Tuesday, January 2, 2007 at 04:47PM 
Be prepared with a few goodies to take with you. It’s not hard to plan ahead. Here are some direct links to items you can print and play. Stick them in the car and pull them out as a surprise.
Source: Car Bingo / Auto Bingo, Travel Bingo and Many other PRINTABLE Car Games
Thursday, December 28, 2006 at 04:25AM Real-time weather on a Google map
Weather junkies, your site has come in. Weather Bonk gives you not only the local forecast, but also traffic webcams, monthly averages and live conditions overlaid on a Google map.
Just type in your ZIP code or city name to see the weather for your area. You can interact with the map as you normally would, zooming and panning and switching between various views (like satellite and hybrid). Click any forecast or webcam to see more detail in a pop-up window. You can also input a route and see what weather you’ll encounter along the way—great for wintertime road trips. — Rick Broida
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 03:07PM by DAVID POGUE
Let’s face it: we’re in love with the idea of secret location trackers. In “The Da Vinci Code,” the bad guys slap a location-tracking button onto Tom Hanks’s clothing. In “The Matrix,” a location-tracking scorpion robot crawls into Keanu Reeves’s abdomen. In “Total Recall,” a tracking device is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nose.
Many parents may have fleetingly harbored the fantasy of equipping their children with such tracking devices (though perhaps not through their noses or navels). You could find out instantly where your teenager was, or find out that your middle-schooler didn’t come home after school because of a rendezvous you forgot about.
But this is one sci-fi gadget that’s no longer fi, thanks to advanced sci — satellite-based tracking based on Global Positioning System (G.P.S.) technology. At least five companies — Wherify Wireless, Guardian Angel Technology, Disney Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Sprint — have built G.P.S. tracking into something children carry voluntarily: cellphones.
The super-simplified Wherifone ($100), for example, is intended for very young or old customers. Because it has no number pad, it’s probably the smallest cellphone you’ve ever seen — about the size of a Fig Newton. On the company’s Web site, wherifywireless.com, you can program three of its four speed-dial buttons to dial Mom, Dad and Gramps, for example; the fourth summons an address book containing 20 more numbers. The phone can receive calls from any number, although you, the wise parent, can restrict incoming calls using the Web site.
The phone comes in five colors. The plans range from $20 a month (60 minutes of talking) to $47 (200 minutes); checking a phone’s location counts as one minute of calling.
To pinpoint the phone’s location, you call up the Web site, enter your password, click “locate,” and presto: an icon appears on a map — either a street map or actual satellite photo. In the photo view, you can zoom in enough to see individual buildings. These are existing satellite photos —you won’t actually see your child standing there — but this feature is still creepy and awesome.
You can even watch “bread crumbs” appear on the map as the phone moves around (cost: one talk-time minute apiece). That could be helpful if you’re trying to assist someone lost on the road, or in the kinds of emergencies encountered primarily in your nightmares.
The Wherifone is not, however, a full-blown cellphone. It looks and acts more like a “Star Trek” communicator. Its screen is crude, tiny and black-and-white. There’s no Internet, ring tone downloads, games, camera or text messaging, though some parents might consider that a bonus. The phone has a hissy quality that makes all calls sound as if they’re coming from the seashore.
The phone from Guardian Angel Technology (guardianangeltech.com) is quite a collaboration; the company makes neither the phone ( Motorola), the cellular network (Nextel), nor even the billing plan (Boost Mobile).
Instead, what this company brings to the table is the G.P.S. software. The company offers three phone models, none of them cutting edge, and one of them (the $75 base model) looks as if it’s from 1994. You can also buy any phone from the greater selection at boostmobile.com, and send it to Guardian Angel for G.P.S. enhancement. Many of these phones offer Nextel’s walkie-talkie feature.
On the upside, the G.P.S. tracking on the Guardian Angel phones is more sophisticated than its rivals’. For example, you can see a full 30 days’ worth of “bread crumbs,” which could settle the occasional argument about your teenager’s whereabouts the last few weekends. And you can opt to have street names superimposed on the satellite-photo view (just as in Google Maps, which powers this feature).
The downside is the pricing: $30 a month just for the tracking. You can start and stop this service as needed, but it’s still much more expensive than its rivals.
Then again, the Guardian Angel phone is prepaid, so there’s no annual contract, monthly bill or credit check. You buy minutes in advance. Such a plan makes sense for many young consumers, although the minutes are pricey (20 cents each, 10 cents at night and weekends).
