December 4, 1997

Tech Toys

Joan Lynch, Managing Editor

Come on, admit it. You still get a little thrill when someone hands you a beautifully wrapped package with your name on the tag. So why not return the favor? Check out this year's batch of Tech Toys for some ideas. (You might even find a little something for yourself!)

During this gift-giving time of year, take along our best wishes for peace and happiness in 1998.

Cat vs mouse

The Easy Cat, Smart Cat, and Power Cat touchpads let you glide your finger rather than click a mouse to manipulate the cursor on a computer's screen. The touchpads perform the same functions as a mouse with simple taps on the touchpad surface. The upper-right-hand side of the touchpad replaces the right mouse click. The Easy Cat costs $29; the Smart Cat, with the Scroll feature, costs $49; the Power Cat, with an Internet-navigation feature and signature capability, costs $79.

Cirque Corp, Salt Lake City, UT. 1-801-467-1100, fax 1-801-467-0208, www.glidepoint.com.

Smart house

All you need to automate your home with the Home Director is your existing wiring, a PC, and a couple of triple-A batteries. The kit features a PC-connection module, a lamp module, a six-in-one universal-remote control, a remote module, and software to give your house a lived-in look and to give you peace of mind while you're away. The PC-connection module lets Home Director perform tasks while the computer is turned off. The remote control allows operation of your TV, stereo, lights, and appliances from anywhere in your house. The Dawn and Dusk feature automatically sets lights to go on and off at dawn or dusk any time of the year, according to the user's geographical location. And the Lifestyle feature learns the way you use lights and equipment and replays the patterns to make your home look lived in. $99 at Circuit City stores.

IBM, Research Triangle Park, NC. 1-800-426-7235, www.pc.ibm.com/homedirector.

The world at your fingertips

Odyssey, or what the manufacturer calls an "atlasphere," is a 3-D globe that talks back to you. Use the wand to touch Brazil, and the globe responds in natural English with the country's capital, currency, climate, population, and other fun facts. Find the distance between Maine and Manitoba. Trace the Amazon, and find out its length. Hear the national anthem of Andorra. Find out what time it is in Japan. A geography game and reference in one, Odyssey always stays current: Overlays and plug-in cartridges provide updated information. The NearTouch technology uses a low-voltage signal, conductive materials, software algorithms, and a proprietary ASIC to locate the point of touch in a manner similar to GPSs. Odyssey runs on batteries or an included adapter and costs $399.

Explore Technologies Inc, Santa Clara, CA. 1-888-456-2343, www.globeheads.com.

Draw, partner

A good drawing package, such as Visio 5.0, forms the cornerstone of an engineer's software suite. Visio's Technical Edition includes a library of common shapes for schematics, block diagrams, and flowcharts. It also includes a netlist generator that can convert a schematic into a file for circuit analysis in packages such as Spice. The package integrates with Microsoft Office, allowing you to insert a Visio drawing into an Office document and to edit it there. Visio Standard costs $149; the Technical Edition costs $349.

Visio Corp, Seattle, WA. 1-206-521-4500, www.visio.com.

Move it

Strap on The Glove, and fire up your Sony PlayStation. With this video-game controller, the game characters move in the direction you move your wrist. Action buttons are conveniently located at your fingertips. The Glove targets gamers 12 years old and up and costs $89.95.

Reality Quest, Longmont, CO. 1-303-682-2689, fax 1-303-682-4332, www.theglove.com.

Extracurricular math help

Here's a way to strengthen the math skills of your sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-grader: self-paced interactive software that uses instructions, examples, practices, tests, and rewards. Each lesson in the three-CD-ROM Math Advantage Middle School package starts with math fundamentals and shows how to apply them. Grades for each chapter quiz appear on a report-card format, and good grades give the students access to a mystery puzzle game. An interactive lab helps students visualize math concepts. PC and Macintosh versions are available for $29.99. A workbook with 250 practice problems also comes with the package.

Aces Research, Fremont, CA. 1-510-683-8855, fax 1-510-683-8875, info@acesxprt.com.

