enough for most users), $65 for two gigabytes and $110 for four gigabytes. All the drives have built-in 256-bit encryption routines to keep your data private and for all practical purposes “uncrackable” by anything but a Cray super-computer. A “shredder” routine is also available to completely destroy any data you want permanently erased. Free engraving of your name or personal message; your could load it up with photos or songs for a nice gift. More info at Lexar.com.

A Really Thin Phone

   Kensington has a new phone card for Windows laptop users. Its not a card that gives you credit for a certain number of minutes on the phone, it’s a phone that’s only slightly larger and thicker than a credit card.

   The ultra slim phone is called the Vo200 and works with free phone services offered by Skype, Google and MSN. You can download the software to your laptop for free by going to their web sites. The phone can then be used to make calls anywhere in the world where you have a connection to the Internet. These Internet calls are free to anyone using the same service you are; otherwise the cost is about three cents a minute. We called someone halfway across America and could hear them quite clearly. They said our voice broke up slightly at times but that’s much better than Skype calls used to be. And that’s because they weren’t a fellow Skype user. If they had been, voice quality would have been virtually identical to a regular phone connection.

   You handle the phone like any other cell phone. You plug it into your laptop only to charge its tiny battery, which is good for several hours of phone calls. It communicates with your laptop by Bluetooth wireless technology, which is fast becoming common. If you computer does not have Bluetooth built in, for $30 you can buy an adapter that plugs into a USB port. You can be anywhere from 10-30 feet away from the laptop when you’re calling.

   If you press a button on this little credit card phone, it becomes a speaker phone and several people can be in the conversation at the same time. It has built-in noise suppression and echo cancellation, which we found worked well. The phone itself costs $90 from Kensington.com  and they also sell Bluetooth adapters.

Pay for View

   Amazon has started a program for people with free web sites to earn back a little of their costs. By “free” we mean the kind of sites that carry no ads, and hence earn no revenue to offset the costs. A small “click box” can be placed on the site and people who wish to can make contributions of a dollar or more.

   These kinds of payments are commonly called “micro-payments” but they haven’t been used much before because of the cost of collecting them. The idea of contributing for web sites you like is no different than the fund raising carried on by National Public Radio and Public Television, in which they solicit funds from the audience to pay for the shows. The argument behind such requests is that they carry no advertising, so they need contributions.

   The situation for free web sites is more serious. Public radio and TV get funds from the government through the National Council for the Arts and large grants from corporations and charitable foundations, but free web sites get nothing. Labors of love are nice, but there are costs. Find out more by going to Amazon.com, click on “help” and then click on “honor system.” Amazon collects the contribution for that site and they do not share any of the information with third parties, so you will not receive spam or advertisements in your email. Amazon keeps 2.9 percent plus 30 cents to cover the costs of collecting the micro-payments.

Internuts

n  SciAm.com/podcast  is a site run by Scientific American magazine. Along with a lot of other information they carry audio podcasts describing recent developments in various fields of science. Depending on your Internet connection, the podcasts may take a minute or two to come in, so it’s best to minimize the site and do something else on the computer while they’re loading.

n  SeinfeldScripts.com  has all the scripts for eight years of the Seinfeld comedy show.  Our favorite is “The Marine Biologist.”

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