What: A wireless IM device for AOL Instant Messenger
Where: Many vendors (see below)
How Much: $10-$129 (see below)
The tech world is littered with products that may (or may not) have been good ideas. One of the most famous (infamous?) was DIVX – not the popular MPEG4 video format, but the “DVD rental replacement” player. The premise behind DIVX players was that you could go to Circuit City and buy a DIVX movie disc for around $6. Once you put the disc into a special DVD\DIVX hybrid player, a chip inside the player would record the discs’ title and only allow you to play the disc for 48 hours. After that time, you could play the disc again by paying a “continuation fee” of around $3.25 or you could even upgrade the disc to “Silver status” allowing for unlimited playing. This was all done via a modem built-in to the DIVX player that would connect to a central server and charge your credit card accordingly. Although it seems silly now, there was great fear at the time that certain movies would come out in DIVX format only and thus turn the entire home movie market into one huge pay-per-view moneygrab by the movie studios. (For what it’s worth, the DivX MPEG4 video format was named after the failed DVD substitute as a last “Ha-ha” to the content industry.)
Spooks – If you like 24, there’s a good chance you’ll like Spooks as well. It’s a gritty action\drama set in the anti-terrorism division of MI-5, which is Britain’s version of the FBI (sort of). Because most British shows still lack the big budgets that American shows have, most Brit TV writers rely more on cheaper things like, I dunno… character development. Whereas 24 is populated with a bunch of cartoon characters that we couldn’t care less about (excepting Jack, of course), we get to know each of the characters on Spooks deeply. And this makes us care. And when bad things happen to them, it’s like a kick in the gut. The show is tightly written, so whether the gang is chasing IRA or Muslim terrorists, computer hackers or rouge agents, you’ll almost always be on the edge of your seat. More than once I thought I was gonna have a heart attack before an episode was over. This show pulls no punches. At all. Yes, Spooks sometimes leans heavily on “technobabble” (not to mention technology that simply doesn’t exist in the real world). But still… this show will simply take your breath away!
Lisa and I recently switched from a traditional phone service to voice over IP (VoIP) provider VoiceEclipse (see my review of the service here). One significant change with switching over to VoIP is that (for the most part), you’re stuck with a single phone jack – which is located on the back of the device the VoIP company sends you that connects to your router or cable modem. While it’s certainly possible to rewire your house for VoIP service, it’s simply a task that most folks don’t have the expertise or confidence to do. So the easy answer for this is a multi-headset phone. Although I was eager to volunteer my services, I don’t think that Lisa really wanted me monkeying around with the telephone cabling.