Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

DIY The video blew on my son’s computer. He asked if he should replace the computer. After we discussed it and he weighed a new computer against a $30 video card and free labor, the choice was simple. Best price I found on a new AGP card is at Buy.com. They have a 128mb gfx5200 for $29.00 including shipping. http://www.buy.com/prod/evga-geforce-fx5200-128mb-agp-8x-video-card/q/loc/101/202902698.html .buy.com/prod/evga-geforce-fx5200-128mb-agp-8x-video-card/q/loc/101/202902698.html I looked around on eBay and other places for a cheap AGP but this was the winner. I am gradually replacing my son’s computer piece by piece. His use is modest, he doesn’t need to buy some mammoth Vista machine and what he has is substantially better than the $399.00 discount house machines. Too many people get wrapped up in the “must have the newest, fastest, slickest machine” trap. When selling computers I often lost a sale because I tried talking someone out of buying new just for the sake of being new. Loo

It’s Not Really Free. Suspicions confirmed, they don’t really make any money on the printers, they get their money on the toner. However, a free, laser printer is still a pretty good deal if you need one. You’re going to be buying toner anyway and it is always iffy using third party stuff when you are under warranty. Generally if you use third party ink/toner and it trashes your printer it also may invalidates your warranty. Technically that is illegal and you can fight it, but who needs the hassle. Anyway check this out if you need a pretty nice color laser. READ the FINE print, you may not purchase enough toner to keep the printer free. Good luck and maybe for you it will be FREE. http://www.freeprinterpromo.com/

$6.99 Light Saver at ACE Hardware What mysterious force impact’s Xmas lights as they quietly lay in their season storage box? Why does a string of lights that worked just fine when they were taken down, spontaneously destruct while safely stored? Doesn’t seem to matter if it is a name brand light set or a no-name, expensive or cheap, some bizarre electrical failure seems to occur year after year when putting up lights. Help is at hand. http://www.acehardware.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2147033&cp=&sr=1&origkw=christmas+light+tester&kw=christmas+light+tester&parentPage=search&searchId=20022359953 Ace Hardware, $6.99 and it works. It features headlight LED beam to help illuminate the working area, a built-in storage case and a beeping sound that helps locate problem. It works, it’s not perfect but it works. They also have a similar tool for $23.00 that my son finds works terrific and he claims it is better than mine. I guess when I buy the lights o

No, the magic word to parenting success. If you raise a child and that child never, ever has said, "I hate you!" Then you probably haven't done a good job. Be a parent, not a buddy, pal, girl friend or companion. Be a parent, set rules and regulations, provide structure, set goals and for pity sakes don't be afraid to say, "NO!" Dropping off my grandson for kindergarten and seeing a cute little girl classmate in jeans so tight she can barely walk and wearing high heel, knee high boots is just so WRONG. Hmm, how successful is our little Miss going to be in duck, duck, goose, musical chairs or any other mobile game. She may not be a reflection of a frustrated mother's unfulfilled aspirations; she may have wanted to dress like that. This is when the much under used word, NO , comes in handy. NO , you can't dress that way, besides being inappropriate for your age, it will prevent you from having a good time with your peers. Watching the

When we can buy laptop computers for $299.00 why does the Sony Reader Digital Book cost $299.00. I grant you the $299.00 computer is not a powerhouse but it sure will do a lot more than an electronic book. If we can do digital photo frames with remote, mp3 and multiple format flash readers for $50.00 why is an electronic book $299.00? I have 75 books on my PDA. The backlighting means I can read in low light or no light. It is slim and fits in my shirt pocket. It cost more than the Sony book but it also has a spreadsheet, word processor, wireless internet access, 600 songs, a couple hundred photos of my grandchildren and my calendar. Now that is good value for the money. Who knows, maybe the electronic book is coming of age and if Sony does well there will be competition. Call me when it gets down to $50.00 and then I will jump on that bandwagon. In the meantime, my trusty PDA is my well loved Swiss army knife and I will continue to use it.

I am thankful for books that fuel the fire of imagination and stir the soul!

