By Jon Kenton

What is luxury? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, luxury is an “indulgence in something that provides pleasure, satisfaction, or ease,” but is not “absolutely necessary.” If we take a moment and look around our homes, offices, or cars, I am sure we will find many items that we see as real necessities. I would bet that, at one time, these items were seen as luxuries or even frivolities. The Austrian economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises once said, “The luxury of today is the necessity of tomorrow.” This has been historically proven time and time again, wherever technology is involved.

Consider certain fundamentals that the majority of the population now owns and couldn’t or at least wouldn’t do without: radio, television—even the refrigerator and freezer. At one time, these were seen as luxury items. In the 1980s, a new gadget appeared in the marketplace. It was expensive and bulky, and most thought it would only ever be used by business executives. Any guesses? Yup, that was the cell phone. There are now nearly 3.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions—that’s over half the population of the world! Does that make it a luxury or a necessity?

Given our earlier definition of luxury—indulgent and unnecessary—most of the latest technogadgets would seem to fit the bill. They are either expensively adorned or “designerized” versions of current products that would seem for the most part to be highly indulgent, or clever new technology, or packaging that’s looking for that magic demographic that deems it necessary. Let’s take a look at a few current examples, some of which are creeping into the mainstream and others that are still way out there—you can decide where they fit.

Staying with the mobile phone theme, if you want the designer label to go with your latest device, they certainly come with a luxury price tag—Tag Heuer, to be exact. The company has a phone called the Meridiist, which they say is “the perfect cosmopolitan traveling companion, uniting formal purity with functional perfection.” No extra-special features, but you can get it in crocodile skin! A snip at around $6,000! If Christian Dior is more your style, they will soon have their latest creation available for $5,000—this phone is at least studded with diamonds! If these are a little pricy even for you, but you still want the luxury label, Armani and Prada phones can be had for around a tenth of these two “necessities.” If adding glitter or gold fits your definition of luxury, then you can pick up almost any technodevice with “enhancements.” From a jewel-encrusted $20,000 Kodak camera to a gold-plated Gameboy ($25K) or even a whopping 71-inch plasma TV with a 24-karat gold casing for an equally whopping $132,000.

Back to the more mundane—at least pricewise. How about those GPS units? Once a definite luxury, but not so now with portable units available for a few hundred dollars—but are they really necessary? They certainly can be convenient when visiting unknown places, or trying to find the nearest gas station or Tag store to buy your $5,000 cell phone. The technology continues to evolve, and before long, a GPS device will be a near-standard feature in most cell phones or cars.

Multimedia is now everywhere, from our desktop to our mobile devices. The integration of these devices into our homes and lives is less pervasive. The DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance, dlna.org) has brought together over 250 companies from the fields of consumer electronics, computing, and mobile device with the goal of changing this. They are creating standards and specifications aimed at the next generation of devices that will ensure seamless integration such that we can watch or listen to whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want.

If these items seem like indulgences today, think back to the days when the VCR was first introduced. Once we can gain such control over our ever-increasing multimedia environments, necessities they will be.

By Jon Kenton

There are over a billion PCs out there, and a large majority of them has one version or another of Mr. Gates’s productivity suite, Microsoft Office.

Although the premium versions have lots of extras (e.g., database software or Web development/publishing tools), the three foundational legs of the Office suite are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Millions of people use these now de facto tools every day for word processing, number crunching, and creating presentations. Most, however, probably use less than ten percent of the capability of the software, typing simple documents or using Excel essentially as a calculator.

I am frequently asked about a variety of issues, to which the answer is: “Office can do that.” “Really? I never knew!” is the usual response.

Here are a few suggestions that will help you get more productive with your productivity software. First and foremost, treat yourself to a book. There are numerous types; for example, the For Dummies series that will walk you through all the clever things the software can do. I guarantee that you will be pleasantly surprised and find many easy ways to achieve results you have been ignoring or doing by hand. You have spent hundreds of dollars on a PC and the software—another few bucks on a book is money well spent.

I obviously don’t have room to cover a book’s worth of tips and instructions, but here are some of my favorites that I use all the time. Many are implemented across the entire MS Office suite. Others are specific only to certain tools.

Keyboard Shortcuts Many if not all of the most commonly used commands can be accessed via a keyboard shortcut. This means that you are not continually removing your hands from the keyboard and reaching for the mouse. To use them, it requires hitting a couple of keys at the same time, usually the Ctrl (Control) key. Examples might be Cut and Paste—Ctrl C and Ctrl V—or Undo, which is Ctrl Z.

