Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

My First Giveaway! My review of The “Devlin Diary” by Christi Phillips will be posted at the Pick of the Literate on June 29, 2009. The Question and Answers for Christi Phillips, author of the “Devlin Diary” will be posted on June 30, 2009 at Pick of the Literate . Drop by, read the review, make your comment and sit back and hope you win. Contest will begin on June 29, 2009 and end on July 6, 2009.

We saw Angels and Demons, very good movie, do not expect to lie back leisurely and watch, it is an edge of your seat kind of movie. Afterward the couple we were with suggested dinner and we ended up on an outdoor patio shouting over the unnecessarily loud music and the most definitely loud children nearby. Ger proceeded to tell me how much trouble he had hooking up his new TV and then hooking digital converter boxes to his old TVs. It was far more trouble that it should have been. I treated him to the story of my hooking up my new TV. Since I have the DVD burner/player, TIVO, external speakers with subwoofer, cable box and computer all hooked to the TV the wires and the small holes they were supposed to go through in the cabinet provided the first difficulties. After taming the wire snarl I proceeded to set up the new cable box. My old cable box would not do high definition and since that was one of the reasons I got a new TV I called Comcast to find out how to get the new box. First p...

Not long ago I blogged about frying my digital photo frame. I replaced it with the Sungale ZA701 from Buy.com for $29.99 including shipping. It has since sold out and I don’t know if they will be getting more in but it was a very good value for the money. The resolution is no better than what I fried but it allowed me to put 2400 photos on a 256mb SD card and it accesses them all. It has a remote and and easy off/on on the remote which my previous frame did not have. It comes with a removable frame if you are tight for space. All in all it is an extremely good value for the price. This is not a paid blog. Manufacturer: Sungale Mfg Part#: ZA701 UPC: 00718103081863 Buy.com Sku: 211046819 Item#: E4YJFT Features Elegant wood frame to decorate your home 7" 16:9 TFT LCD display Slide show browses your precious photos Background music add sentiment to your memory Inter-exchange photos between memory cards Support all popular SD/MMC/MS memory cards Photo zoom and rotation Interchangeable ...

I have written in the past about the NetGear Powerline products. They turn your house electrical wiring into Ethernet wiring. You plug a Netgear XE103 into an electric outlet and plug an Ethernet cable from it to your router. You have now established the sending side of the equation. On the other end you need to have something to receive the Ethernet signal. The XE104 adapter plugs into a wall outlet somewhere in your home and it adds 4 Ethernet ports to your network. We all know that as wonderful as wireless Ethernet may be, there are always dreaded dead zones where for some reason wireless just doesn’t work. Usually those dead zones are areas where physically cabling for networks is darn near impossible or improbably expensive. NetGear’s Powerline products can meet that need. I particularly find the XE104 attractive as it adds 4 ports not just one. I have routers all over the house and the ability to add 4 more ports easily is highly appealing.

Recently at dinner after sullying a beautiful day with a rather dismal golf game, the Kindle came up. Technogeeks and other tech aficionados tend to forget the bulk of the world does not have the same interests as we do. I blogged not long ago on the new Kindle with the rash assumption that everyone knows what a Kindle is and how it works. My dinner companions were happy to point out to me that many people don’t live in front of a computer. So for the folks who are not familiar with the Kindle the following is right from the Amazon web site. Incidentally Kindle is not the only game in town, Sony has a reader as well, currently on sale at Staples for $279.00. Kindle, a electronic device for reading. Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots Books in Under 6...

Sounds like the title of a science fiction story. Sadly there is far more truth than fiction. Recently I did a presentation in a 4th grade class for science week. My presentation was on computers. I provided a historical perspective with Eniac as a baseline. I didn’t feel the need to go back to Michael Angelo or the abacus development. One of the things I pointed out to the students is that their game boxes are disguised computers. Nintendo’s DS looks innocuous, just a game. However you can get to the Internet wirelessly through the DS. My point is that we have reached the ubiquitous stage of computers. Our phones, our PDA’s, our GPS, our clocks, our TVs, our toys all have the ability or potential to be online. In essence, the way we live our lives is vulnerable to cyber attack. Some of the most tech resistant people I know still use email. There are scores of folks out there who dislike anyone in a developed nation. There are also the amoral sociopaths who enjoy showering pain and inc...

For the old timers among us, 5D used to refer to the musical group, 5th Dimensions, i.e. Monday,Monday. No longer can we assume 5D and music now we have to look at storage. If you aren’t happy with the storage capacity on your current DVD, let alone Blu-Ray, wait 5 minutes and a new technology will be out. Future Shock is no longer in the future. A new optical disc format is being developed by researchers at Melbourne Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology. They are rumored to have signed a deal with Samsung to produce their technology. Simplistically they are compounding the amount of data able to be stored on a single DVD. “Ultimately the techniques produced a 5D optical disc capable of storing 1.6 terabytes of data, the equivalent of around 340 DVD movies or 400,000 songs.” iTwire has a very understandable description of the process. Needless to say excitement abounds in those of us geeky enough to be excited about thi s type of news. At the moment the big drawback is that ...

Coming to your family room soon is a compact easy to use, INEXPENSIVE ; LCD projector that will project images up to 80” in size. One of the problems with projectors has been the need for a screen or a white wall. According to BenQ this projector is designed to allow projections on walls in colors other than white, of course a screen will give you a better picture. The other notable aspect of this projector is the use of LCD technology rather than bulb technology. In the older projectors the bulbs were very sensitive to shock and very expensive to replace when they blew. When I was selling home theater pcs, we really liked the DLP technology due it’s astounding reliability. The JoyBee has all the connections necessary to hook up your laptop, cable box, ipod, USB flash disk, digital camera, DVD player, Xbox etc. It is tiny, only 5.35 x 2.12 x 4.72 inches. That isn’t too much bigger that a fat paperback. It has a standard tripod connection tha t you could use with your existing camera t...

I was looking at portable GPS devices. Even though I don’t mind stopping for directions, it would be nice to have a clue where I am going. Now that I am retired I have anticipated a little more car travel. I did some research and after reading until my eyes bled, I decided to buy a cheap one and see how I liked it, then spring for a better one. Staples had a deal on their Omnitech GPS after rebates and other money games for $79.99. It has a 4.3” screen, text to speech and I figured with my $15.00 Staples cash would cost me an affordable $64.99 plus tax. I went in to Staples to see it and it was the only one on display not working. I asked the clerk and he said the screen was bad and I didn’t want it anyway, it was a piece of junk. He said he hated to sell them because he got so many back. I couldn’t decide whether to be grateful he saved me from a bad purchase or suspicious that he was trying to move me into a more expensive GPS. Since I now had a serious case of ambivalence, I didn’t ...