Gadget Gifts I

From: i4u.com:

Swiss Army Night Vision: Wristwatch with built-in Flashlight

 

The Swiss Army Night Vision Watch has a built-in bright flash-light and other features that help navigate in dark situations.

The Swiss Army Night Vision Watch can shine a clear, bright beam to lead you through a darkened home or illuminate a winter night’s walk. It also has a small red LED locator light that flashes every 10 seconds to guide you to it in a darkened room. At the push of a button, a soft blue light illuminates the dial; a second push activates the white LED flashlight at the front of the watch. A third push of the button activates a powerful strobe to guide others to your location.
The Swiss Army Night Vision Watch sells at Hammacher Schlemmer for $295.95.


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SensorBin - A Smart Trash Can

From the SensorBin Web-Site:
"No more juggling rubbish in one hand and opening the bin with the other. This handsfree automatic lid opening waste bin uses a patented AI smartchip Sensor-system.
Place hand or debris about 6" away from the IR-sensor near the lid. It will open automatically and will close in 3 - 7 seconds after debris has been released and hand moves away from the sensor. Lid will remain open if hand or debris is within 6" of the ir-sensor. It creates a germ & odor free, automated environment. Free up both hands and feet eliminating the need to push, pull or step."

The SensorBin comes in 24 (99Euros), 32 (109Euros) and 42 (139Euros) liter sizes.

Mechanical Fly Catcher

 

The Fly Catcher uses non-toxic bait to lure your least favorite insects into its mouth where two sensors give it the kill signal, clamping its mouth shut, crushing the bug in its plastic jaws (in theory). Opening up with a satisfied burp and ready for its next kill, the Fly Catcher is sure to class up any room you put it in with an extra dose of functional, clapping horror. $36 for the unit, $4 for extra bait.

Catalog Page [ParamountZone via RedFerretJournal]



SLEEPTRACKER

Sleeptracker is a watch you wear while­wait for it­sleeping that monitors muscle activity and tension along with body temperature and mysterious “other signals.” When those signals match the particulars of an “almost-awake” moment (the weakest points of your sleep cycle, usually around the REM phase), it can wake you up. The idea is to program Sleeptracker with the space of time you need to wake up in, and when you’re closest to being naturally conscious during that span, the alarm goes off. How does it do all this? The makers ain’t tellin’. For those of you leading a Fight Club-esque double life, Sleeptracker also functions as a regular water- (and blood-) resistant watch.

Sleeptracker: Waking Up Has Never Been Easier [Sleeptracker]

Google Movies

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7019192/

Google Inc. said Wednesday movie showtimes are now available on its leading Web search engine and can be accessed via personal computers or mobile phones and other wireless devices that use short-message service.

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The new feature also provides information such as theater locations and reviews, and enables users to search for movies by title, plot or genre.

Competitor Yahoo Inc., which is making a big move into entertainment, offers such data as movie showtimes, theater locations, reviews and ticketing purchasing through its Yahoo Movies section.

Users of Web-enabled mobile phones also can use Yahoo Movies to search by movie name or to find out what's playing at nearby theaters.

Google, Yahoo and most recently Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Internet unit are battling to offer the most comprehensive Web search products since those services fuel fast-growing advertising revenues.

? Reuters 2005

Instructions from Google:

To find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you, type "movies", "showtimes" or the name of a current film into the Google search box. If you've already saved your location by using Google Local, the top search result will display showtimes for nearby theaters for the movie you've chosen.

example:  movies

To find theatres and showtimes near you for a currently playing movie, simply search for the movie?s name.

example:  million dollar baby

Can't remember a movie title, or just looking for something new to see? You can use the "movie:" operator to search for films related to a specific actor, director or plot detail.

example:  movie: clint eastwood

Want to read about the movies you find? Your search results for any film will include an average rating out of 5 stars and several snippets from online reviews, along with links to the reviews themselves. Click the "reviews" link near any title for a complete list of online reviews of this film.

Erase Your Data Securely

From Lockergnome:

No matter how many times you tell people, they just don?t get that formating is simply not enough! The BBC reports that many companies out there are just not taking the time to make sure all of the data is being properly ?zeroed out? by a professional. I guess this can be attributed to sheer stupidity, but let me tell you one thing. If my bank or something like it ever got me in a world of hurt, there would be heck to pay!

A University of Glamorgan study found more than half the hard drives they saw still contained sensitive information.

It is feared some of the information could be used by criminals.

The Information Commissioner's Office, which monitors data disposal, has said it will be tough on any organisations breaching the Data Protection Act.

The study examined 105 hard drives which had been purchased on internet auction sites and was able to access 92 of them.

The data recovered by the university team included staff passwords and national insurance numbers, a template to print a university degree and even detailed information about school children.

Researchers found 57% of the readable disks contained data which allowed the original owners - ranging from organisations in the leisure and financial services industries to a number of universities - to be identified.

A fifth of the disks contained financial information, including sales receipts and profit and loss reports.