Lock it up

The Blaupunkt Toronto AM/FM CD receiver and the Sydney AM/FM cassette receiver come with a security feature called KeyCard. This credit-card-sized card houses an embedded processor and a memory chip for encrypted security data and stores your favorite radio stations and other listening preferences. The car stereos won't work unless they recognize an inserted KeyCard, which, along with warning labels on the radio, might scare off a potential thief. The Toronto costs $569.95, and the Sydney is $399.95.

Blaupunkt, Robert Bosch Corp, Broadview, IL. 1-800-950-2528, www.blaupunkt.com.

A place to call home

Teach Yourself to Create a Home Page in 24 Hours (ISBN 1-57521-325-7) provides everything you need to do just that. The complete starter kit includes a book broken down into 24 1-hour lessons and a CD-ROM that contains Claris Home Page 2.0 Lite for Windows 95/NT and Macs, examples created by the author, sample templates, 164 Web graphics, and Internet Explorer 3. The book, written by Rogers Cadenhead, is pretty darn funny in parts and contains tons of useful info. The book costs $24.99.

Sams.net Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. www.samspublishing.com.

The big screen

You can choose either the 27- or the 31-in. versions of the Arcadia Home Monitor, which is designed for use with DVD, console video games, cable TV, digital satellite receivers, and VCRs. Browse the Internet, create documents, play games, and send e-mail all from one big-screen monitor. Prices start at $799.

Princeton Graphics Systems, Santa Ana, CA. 1-714-751-8405, fax 1-714-751-5736, www.prgr.com.

Going wireless

The VersaPoint wireless keyboard combines a keyboard and touchpad in one sleekly contoured package. Use the keyboard to browse the Internet from your couch or to control a PC presentation in which you need real-time text changes, Internet browsing, and cursor pointing. Just plug in the wide-angle IR receiver, and you're good as far as 50 ft away. The keyboard costs $159.95.

Interlink Electronics, Camarillo, CA. 1-800-340-1331 or 1-805-484-1331, fax 1-805-484-8989, www.interlinkelec.com/magic/page02h.htm.

Hassle-free searching

Sick of hopping from search engine to search engine? Try Internet EZ Search, which lets you simultaneously talk to 49 search engines without being an expert on Boolean operations. You can look for Web sites that contain any word in a group of words, that contain all of the words, or that contain a complete phrase. The program also has a "remove-duplicates" feature, which eliminates multiple references to the same Web site. The program costs $29.95.

American Systems, Fort Worth, TX. 1-817-485-6547, fax 1-817-485-2193, www.americansys.com.

Turn your laptop into a video phone

The PM-S122 clips on to your notebook's display and plugs into a PC-card slot for full-duplex videoconferencing and for creating and sending video e-mail. The 3.1×1.7×1.2-in. camera swivels as much as 40º and tilts as much as 120º. The bundled SmithMicro VideoLink Mail software lets you create and send audio/video messages as e-mail attachments. The software compresses a typical 2-minute video to a 1-Mbyte file. $549 gets you the camera, headset, conference card, and CU-SeeMe and VideoLink software. You need a Windows 95 machine and 16 Mbytes of memory as a minimum configuration.

Panasonic Corp, Secaucus, NJ. 1-800-742-8086 or 1-201-348-7000, www.panasonic.com.

Control Word with words

Using Kurzweil VoiceCommands installed on your PC, you can create, format, and edit a Microsoft Word document using your voice rather than your keyboard. The speech-recognition-based software lets you issue commands such as "Insert a table with three rows and four columns" and "Set the point size of this paragraph at 12 points." The software saves voice profiles for multiple users. For $59.95, you get the CD-ROM, documentation, a noise-canceling microphone, and a practice tutorial. To run VoiceCommands, you need a 100-MHz or higher Pentium-based PC, 24 Mbytes of RAM, 20 Mbytes of hard-disk space, Windows 95 or NT, and Word 97 or 7. VoiceCommands is available at CompUSA, Egghead, Staples, and Office Depot.

Lernout & Hauspie, Burlington, MA. 1-617-238-0960, fax 1-617-238-0986, www.lhs.com.

Origami the easy way

Even the klutziest person can learn the ancient art of paper folding with "Origami, the Secret Life of Paper." Step-by-step instructions and more than 100 full-motion videos explain how to assemble your figures. A color palette lets you decorate your projects and render them in 3-D, ready for printing. A gallery houses re-creations from the great origami masters; click on one, and learn about its history and creator. You can also learn how to turn your junk mail into origami paper. The CD-ROM comes in versions for Windows 3.x and 95 machines and for Macs and costs $59.95.