Format Painter This is one of my favorites. Once you have set up the style of a particular portion of text, the painter allows you to literally paint that style onto other areas. You use it by selecting the original format and then clicking on the paintbrush icon on the main toolbar. If you double click, it will stay active until you click it again. Try it out.

Images Management With digital cameras now so prevalent, everybody is adding his or her own pictures into documents. If you need to do some simple editing, rather than going back to your photo program, right-click on the image and select the picture toolbar. This gives you access to simple adjustments, brightness, contrast, and even cropping tools. It also has a compression button. This resizes the data in the images to match the usage of the document. The worst culprits are PowerPoint presentations in which the addition of numerous full-size images will quickly make for a 10+Mb file—not very e-mail friendly.

AutoCorrect You may not realize it but these applications actually take care of your mistakes for you. Try typing t-e-h instead of the—miraculously, it changes automatically. This is the AutoCorrect feature. You can make this work even further for you. If you type a phrase or long name frequently, you can set this feature to help you. For example, you can make it automatically change nvm to North Valley Magazine. Look under Tools for the AutoCorrect options menu.

Drawing tables Many people have a hard time with adding tables and figuring out beforehand how many rows or columns they need for the dialogue box. A much easier way to create a table is using the Tables and Borders toolbar. You will see a pencil and eraser icon in the top-left of this toolbar. Simply use these to draw and/or erase lines, and voila—there is your table.

You can find out more about these features by looking at the included help in each application, and of course, in the shiny new book you have just bought.

By Jon Kenton

In January, we hail in the New Year, make our resolutions, and head back to work after the holidays. If you are in the technology industry, January means heading to Las Vegas for CES, the International Consumer Electronics Show. This is where everybody shows off their latest innovations and techno gadgets.

I spent a week there, and here is my rundown of the latest and greatest. If you like to be an early adopter, make sure some of these items are on your buy-me list.

Televisions loomed large in the central hall, and when I say large, I mean large! Panasonic introduced their 150-inch plasma screen. In case you have some spare space in your living room, you’ll need eleven feet to fit this monster in. Now, that really is home theater. Know, however, that bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to the thickness of TVs. Many manufacturers were featuring new OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) Technology. Sony demonstrated their XEL-1 11-inch version as well as a prototype of a 20-inch OLED screen. These babies are ultra-thin—about the thickness of three stacked credit cards. Pioneer also had a wow factor with their “Project Kuro” 50-inch plasma, which was all of 9mm thick—that’s just over a third of an inch! Not only that, but they boast an infinite contrast ratio, meaning absolutely black blacks.

If a huge screen and 360-degree soundstages are not enough for your home theater experience, then you should check out the Motion Code system from D-BOX Technologies. By adding motion actuators to your existing furniture and utilizing equipment that can decode an extra motion track on your DVD, you can feel every bump and roll along with your favorite action stars. In a demonstration featuring the latest Die Hard movie, we experienced what D-BOX claim is the ultimate in sensory emersion. All we need now is the heat from all those explosions and the smell and feel of Bruce Willis’s perspiration, and we’ll be in sensory overload.

There were some very stylish new products, and the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin certainly qualifies—it won a CES Innovations award. The Zeppelin is an iPod dock-and-speaker system. It has a total output of 100w with two midrange/tweeters at 25w plus 50w of bass. Netgear was also awarded in the home networking Innovations category for their Powerline HD Plus. This device allows you to create a home network using your existing home electric circuits. You simply plug in an adaptor, connect your device’s network cable, and off you go.

Staying with the home-networking theme, D-Link had a slew of new products on display at CES. As well as additions to their wireless router range, they added four new media players. My favorite was the MediaLounge PC-on-TV (DPG-1200), which allows you to stream Internet media content from your PC to your television. It copies your PC’s desktop onto your TV screen; with a functional trackball remote, you can control your PC from your armchair, even if it’s elsewhere in your house.

To see absolutely everything that’s featured at CES, you need to walk the aisles for the whole week. If you are looking for that very indispensable something, then Interactive Toy Concepts has just the thing for you. Their RC Cooler, one of my favorite items at the show, will find a place in my backyard. Yes, it’s a cooler and it keeps your beer cool. Nothing new there. But this cooler is on wheels and has remote control. With just a flick of a switch, RC will deliver a cold one right to your chair—now, that’s cool!