If you’re worried that classmates will make fun of the weird-looking Wherifone and Guardian Angel phones, consider Disney Mobile. Its flagship phone ($50 each after rebates and with a two-year commitment), looks like a cutting-edge sleek flip-phone — because it is one. This phone, made by LG and dressed in red and silver, has a camera, video capture, text messaging, Bluetooth, speakerphone and voice dialing, plus Disney-themed ring tones, wallpaper options and phone themes.
You get five free location checks a month; additional checks cost 50 cents each. No bread crumb feature is available, and you see only street maps — not aerial photos.
You can make a location check from a Web site (disneymobile.com) or, better yet, from your other Disney cellphone. (Most people get two Disney phones, since the monthly plans include two phone numbers.)
Your own phone’s screen might say, for example, “Casey’s Phone. Near 18 Whippoorwill Ln, Chicago, IL 60609; accurate within 20 yards” — and you can summon a map right on your phone’s screen.
Performing location checks from your phone is a huge benefit not available to the Wherifone; you can do it with Guardian Angel phones only if your own phone has a full-blown built-in Web browser.
Disney also offers the best parental controls. You can establish allowances for calls, text messages and downloads, for example, and you can limit calling by time period. You can set up whitelists (lists of approved phone numbers) or blacklists (not permitted). You can also blast “family alerts” to the screens of all of your family’s phones at once; a menu offers ready-made phrases like “Running late. Be there soon!”
Unfortunately, these premium services command a premium price. Plans range from $60 a month (450 minutes) to $250 (4,500 minutes). That’s much more expensive than, say, Sprint, which provides Disney’s service. With Sprint, you get twice as many minutes for the same $60. No text messages are included in Disney plans, and calls to Disney phones outside your family aren’t free, either.
Each specialty-phone candidate offers something unique: Wherifone’s four-button simplicity; the pay-as-you-go feature of Guardian Angel; Disney’s parental controls.
Each entails some compromise, though — like inflated rates, a microscopic selection of phones and, perhaps, the need to switch carriers.
For many people, two newcomers to the track-your-kid market may offer less severe trade-offs: Verizon Wireless and Sprint.
For $10 a month, you can add either company’s tracking feature to any regular calling plan. Sprint’s Family Locator feature offers 58 trackable phone models for your children; Verizon’s Chaperone plan offers four phones, including the Wherifone-like four-button Migo for younger children. You, the parent, can perform unlimited location checks either from a Web site or your own Sprint or Verizon phone (30 models from Sprint, 12 from Verizon). Sprint’s map Web page is far more sophisticated than Verizon’s — it offers aerial views, reports of past locations and the ability to add landmarks to the map (like “Robin’s house”), but it’s incompatible with Safari, the Macintosh browser.
Verizon offers, for yet another $10 monthly, another equation-changing feature called Child Zone, in which a text message notifies you every time your child strays beyond geographical boundaries that you’ve set up. It’s like a more humane version of the electric doggie fence.
With all of these phones, your main frustration is likely to be coverage. Guardian Angel’s phone, for example, uses the Nextel network, which is smaller than those of the major carriers. In every case, consult the companies’ coverage maps before you buy.
It’s also worth pondering the moral implications of this technical advance. What these companies are selling you is, in effect, a spying tool. How comfortable are you playing Big Brother — or, rather, Big Momma or Big Daddy?
Only Sprint informs your youngster, by text message, each time you perform a location check, so you can’t snoop around undetected. The other companies permit spying with total stealth.
Maybe that’s a good thing. After all, remember what always happens in the movies once the hero discovers the tracking device. Arnold Schwarzenegger extracts the circuit from his nose, Carrie-Anne Moss sucks the scorpion from Keanu Reeves’s belly button, and Tom Hanks confuses his pursuers by tossing his G.P.S. button into a passing truck.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 04:42PM LED holiday lights might save your life
What kind of idiot would put up a flammable evergreen tree as a holiday decoration and drape it with electric lights and wires? Oh, right, that would be me. But my living room may get a little safer with LED Christmas lights. Using light-emitting diodes in lieu of incandescent bulbs, they dissipate less energy in the form of heat. That makes them less likely to cause a deadly fire. More benefits: They cost 80% less to run, and while that advantage is partly offset by their higher initial cost, the reduced power consumption also fights global warming.