12 Tech Things I am Thankful For Oh, where to start, my digital cameras allow me to take hundreds of photos of my family, get a few good ones and not cost me a fortune to do it. My email account that allows me to keep in contact with family and friends that I might feel I should call but never get around to it. My Tivo which allows me to watch what I want and when I want to watch it. My PDA which allows me to carry around the list of 3000+ books I have read so I don’t buy the same book for the third time. It also lets me carry a couple hundred family photos and 75 books I downloaded from http://www.baen.com/library/ . My computers, upon which I labor long hours, frequently over nothing of consequence but make me feel like I am being productive. My wireless headset that allows me to wander aimlessly about the house listening to U2 and Led Zepplin. My MP3 powered razor that doesn’t give me razor burn. My cell phone that allows me to make all of those incredibly important calls such as “

Inkjet Cartridges for Less. I may have mentioned I am an avid grandparent. That fact leads to printing lots of photos and other assorted graphics for said grandchildren. Graphic printing is very ink intensive. I seem to run through ink like there is no tomorrow. Consequently I am always trying to find the cartridges on sale. I do not recommend nor will I use the refilling kits. As a reseller, we frequently got printers in for repair that appeared to have had small animals sacrificed in their interior. Generally speaking the problem was home refilled inkjet cartridges. Although in one instance we did find two halves of a mouse that had wondered into an Okidata 3510. So I am not a fan of home refill kits for inkjet cartridges. I had found a reseller that seemed to have the best price I could find for Epson branded inkjet cartridges. Databazzar’s prices were good and the shipping was free when over $50.00. However I had a defective cartridge and emailed their cust

Label Printing & More Made Easy. Free always gets attention and seldom meets expectations when you discover what is really free. In this case, SURPRISE, free really means free and it is very cool software. Avery, the form and label people, have free software on their website. Not just templates for Microsoft, but free stand alone software. I downloaded DesignPro and used it to print out several hundred labels for my daughter. It was easy to use, had lots of flexibility and was FREE! Avery’s site is http://www.avery.com/us/software/index.jsp You do need to register to be able to download but I have not gotten spammed or hassled with Avery ads and I downloaded it several months ago. So with the holiday card season upon us, this program may save your sanity clause from burn out doing labels. They also have FREE holiday templates for Microsoft software. Ho,ho, ho, Happy TD and good luck with your holiday printing.

Why I am blogging. Getting the hang of blogging is somewhat problematic. For a guy who is seldom at a loss for words, I find myself staring at the keyboard wondering do I have anything remotely intelligent to offer today. In some ways it is like a commitment to exercise. You know it is good for you, you know it needs to be done regularly but you often have difficulty getting going. Oddly enough, I have always had a desire to “help”. Astrologically I am a Libra and if I bought into that stuff, it might explain that desire. I put nearly 30 years into the tech environment and it seems senseless to let that experience just whither away to nothing. I am cognizant that in my age group my skill set and technology interest is somewhat unusual. Those of you 20 years or more younger than me probably don’t need input on technology from a guy who text messages at about 1.5 words per minute. (I have big thumbs and these darn phone keyboards are really small.) Anyway, I am trying

The Webcam Family Connection This post applies to any of us who travel and miss the folks at home. First you need to travel with your computer and you need a web cam. You need a web cam on your traveling computer and whoever you want to see needs one on their computer. You can use one of the instant messaging services from Google, AOL, Microsoft etc. to power up your face to face communication. If you have little folks in your life, they can be reassured when they see their grandparents on the computer. As far as I am concerned, I need to see them. Please set this up and play with it before you go away. You’ll find it much less frustrating having it work before you need it to work. If you haven’t used instant messaging, it is similar to email but you are talking real time. You can type into a window and get a response from your remote friend instantaneously. You both have to be at your respective computers and logged into whoever’s instant messaging you are using.

Technology for Grandma My boys and their cousins got their grandmother a Christmas gift two years ago which she uses every day. Generally many times a day she uses it. What gift can you think of that can continue to give and give and give. Ceiva is a brand of photo frame. www.Ceiva.com is their site. It shares many similarities with other digital photo frames but it also is somewhat unique. It can be setup by the technically savvy grandchildren to download new photos every night. After being setup, the screen is plugged into the wall and to an unused phone jack it runs without any attention. Grandchildren all over the country can upload photos to albums on Ceiva’s site and they will be automatically downloaded to Grandma’s picture frame. Now Grandma thinks it is magic but that is beside the point. This is a terrific way to keep a long distant loved one in the family loop. It does require a service fee, the best deal is $249.00 for three years. That sounds like a