By Jon Kenton

The advent of wireless home networks has created a booming industry, providing great freedom and flexibility for us all. Unfortunately, it has also spawned a new breed of pests: piggybackers who take advantage of your unsecured network and use your broadband service for free. Worse, if you have shared storage and an open network, they can get to that, too. And wireless has made life even easier for the worst kind of pest—hackers. If your network is left unsecured, they can easily gain access and wreak untold havoc on all your PCs and servers. But don’t fret—there are some basic steps that you can take to secure yourself.

1. Site your router as close to the center of your home as possible. This will minimize signal leakage outside your walls. This is often difficult, as you must place it near wherever the broadband connection enters your home. Also, most apartments are much smaller than the transmission capability of a router. You would still probably leak to all the other apartments around you.

2. Change the default password. Every wireless router has an administration function that allows you to set it up and change its configuration. The defaults for all routers are widely known, so as soon as you install your router, change the password!

3. Change the SSID and then hide it. When your PC goes searching for a network, it is looking for a network name or SSID. Out of the box, it will be set to the same name as for everyone else who bought the same router. The first thing to do is to change it to a unique name you can remember. Don’t use something generic like “office”—be a little more creative. Once you have done this, set your router to not broadcast the SSID. This will prevent anybody from seeing it. You can still enter it manually on your laptop, as you know the name. Once you have set the Remember Network setting, you won’t need to do it again. This should prevent most piggybackers, but won’t stop hackers.

4. Enable MAC filtering. Each PC’s network adaptor has a unique identifier known as a MAC address. You can set your router to work only with PCs whose MAC addresses you have identified.

5. Turn on Encryption. This essentially creates a code that only your router and PCs know how to decode. There are two common forms: WEP and WPA. WEP is better than using nothing, but serious hackers have figured out how to break this coding scheme. WPA or WPA2 is the strongest encryption available today. The issue is that not all PCs and routers have all encryption schemes, so pick whichever one all the devices on your network will support. They all work in a similar way. You pick a key, which is a string of letters and numbers much like a password. You enter this into each device’s encryption configuration, and then they all know the key to unlock the code so they can communicate. Change the keys periodically.

If you take the above steps, you will have made yourself as secure as you can against wireless intruders. Would you leave the door to your home wide open? I doubt it! So, why leave your wireless network wide open?

By Jon Kenton

Whether we’re at them at home or in the office, we now take for granted the role the PC plays in our lives. Attached to our PCs, both desktop and laptop, is a multitude of devices. These range from the expected basic input/output such as keyboards, mice, and printers to more specialized items such as webcams, scanners, or gaming devices. There is also a plethora of mobile gadgets such as cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and media players (iPods) that many of us now could not live without. The one thing all these devices have in common is how they connect to our PCs—they use USB.

USB, which stands for Universal Serial Bus, started life on the drawing board back in 1994. The first version, USB 1.0, was released in 1996, and the now commonplace Hi-Speed USB has been with us since the year 2000. The aim was to create a single standardized interface socket for the connection of any type of peripheral to a PC. A key goal was to allow for Plug and Play (PnP) capability, i.e., the connection or removal of a device from a PC without needing to restart. USB also provides power and charging capabilities to many of our mobile devices. By any standard, USB is undoubtedly wildly successful. With over 3 billion devices sold across the globe, USB is the single most ubiquitous connectivity solution in existence.

We all love our USB devices, the only downside being the number of available sockets on our PCs and the mass of cables to buy and keep tidy. But, there is a solution! This year, USB comes to the rescue once again with Wireless USB—all the same features and the same performance as hi-speed USB, but without the cables.

Imagine your current PC setup at home with all those cables—what a mess! Have you also been frustrated with the necessity to site your printer or other peripheral right next to your PC? I know I have. Wireless USB gives you the freedom to place your devices anywhere you want (within reason) and still have the same ease of use that wired USB has today. The specification allows for speeds that match current Hi-Speed USB performance, which is up to 480 Mbps at 9 feet and 110 Mbps at 30 feet. For most computers, that means you can place your external hard drives, scanners, printers, etc. anywhere in the average room.

Some of the most exciting things about this technology are the new ways to work with mobile devices. Think of being able to automatically download your digital photos or sync your music just by placing your camera or iPod anywhere in the proximity of your PC. As TV and set top-box vendors consider implementing Wireless USB into future products, imagine the possibility of streaming your photos or digital video from your camera sitting on the coffee table, direct to the television.

