Editorials

This Does Not Reassure Me – “Texas School District Will Let Teachers Carry Guns”

Wayne sent me this news story as an aside, and I have to admit that after reading it my first thought was how glad I was that I didn’t have any kids in Texas’ Harrold Independent School District. This isn’t exactly gadget news, and I’m not sure why it hit today as this policy change approval actually took place last October, but needless to say…I am flabbergasted and felt the need to share. Indulge me, please. Trustees at the Harrold Independent School District approved a district policy change last October so employees can carry concealed firearms to deter and protect…

Editorials

Livescribe Pulse – Don’t Head Back to School Without It!

I’m a terrible note taker. Half the time I’m focussed so intensely on what the other person is saying that I forget to take notes for brief periods of time. Later when I get back to the office I rack my brain trying to remember what was said. Here’s a solution to fill in the blanks on those notes you forgot to take. It’s a regular sized pen with a built in audio recorder(1GB or 2GB of memory) – plus it digitizes your notes for upload to your computer or the web. This is a PERFECT back to school item…

Editorials

The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Dating

In the car I just can’t wait, to pick you up on our very first date Is it cool if I hold your hand? Is it wrong if I think it’s lame to dance? Do you like my stupid hair? Would you guess that I didn’t know what to wear? I’m too scared of what you think You make me nervous so I really can’t eat – “First Date”, by Blink 182 So you’ve picked the online dating site or sites that you would like to join, you’ve created what you think is a fabulous profile, you’re getting “winks”, “nudges”,…

Editorials

Meet Winerack – Beerbelly’s Adventurous Little Sister

I don’t know which is funnier. The fact that there is a sister product to The BeerBelly named The Winerack – whose purpose is to let you sneak booze into events where BYOB is prohibited hold 25oz of wine or other beverage in a sports bra where you then drink it through a flexible tube. Or, that the company that makes it wants to send us a sample and asked Judie her bra size: Hi Judie, I just saw the write up on your site about The Beerbelly and your comment that the WineRack needs to come out now… Great…

Editorials, Gear Bits

Goodbye Blackberry, It’s Not Me – It’s You – Here Are 10 Reasons I Left

On Friday I transferred my Blackberry phone number from T-Mobile over to my Apple iPhone, effectively terminating my contract with T-Mobile and ending a 15+ year practice of taking a Blackberry with me everywhere I went. In January I’d purchased an iPhone (“just to try it out”). Like many iPhone owners, I’d been hauling two phones with me. The Blackberry was my main email phone. The iPhone the web browser, Twitter client, music/video player, and picture taker phone. During the past week I was out at the Sage Software Insights Reseller Conference where they’d asked me to speak about Social…

Editorials

The Forgotten Mission of the OLPC

This is definitely a moment in OLPC’s history of big changes as views are conflicting on what the mission should really be about. This week, we have two important announcements: Microsoft is officially pushing Windows XP into the XO and Sugar Labs is no longer dedicated to the XO but will now offer the possibilities of building a “learning ecosystem” on all platforms. XP XO Is the XO sporting windows a good or bad thing? This is such a trivial question and so besides the point that we need to look at the real issues with OLPC. OLPC and Microsoft…

Editorials

Soft Claws for Cats: Doing the Humane Thing

When Sarah and I first got Avah, one of the conditions (beyond that we would take turns cleaning out her litter box in those pre Litter-Robot days) was that we get her declawed. My only justification looking back, was that we don’t have leather furniture, and I didn’t want our chenille sofas to be shredded by a claw-sharpening maniac. I asked our vet’s receptionist about it when I took Avah in for her first shots, and she asked me “front and back? or just front?” Doing both just seemed excessive, even though Avah is an indoors-only cat, so I responded…

Editorials

So You Want to Buy a Car on The Internet…

I’ve been shopping for a used car. I know exactly what I want. The problem is getting it. The vehicle I want isn’t common in my area, so I turned to the Internet to find one. What’s I’m finding, however, is that outside of buying via ebay, the shopping experience varies widely.

Editorials

Why Walmart isn’t the place for Linux

A lot has been said this week about Walmart pulling the Everex gPC and Cloudbook from their stores. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a interesting article on desktoplinux.com regarding his views. What it boils down to is the people who typically shop at WalMart are probably not even capable of determining what OS their computer is running. All they know is they bought the computer and then bought Quicken and couldn’t get it to run on the gPC.