Digital Photo Frames Now that you have hundreds and hundreds of digital photos what do you do with them. You used to put them in photo albums that you looked at on rare occasion. There is now a solution. The digital photo frame is basically a LCD screen with a flash media drive built in. You put in your camera cards and the frame will run a slide show for you. If you have a photo screen saver on your computer then you no exactly how it works. The size ranges from little 1” keychain screens holding 60 photos for $25.00 to 17” screens with stereo speakers, mp3, fm radio, remote control and more for $399.00. Put the frame in a well traveled spot in your home. Mine is in the kitchen. You will be amazed how often you find your self pausing in your busy day and smiling at a photo of a pet, loved one or your favorite Harley. Shop for your frame, the prices range widely and wildly. Make sure you read the fine print too. The photo in the sale flyer may make it look li

Tech Humor? We had an eye doctor who bought a new computer. It seemed like everything was working to his satisfaction. Several weeks passed and he called to say that his computer was only working at night. We questioned him on it and he said it wouldn’t work at all in daylight but as soon as it got dark it began to work. Not wishing to doubt the Dr. one of our reps went out to check the situation. Sure enough the computer wouldn’t work. Our rep checked the outlet and it was dead. He asked the doctor if it was plugged into the same outlet all the time. It was. Then he asked the doctor if that outlet was on a wall switch. “Sure, the Dr. responded, the same one the light is on.” Mystery solved, he didn’t use the light during the day so he didn’t turn it on, which, of course, meant the outlet the computer was plugged into was dead until night fell and he turned on the light. My tech gently showed him why his computer was only working at night. True story!

Digital Photo Cards My camera and my digital photo frame both use SD (secure digital) memory cards. My first camera came with a whopping big 16 mb card. Since then I have upgraded cameras and cards several times. Currently I am using a 2GB card that rates at 938 photos at the best quality. I doubt that I will be shooting more photos than that at any one time. The older, smaller cards got relegated to my backup camera and I carry a spare with my main camera. Another use is to back up files from my laptop to the SD cards. 256mb can hold lots & lots of documents. Since I have flash card readers on most of my computers and they are built into my laptop it is simplicity itself to do the backup. I also have three to rotate photos through my digital photo frame. Now the money saving part, Radio Shack has the 256MB SanDisk® 256MB Secure Digital™ Memory Card Model: SDSDB-256-768 Catalog #: 44-1905 for $5.99. Yup, less than 6 bucks. My guess is that when the

SnapFish www.Snapfish.com is a photo sharing site. They handle both digital and film photographs. Sign up for an account for FREE. Then you can upload photos from your computer to their server and share them with anyone you wish. Note that is anyone YOU wish. The photos are only seen by your invitation. You place your photos in albums that you define. Even better is the fact that your invitation is not all encompassing. You can send out an invitation to share for one album and the next album you upload you may not want to share with the same people. You decide who gets to see the photos. As an obsessive grandparent, I take tons of photos. I would put the best ones up on my web site under a pass worded section. Then I would email my family members to tell them when new photos were up. It was a bit labor intensive. Not horribly so but Snapfish is way easier. Of course, they try and sell you stuff. They will do prints of your photos for $0.12 each in 4x6

The Marvels of Online Payment Having my own business for over 30 years had a measurable impact on my vacation time. Up to the last three years I had never taken more than 5 consecutive business days off in those 30 years. I realize I have more than a smidgeon of the little red hen in me but even realizing it didn’t help. I was paranoid about taking more time off. Now that I am retired I am able to take off more often and for longer periods. This impacts paying my bills on time. Introducing online bill payment, whoohoo what a marvel. Well, let’s just say that regardless of all of the propaganda to the contrary it is NOT seamless. Every vendor, bank, credit card etc. has their idea of how to do it. We spent literally hours and hours of time online, filling out forms, providing security information and plowing through terms and conditions. Once the bull work was done, I thought, ok we are home free. WRONG, one credit card will work through my bank’s account and another

This policy is valid from Nov. 2007 This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact wbentrim@bentrim.info. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content. The owner of this blog may be compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner of this blog receives compensation for my posts or advertisements, I always give my honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in

A Penny Saved is as good as one Earned. Being retired has it’s ups and downs. Some days you feel like you are on vacation and others like you are playing hooky. You spend your life working and suddenly it is ok not to be working. This blog is one way to pretend I am working; at least I have to think about what to write. The little bit of consulting and web work helps to maintain an awareness of a field in which I spent over a quarter of a century. Generating income is almost an after thought, it is primarily a ratification that what your doing has some value. I have authored some public service books on another web site that I have up as free downloads. They are focused on preschooler’s feelings about family abuse, feelings of alienation and other such sad realities of our modern family. Anytime one is downloaded, I feel like I have helped someone. I guess the point is that working tends to validate your existence. You’re bringing home the bacon, supporting the family, nobly toiling