These features and the ultimate benefits will be available when PCs and devices have Wireless USB built in as standard. There are, however, intermediate solutions to help migrate the numerous existing products we all own. The first Wireless USB capable products were announced this past July and are initially available in the form of Notebook PCs, host adapters, and wireless hubs to upgrade existing devices. Computer manufacturers Dell and Lenovo both have announced new laptops with built-in Wireless USB. Wireless USB will become a standard option just as wireless networking (802.11) is today. If you want to take the opportunity to reorganize your home office, consider a Wireless USB hub. Major manufacturers Belkin, D-Link and Iogear have all released such products. They all come with a small adaptor that plugs into an existing USB port on your computer (looks like a USB memory stick). This communicates wirelessly with a hub that you can place anywhere within range and plug in your existing USB devices.

More than 100 companies from a wide range of industries have committed themselves to using Wireless USB. This indicates a rich breadth of choice from multiple suppliers, all of which will produce interoperable products. As the opportunity for Wireless USB heats up, manufacturers will be able to ship hundreds of millions of units within a few years. Eventually, every PC, camera, printer, camcorder, flat-panel television, and mobile phone will have a Wireless USB connection. It may be a little while yet, but freedom from wires is just around the corner. Start thinking about how you can use your wireless freedom!

By Jon Kenton

“I recently experienced a real computer catastrophe. I am not sure what exactly caused it—possibly a thunderstorm—but my PC crashed in a really bad way. I got a new system, which is great, but I ended up losing most of my files, as they could not be recovered from the old disk. How do I stop this from happening again?”

I heard this sorry tale from a friend of mine a few weeks ago. I answered, “What about your backups?” “What backups?” he responded, with a nasty glare.

Does that story resonate within you? The most important thing about backing up is that you must actually do it. Whatever scheme you end up choosing, make sure you create a schedule and stick to it. Write it in your calendar, put sticky notes on your monitor—whatever works—but do make those backups. There are numerous options to consider—the amount of data, cost, convenience, complexity, and portability. There is also the issue of software, such as various backup packages. In this article, I am going to focus on where to store it safely. I prefer to use a KISS (Keep It Seriously Simple) approach: create a copy of your valuable data files, documents, and media somewhere other than your primary storage, so that whatever could damage the primary storage won’t do the same to the backup.

If you don’t have that much data, and need portability, then using CDs, DVDs, or flash drives would work. CDs have a max capacity of 800MB, and regular DVDs are just less than 5GB. If your drive has the capability to do double layered and double sided, the DVD capacity can be as much as 17GB. Blank CDs and DVDs are relatively cheap, and you can match the capacities to your needs. For the best portability, flash drives work well and are available with capacities as high as 8GB. The size and portability benefits come at a higher price and don’t necessarily meet the requirements for longer-term storage.

The fastest, largest-capacity, and best dollar-per-MB option would be using another hard drive. There are multiple ways to utilize a secondary hard disk for backup storage. All allow you simply to copy the files or directories you want to back up or archive to the second drive, and are all instantly accessible. Here are some of the options, pros, and cons:

1.    Add another internal drive to your system. Speedy and simple, but can’t be removed. If your system does crash, there is a chance that both disks will be damaged.

2.    Use an external drive. This option is a hard drive in a small external, independently powered unit that connects via USB. There is no need to take the skins off your system; the unit is simply “plug and play.” You can either leave it permanently connected (may have pitfalls similar to option one) or just attach it when you want to backup or restore files. It also has the benefit of being able to be stored away safely, and can be connected to any other system if required.

3.    Network attached drives are rather more complex, but do afford flexibility for multiple computers on a home network. With such setups, you can share your storage across your workgroup (not too difficult to configure). You may then back up system A on system B, and vice versa. There are products available that let you add storage as an independent unit on your wireless network. This option offers great flexibility but can be more complex to set up, and if your network has problems, you can’t access the storage.

4.    All of these options can be configured with removable hard drives. Drive units can be taken out and stored in a safe place. This option is more expensive, but you can isolate the physical unit and the data it contains. Caution: store the unit away from the main unit. If you remove the drive and leave it next to the system, and you have a fire in your home, the backup will also be lost.