Editorials

Surviving the Nuclear Winter after an Atomic Server Crash, Part One

As you may have noticed, Gear Diary suffered a massive server crash on Saturday, March 1st. If you didn’t know it, then it is only a testament to how awesome the Gear Diary Team is, because we all immediately scrambled to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. Things aren’t quite there yet, and for better or worse they will never be quite the same again, but as usual I am getting ahead of myself… The night before everything happened, I had posted about my MacBook Pro order, and I had already started to receive informative post comments…

eBooks, Editorials

GearChat: The Demise of Print Media and a Possible Reason for the Amazon Kindle

Once again, we invite you to eavesdrop on our email conversations… Wayne: R.I.P. … the Internet slays another print publication… Mitchell: I was a subscriber to PC World for about 5 years, and then I realised that I was paying for a magazine with content that I had read weeks earlier on the internet. It really is inevitable I suppose, tech magazines just can’t stay ahead of the game with online news sites getting information out hours after release. They have to wait a whole month… Clinton: This is the same problem that many tech magazines face. Granted, most have…

Editorials

Total and Utter Crap: Gizmodo’s Stupid CES Prank on Motorola and Us Bloggers

I first found out about Gizmodo’s stupidity on ValleyWag a little earlier today; the post read “What’s the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Nothing, says CNET’s Rafe Needleman. But he’s concerned that ValleyWag, using a TV remote control to turn off video screens at the CES 2008 gadgetfest, will get bloggers disinvited to the event next year. After all, CES only grudgingly started accrediting bloggers to the show.” I had no idea what Owen Thomas, the post author, was talking about, so I went to Gizmodo and took a look…which turned into a moment of wide-eyed horror. In…

Editorials

My First “Pocket” PC – A Tribute to Clinton Sr.

[Judie’s note: This article is also currently running on Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com!, and it can be viewed in the original format (with even larger pictures) there. If you haven’t already checked out the many Windows Mobile software reviews on Clinton’s site, then be sure to visit soon.] If you read my biographical information on the Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com! Staff page, then you will see that I’ve been writing reviews of some type since the late 1990s. Likewise, if you read my blog entry over at Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine last month, then you read about how I…

Editorials

The Treo 750 vs. HTC Hermes

[tps_start_button label=”Start slideshow” style=”” class=””] Recently my dad’s company bought several of their employees Dopod 838 Pro mobile phones (based on Judie?s review actually :-D). His device arrived at the office a few days ago, but he is in Vietnam for work, so one of his colleagues dropped it off. For the last 3 days I have been using it instead of my Treo, to see if I made the right choice months ago. I have come to a somewhat mixed decision based on several things that I?d like to describe below. My basis for these ?ratings? is that I…

Editorials

TSA Nudie Show at the Airport: Perfect Dieting Incentive

So let’s say that you haven’t exactly kept up with your New Year’s Resolution of doing 30 – 50 minutes a day on the treadmill, with a little bit of upper body weight lifting every other day. You didn’t think anyone would ever notice, right? Well the TSA will notice, so if you travel, you’ll now have a new reason to get your butt back on track…and as quickly as possible! According to Yahoo News, “Sky Harbor International Airport [in Phoenix, AZ] became the country’s first to begin testing a controversial new federal screening system that takes X-rays of passenger’s…

Editorials

An Interview With Nandini of Instablogs Network

Nandini Maheshwari is the managing Editor and Publisher of a truly entertaining blog, BornRich. Launched on October 5th, 2005, it has quickly become a place where visitors can come and be amazed at what more than a few dollars will buy. Whether it be the Multi-Media Bed with RUF Cinema, the Chrome Robot TV Stand, the Solarjo Solar Power Purse, or the Sharp Refrigerator with Thawing Mechanism, Nandini scours the web to find interesting and generally quite pricey items that we all might enjoy using if they were more easily obtainable; and always, Nandini will spike her posts with a…

Editorials

Hello World…

I have had a fascination with all types of gadgets and gizmos since I was a child. One of my earliest gadget memories was a Christmas when I was given yet another doll, and my brother got the coolest toy robot in the world. It didn’t take me too long to convince him that he wanted to trade…really!

And thus, the monster was born.

I never expected to become a prolific writer, it just kind of happened. I got my start in late 1999 after answering a software reviewer request at the now defunct smaller.com. By mid 2000 I knew that I wanted my reviews to focus not only on software, but also on the PDA hardware which I found so fascinating.

I soon

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