Casady & Greene, Salinas, CA. 1-408-484-9228, fax 1-408-484-9218, www.casadyg.com.

In the palm of your hand

What? You don't have a handheld organizer yet? With more than 3000 developers creating applications for the PalmPilot, it's a good time to take a look at this powerful organizer. Another good reason is a price reduction in time for the holidays: The PalmPilot Professional Edition now costs $369, reduced from $399, and the PalmPilot Personal Edition sells for $249, reduced from $299. The Professional organizer includes e-mail connectivity software, expense-tracking software, a backlit screen, enhanced PalmPilot personal-information-management (PIM) software, and 1 Mbyte of memory. The Personal Edition features the same expense-tracking software, backlit screen, and enhanced PIM software and includes 512 kbytes of memory. The best thing about the organizers? You input everything via a stylus--no fooling around with impossibly minuscule keyboards.

3Com, Santa Clara, CA. 1-800-881-7256, www.3com.com.

No bull

The No BS Guide to Linux (ISBN 1-886411-04-2) provides the essentials for installing, optimizing, and using Linux, a version of Unix that runs on PCs. The author lays out the facts with ease and provides terms and definitions throughout the text. When you buy the book, you also get a CD-ROM that contains Linux Pro 4.1a, the complete Linux Encyclopedia, the Apache Web server, and dozens of games, compilers, and utilities. The book costs $34.95.

No Starch Press, San Francisco, CA. 1-415-284-9900, fax 1-415-284-9955, www.nostarch.com.

Listen up

You can now have instant access to your e-mail without logging on to your computer. It's done by phone when you subscribe to JE Mail-Call. Just dial into a central server, enter your PIN, and listen as a voice reads your e-mail messages. The text-to-speech software system gives you the message number, sender, subject, and date. You can listen to the message, fax it to any number, or skip it. All e-mails stay in your computer's in box for future reference. A one-year subscription costs $99; for six months, you pay $54; for three months, the cost is $30. Or buy a 30-day trial for $10.99. For a free demo, call 1-888-462-4348.

JE Software, Mount Vernon, NY. 1-914-699-6710, fax 1-914-699-6969, www.jesoft.com.

While you were out...

You don't necessarily need a fax machine or internal fax/modem card to receive faxes. The FaxPal II stand-alone peripheral intercepts incoming fax transmissions and stores them in flash memory even if your PC is off; it can hold as many as 20 pages until you're ready to retrieve them. When you want to view or print the faxes, connect the device to a serial port on your computer. Memory is upgradable to 200 pages. The device costs $99.

Infoimaging Inc, Pleasanton, CA. 1-800-966-1140, 1-510-485-4000, www.infoimaging.com.

At your service

For $29, Download Butler collects and categorizes the files that you get from the Internet. The Windows utility works with all browsers to capture downloaded files into a tabbed notebook with file names and file descriptions clearly labeled for later recall. You can also associate a URL with the file. Download Butler also features a built-in decompression utility that lets you open and extract any file in an archive to a specified location.

Lincoln Beach Software, Ballwin, MO. 1-314-861-1500, www.lincolnbeach.com.

Petite and powerful

Weighing in at a mere 2.4 lbs, the Amity CN mini-notebook computer is no lightweight machine. It includes Windows 95, incorporates a 133-MHz Pentium processor, and features as much as 48 Mbytes of RAM and a 1.2-Gbyte, 2.5-in. hard drive. The notebook has two PC-card slots, standard interface ports, and a 7.5-in. VGA LCD. An optional battery adapter allows operation for 7.5 hours. The whole thing measures just 9.3×6.7× 1.34 and costs $1995.

Mitsubishi Electronics America, Cypress, CA. 1-714-220-2500.

Free filter-development kit

A free design kit that helps you develop high-speed active filters includes two dual op amps, one high-speed buffer, an evaluation board, and data sheets. To order the kit, go to www.national.com/see/activefilter, and follow the instructions.

National Semiconductor Corp, Fort Collins, CO.

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