If you are serious about your backup requirements, you can subscribe to a third-party service. Many businesses do this. This option is the most costly, requiring monthly subscription fees, but is typically the most secure. Data is archived offsite (anything that happens to your system or location won’t affect your data) and the companies offer backups of your backups. Search the Web for “online backups” and you will find numerous options.

No matter which of these options you may choose, it is most important to develop a process to follow regularly: identify the data you want to protect, create a series of folders on your backup media, name and date them appropriately, decide on the frequency of backup you need, and finally make sure you actually create the backup copies. Remember KISS: there is no backup process in the world that will protect your data unless you use it. The three golden rules for protecting data are make backups, make backups, and make backups !

By Jon Kenton

Whenever I am asked for advice on which digital camera to buy, the question of how many megapixels (MPs) is the one most frequently asked, and is in fact often the first one asked. What usually follows is “I saw this 7 megapixel camera on sale for $50 less than a 5 megapixel one. It must be a good deal—right?” While more MPs can be of benefit in certain situations, it is not necessarily a measure of a better camera nor does it assure better-quality photographs. Why is this, and what should one look for in a digital camera?

The vast majority of digital cameras are purchased for family and vacation photos to capture those special and precious moments. Typically, they will be printed either at a local outlet or at home in sizes similar to conventional film cameras: 4 by 6 inches, 5 by 7 inches, and occasionally 8 by 10 inches. It may surprise you to learn that even a humble 3 or 4 MP camera is more than up to this task.

A megapixel is a measure of the number of photocells, or sites on the sensor of the camera. MPs are calculated by multiplying the width by the height. Thus, a sensor 2,816 by 2,112 yields 5,947,392 total pixels or, rounded off, 6 megapixels. An MP is, in fact, an area measurement, like a square foot. As the total area increases, it seems as if you have a lot more, but in terms of usable dimensions it’s not that significant. Think of comparing two rooms, the first 150 square feet and the second 204 square feet. Although 204 sounds like a lot more and is over 30 percent bigger than the first room, we are actually comparing a 15 by 10 square foot space against one that is 17 by 12. That means only an extra foot all round the room; while it is bigger, it’s not really substantially more usable space.

Bringing us back to our photographs, let’s see how prints change with MPs. Most high-quality prints need 300PPI (pixels per inch). For home use, it is perfectly possible to get acceptable prints using only 200PPI. Most home printing software and all professional lab equipment use a technique called interpolation to fill in the missing pixels when lower than 300PPI images are used.

The following table shows a range from 4 to 10 megapixels and how they approximate width and height with print sizes at 200 and 300PPI. The columns bellow the 300 and 200PPI show the width and height divided by 300 and 200 respectively. Rounding these down will indicate the maximum picture size. For example, 4MP with 300PPI works out to 7.57 by 5.68. Rounded down, this gives you a 7 by 5 photo.

We can see from this table that 4 MPs will easily yield a high quality 5 by 7, and at 200PPI, an 8 by 10. It also shows how small increases in MP density, much like our “larger room” example, don’t buy you much in terms of greater print size. If you are looking for an upgrade only for extra MPs, then you need to jump by at least 3MP to gain any reasonable return in terms of increased print size.

There are a couple of primary situations in which more MPs are desirable. The first relates back to our discussion on print sizes. If you intend to create a large number of high-quality poster-size prints, then you’ll want more pixels—the more you have, the larger you can blow up your photographs without sacrificing quality through “pixilation.” The second advantage is when you want to crop your photos—cutting out a smaller section of a full image. If you start with a 10MP image, you could crop out 50 percent of the area and still be left with 5MPs, plenty for a good 5 by 7 print.

As we have seen, megapixels are important, but are not the overriding attribute of a digital camera when it comes to shooting better photographs. There are a number of key factors to take into account when deciding on which camera is best for you, not least of which is making sure you get the best value for your money, or all the features you need or want at a price that makes sense to you. When making your decision, you should consider at least the following factors as they relate to your personal needs.

• Size Small enough to fit in your pocket, or large enough to fill a backpack

• Features Advanced shooting modes, battery life, movie modes

• Lens Quality glass, optical zoom, wider apertures, ability to use filters

• ISO range Noise, low light capabilities

• Sensor Type, sensitivity, physical size

• Image Stabilization great for long zoom and indoor/low-light shots

We don’t have time to go into each of these items this month, but watch out for future articles or the Ask the Techno-file column. Until next time, I wish you good shooting and the hope that megapixels are no longer mega-puzzles to you.