There are many free programs that will securely erase your data.  Here is one that will securely erase a single file, a folder, or an entire hard drive:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/Eraser.shtml

CutePDF - Create a PDF of any document

CutePDF Writer is a Windows freeware program that lets you make a PDF (Portable Document Format) file out of any document.

CutePDF Writer creates a virtual printer on your computer. When you print a document from any program to the CutePDF ?printer,? it will produce a PDF file from that document. Pretty handy for distributing files in the popular and easy-to-open PDF format.
Download at: CutePDF [Acro Software]

Source: Lifehacker.com

Vacation Home Rentals

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/travel/13prac.html?ei=5088&en=b50ca6ee0e58a803&ex=1266037200&partner=rssnyt&pagewanted=print&position=
PRACTICAL TRAVELER

More Choices for Vacation Home Renters

By BOB TEDESCHI

VACATIONERS seeking a true home away from home have been fairly well served by the Web's many house rental services. But options have recently improved, thanks partly to the re-emergence, after a two-year hiatus, of one of the more useful vacation home sites.

VacationSpot.com, which was owned by Expedia but suspended operations in 2003 because Expedia wanted to focus its attention on the travel package market, has recently reappeared - this time under the corporate flag of Expedia's sister company, Hotels.com, part of InterActiveCorp. The new site offers a refined complement to the array of less polished but increasingly useful sites in the category, like Rentalo, CyberRentals and VRBO.com.

Those who click around to these and other sites may quickly notice that VacationSpot lists just 2,000 properties for rent, most of them in the United States - significantly fewer than its competitors. VRBO.com, for example, has more than 33,000 homes and condominiums worldwide.

But Daniel G. Proctor, vice president of vacation rentals for Hotels.com, said: "We're very selective in who we accept for the site. Consumers don't want the 550 choices in Orlando. They just want the top 30 or 50." Among VacationSpot's listings are a number of exclusives, like Ors Vacation Homes, which manages 300 condominiums and homes with pools in the Orlando area; a three-bedroom Ors home was recently offered for $1,120 for a week in April. Rentalo, by contrast, lists 669 vacation homes in the Orlando area for the same period.

To winnow down the list, Mr. Proctor said, VacationSpot employees research the available properties in a given market, including, in many instances, on-site inspections by the company's regional market managers.

Executives at most of the major vacation rental sites say they will drop advertisers whose listings result in two or three customer complaints. And some will help customers get their security deposits returned.

VacationSpot does not guarantee satisfaction, but Mr. Proctor said it would mediate disputes and arrange for new accommodations if customers contacted the site immediately after discovering a problem. (VacationSpot declined to make a customer available for an interview.) Unlike some other sites, like VacationRentals.com and VRBO.com, neither of which offer phone numbers on their sites, VacationSpot offers toll-free phone support. Other sites, including VRBO.com and Greatrentals.com, make clear they're simply listing homes, not vouching for the quality of the properties.

At this stage in its development, VacationSpot's inventory is limited. While Florida, Phoenix and Hawaii are well represented, many popular destinations like Cape Cod and the New Jersey shore are barely accounted for. The type of housing is also unevenly represented: a very good selection of condos, but houses so far account for fewer than 20 percent of VacationSpot's mix.

Selection is much less a problem at companies like VRBO (acronym for vacation rentals by owner), which has been operating since 1995. According to David Clouse, founder of VRBO, it has made several recent improvements. Users can now search for properties within certain neighborhoods or condo complexes at the most popular locations, such as Lake Tahoe, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and Hilton Head, S.C., and peruse availability calendars for about half of the homes on the site.

Gauging how well an owner cares for a particular property is increasingly easy, as advances in technology allow sites to offer more pictures than in previous years. VacationRentals.com, for instance, late last year began offering up to eight photos per home, compared with half that number previously.

CyberRentals.com, whose 16,500 listings are mostly in the Northeast, similarly offers up to eight pictures per listing and recently began listing the homes that offer online guest books. Executives of many rental sites said that the mere fact that owners feel confident enough to subject themselves to such reviews is often an indicator of quality.

Some rental sites have also begun using more sophisticated search mechanisms - a critical feature when the number of properties reaches 100,000, as with Rentalo.com. The site, which also sells rooms on behalf of about 40,000 hotel, motel and B & B properties, late last year started allowing users to search for homes by such criteria as the number of rooms and dates.

While the megarental sites offer the greatest breadth of inventory, regional sites like CapeCodRental.com or CapeCodVacation.com can turn up houses missed by the others. Such were the sites that landed Suzanne Frisch and her husband, Jonathan Levine, of Guilford, Conn., in their vacation homes in recent summers. Ms. Frisch turned to the Web after using a broker who once arranged a rental that turned out to be particularly shoddy. "Online, you have a very good idea of what the houses look like, but you also get e-mail access to the broker or owner, and an e-mail exchange is so much easier than phone," she said.

Still, Ms. Frisch said Internet descriptions can be "as highly exaggerated as personal ads." Even with online rentals, she said, her family has put up with substandard grills, showers and furnishings. "So I've learned to take some of it with a grain of salt."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company