Online Purchase Protection I’m a geek, I can’t hide it, in fact I revel in it. I love technology, learning new technology and yes, buying new technology. Much of my buying of technology occurs online. I am skeptical of online security. Daily you read of someone else’s database or web site being compromised. Up until recently I dedicated a single credit card as my online card and used only it for online purchases. Then the credit card company bumped up my credit limit significantly due to my paying the bills on time and not carrying a balance. Now the low limit credit card that I purposely kept low is now much higher than I am comfortable with for online purchases. I have ignored the opportunity to get the one time use credit card numbers as offered by many of the credit card companies. It seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. I finally took the time to read through the procedure and discovered I could download a software package to my computer th

Porn Protection Funny how the right title on an article at least gets some attention. The internet has put a wealth of material at our finger tips. Obviously some of that material is unsuitable for families and in businesses can lead to liability issues. There is software that can protect your family and your business from internet horrors. There is no question that there is content on the Internet that is not suitable for anyone sane let alone children. Business owners must recognize that they can face liability issues if they provide unfettered internet access. A published company policy can alleviate most of that concern but be aware of the potential problem. Parents need to have more concern. Mature adults have the ability to self filter their Internet browsing. Children often don’t. It is the parent’s responsibility to monitor the home computer. Talk to your children about what they are doing on the computer. Provide an age appropriate dialogue on what is good and bad computer use

Bluetooth Headset Deal You can get a fairly well reviewed Bluetooth headset for $10.99 which is miles below the $69.00 and up average prices for these puppies. If you are in the market for the least expensive Bluetooth headset that I could find it would be the $10.99 PHILIPS VOX130 Mono Bluetooth Lapel Style Earbud Headse t at Buy.com. Free shipping means no surprises like you often get from the grotesque shipping charges some of the net vendors dump on you. The down side or up depending on point of view is the Phillips is an earbud to a wire to a clip on for your garment. Upside is that only a very light earbud is in the ear. Downside is if you don’t want to clip something on your clothes. I have had positive experiences with buy.com. Depending on state laws where you live, you may need one of these sooner than you think.

Digital Cameras Save Grandparents Big Bucks Actually a digital camera can save anyone big bucks if you take lots of photos. My biggest source of photos is my grandchildren. The adage of enough typewriters and monkeys and you get Shakespeare holds true with digital cameras. If you take enough photos, eventually you will get some good ones. Digital cameras allow you to take lots and lots of photos. I have had lots of digital cameras. My most frequent brand is Canon, due to their offering of swivel screens on some models. My knees are not what they used to be, a swivel screen allows me to hold the camera at arms length down and shoot at the level of my grandkids. Equally at a Halloween parade, it allows me to hold the camera over my head (and the people in front of me) with the screen pointing down and I can still see what I am trying to photograph. Now there are other manufacturers that have swivel screens but not many and I haven’t any experience with them. The Canon line has served me

Cell Phone Magic I talked to my son the other day. Big deal, “you say.” Yeah, but he was sitting on the balcony of his hotel in Shanghais China, in his bathrobe and slippers, feet up, sipping tea and admiring the rising sun over the skyline. His clarity on his Blackberry was better than his land line at home. He was halfway around the world and sounded like he was in the next room. This is remarkable, regardless of it’s normalcy today. My first recollection of phone service was a party line shared with 3 other families, one of whom had a phone hogging, chatterbox, obnoxious daughter. You answered the phone based on the number of rings. My first portable phone was smaller than a backpack but not dramatically smaller. Cell phones are one of the few things that guys brag about theirs being the smallest. Bottom line, we take the technology for granted since we are immersed in it. But take a second and consider, is this cool or what!

Ever wondered how to make a file a PDF. PDF stands for portable document format. Many of the downloads on the web are in this format. It doesn't seem to trigger as many blocking programs as other attachments. There are many, many vendors willing to sell you the capability of making PDF formatted files. However there is one company that will give you the program but.... it shows their name as a washout on all the files. $10.00 registers the program and gets rid of any "branding" of the files. http://www.pdf995.com/ is the link to the creator of this program. It is simple to use, when you finish your document regardless of what software you used to create the document, you simply choose pdf995 as your printer. It automatically converts the doc to a pdf. I use it daily. Very easy and very, very cheap!