To get an idea of what’s available, check out the sites of Home Depot, Brookstone, or these people — but if you’re in a hurry, try their brick-and-mortar counterparts or your local hardware stores. Oh, and if you’re not in the market for LED Christmas lights, there are also LED menorahs for Hanukkah, ranging from cheap and cheerful to high end. — Al Boline
Source: SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM
Friday, December 22, 2006 at 04:04AM Mozy is free for 2 gigabytes of storage or $4.95 for unlimited storage from one computer.
These Services Make Backing Up Your Files Safe and Inexpensive
By Walter S. Mossberg
Everybody understands that it’s important to back up your computer. But few have the time or the discipline to do so. And that’s why, when hard disks fail, computers are stolen or destroyed, or viruses corrupt data, so many important files are lost.
You could, of course, automatically back up your files to an external hard disk, attached to your PC or to your home network. But that can get expensive, and it doesn’t store your backup remotely, so any disaster at your home or office could also wipe out your backup drive.
There’s another method: backing up over the Internet to a remote server somewhere. This is automated and solves the location issue, but in too many cases it has been costly and complicated, usually with quotas on how much you can back up.
Now, things are changing. I have been testing two online backup services that offer unlimited capacity — no quotas or limits at all — for around $50 a year.
One, called Carbonite, has been unlimited from the start, and Mozy, which previously had limits, is offering unlimited capacity as of today.
Mozy and Carbonite can be set to back up only a few key folders or types of files — say, all your work documents or music files — or, you can set them to back up nearly everything on your computer. If you have a loss, whether a single file, a folder, or everything, they allow you to recover it. Also, you can back up multiple computers with Mozy and Carbonite, but you have to pay extra for each additional machine.
The two services are easy to set up and easy to use. Each worked fine in my tests, both for backing up my key files and also for restoring them.
Carbonite can be downloaded at www.carbonite.com or purchased in stores. There is a 15-day free trial, after which it costs $50 a year, though some stores also sell a $15 version that lasts for three months. The trial version doesn’t back up music or videos by default.
Mozy can be downloaded from www.mozy.com and costs $4.95 a month, or $54.45 if you pay for a year in advance. Mozy also has a totally free version, which is limited to two gigabytes of data. (That is likely to be more than enough, by the way, to cover all of a typical consumer’s word processing, tax and budget files, and plenty of photos.)
Both services currently run only on Windows XP, but both expect to work on the new Windows Vista operating system. And both companies plan to release Macintosh versions next year.
Each installs a fairly small program on your PC that constantly works in the background to back up your data. When a file changes, or a new file is added, it is queued for backup. Carbonite backs up new or changed files 10 minutes after you save and close them, but only backs up each file once a day. Mozy checks the hard disk every two hours and backs up everything that is new or changed. With Mozy, but not with Carbonite, you can also opt for a scheduled backup at a time and interval of your choosing.
The biggest drawbacks of these two products are that backups can be very slow, especially the first backup, and you must have Internet access to do backups and to restore your files. In my tests, on a very fast Internet connection, it still took many hours to do a fairly small initial backup with each product, consisting of about five gigabytes in one case and under two gigabytes in another. A larger backup could take days, though subsequent backups would be much, much quicker.
Both companies encrypt the backed-up files and say they don’t view them. Both try to avoid overburdening or slowing down your computer and Internet connection by going idle or slowing down when you are using your computer for other tasks.
To restore files with Carbonite, you open a sort of virtual representation of your backed-up files and click on what you want restored. If your computer is stolen or not functioning, you can also go to a Web site to initiate a full restore to a new computer.
With Mozy, you can also restore files and folders via a virtual view of your backup that resides on your PC. But Mozy has a much richer Web interface for viewing your backup and for restoring files. From a Web site on any PC, you can log into Mozy and pick any file or folder to retrieve. I even logged in from a Mac, opened a Mozy backup of my Windows PC, and recovered a photo that was then downloaded to the Mac.
Of the two products, I prefer Mozy. Carbonite is a little quicker and simpler to set up, but it’s more limited. If you want to go beyond the default backup choice — your most common documents and settings — you have to troll through your hard disk to select additional folders and files for backup. Mozy also has a default setting, but makes it much easier to alter or customize it.
Mozy offers more-versatile restoring and scheduled backups, and unlike Carbonite, will back up an external hard disk. Mozy will also send you a DVD of all your files, for a fee. Carbonite won’t. Mozy also keeps multiple versions of any file for 30 days. Carbonite doesn’t.
Still, you won’t go wrong with either of these two services, and you’ll sleep better at night.
Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.
Source: Personal Technology — Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.