Technically car wax is not a gadget but I figured I share my experience with Eagle One’s Spray NanoWax and Wax As U Dry.

I come from the old school that to get a nice pop on your car you need to spend an entire day doing a 3 or 4 step process of clay bar, glazing, and waxing with a Porter Cable 7424 random orbital polisher.

I have to tell you though these Eagle one products are fantastic especially for those that don’t have an entire afternoon to spend waxing their cars.

The first product I tried was Wax As U Dry (WAUD). After washing the car you simply spray it on the car and then dry with a micor-fiber towel. It leaves a very nice shine and is especially made for touching up between complete wax jobe to maintain a shine. I have used it on my daily driver as well when there was a very long time between waxinmg and it did a nice job. The weakness of WAUD is that is does not last too long, maybe a month or so. But is is so easy to apply it’s not a big deal. It works on windshields nicely as well. It can’t get simpler than this.

The next product from Eagle One I have tried is NanoWax. The Eagle One literature claims they have some sort of a nanotechnolgy that penetrates the surface better which provides better and longer lasting protection. I decided to try the spray version.

Once again the application could not be easier. All you do is spray the product on your car and wipe it off. Unlike traditional waxes it doesn’t seem to haze up, but it will dry clear.

The results were pretty impressive and rivaled products like Meguiars NXT. Eagle One claims NanoWax will hide swirl marks and I have to say it did conceal them to a certain extent.

So the next time your looking for some easy, affordable car care check out these products. They may not replace a 3 step all day process but for the effort they are excellent.

In the US there are three choices in the Garmin C3XX series. The Garmin C320, C330 and C340. It’s a little confusing to decide which one to buy.

I can say pretty confidently to cross the C330 off your list.

The main features that are different on these three units are:
- A built in hard drive to store maps
- Unit Speaks Street Names and POI Names

So here’s how I see it. The only difference between the Garmin C320 and C330 is that you will need to upload maps from your computer to the SD card on the C320. You can buy a 1GB SD card for about $20 which will hold the entire US. That brings the total price of the C320 to $295. Which is $25 cheaper than the C330.

Now that we eliminated the C330 the choice remains of it’s worth $100 to have the C340 say “Turn Left Onto High Street” as opposed to “Turn left in 50 feet”. In very informal surveys friends have said they prefer the unit that would say the street names. Some feel it’s a waste of money.

Personally I live the idea of the unit that speaks the street names. It would mean I could keep my eyes on the road and have some feedback that I took the correct turn if the roads were close to each other.

Like a lot of people I have a ton of old photos stored in boxes. I have always wanted to find some kind of automatically feed the pictures to the scanner like commercial printers have.

I did a Google search for “scanner with automatic feed” and “automatic photo scanner”, “scanner with feeder” etc. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of vendors that provide this type of product. There are plenty of choices for photo scanners with slide and negative adapters.

It turn out that at one time Epson made a scanner that did exactly what I wanted. It was the Epson Perfection 2480 Limited Edition Photo Scanner

I also found the HP ScanJet 5530 Scanner but it had less than stellar reviews.

I then found out that Epson still has the Multi Photo Business Card Feeder B12B813372 available. I did some searching and the retail price goes for about $149 for the feeder. The feeder works with the Perfection 2480, 2580, 3490 & 3590 Scanners. The only problem is that these particular models are no longer readily available.

I of course searched ebay and scored a Sealed Epson 2580 scanner for $85 shipped. Cool !
So for about $235 I have a pretty cool scanner than can autofeed photos and also scan negatives and slides.

There were essentially no instructions with the automatic feeder. I soon discovered that all the documentation is installed on your computer when you install the software for the scanner. Once I read the Reference Guide installation of the feeder was very easy.

The largest photos that can be scanned are 4X6. Epson says you can stack up to 25 photos in the tray.

So far the scanner has worked perfectly. It sucks the photos in and when the scan is complete it spits them back out. The total time per photo is about 30 seconds. Normally this would be a slow pace to work but you can just set a stack of photos in the tray and go off and do other things. I’m guessing I can scan about 100 photos per hour pretty easily.

I’ll report back in a few weeks once I really start to go to town. I am going to be using Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 to scan and organize the photos.

I came across a gadget that at first had me scratching my head. It’s a USB turntale that makes recording vinyl records to CD easier. It’s made by Ion Audio and can be bought at online stores such as zzounds.com for about $150.

At first I could not imagine owning any piece of vinyl that was not available on CD or Itunes. However this summer I attended a square dance (don’t ask). The “caller” was using vinyl 45’s. he even had modern hits like “Cotton Eyed Joe”. I asked why he isn’t using CD’s and where does he buy his vinyl. Apparently Square dance records is one of the genres that kind of got overlooked by CD’s. As far as getting new songs on vinyl there is a resource in Oklahoma that sells modern songs on 45.

According to reviews people really love this turntable. It simply connects to your PC via the USB port. The turntable comes with software to convert your old vinyl collection directly to CD or MP3. At this point it’s a snap to get it onto an Ipod.

Time to get all your Polka albums onto CD ! What’s next ? An USB 8 Track player ?

I had recently installed Photoshop Elements. The next day I plugged in the Ipod and Photoshop Elements automatically opened up to try to find pictures on the Ipod.

I really don’t want this to happen. The reason it happens is that Photoshop Elements sees the Ipod as a card reader or a USB device.
In the preferences for Elements click on “Camera or Card Reader”. Uncheck the box that says “Autolaunch Adobe Photo Downloader On Device Connect”. Then click ok.

Today apple announced the “Apple iPhone”. This story reported that Apple could not call it the iPhone since Cisco was using that brand name to market their IP phones. We’ll see is there any lawsuits.

I will be the first to admit I am not an Apple fanboy but the iPhone looks very cool indeed. The iPhone runs OSX, integrates with Itunes, had a has a 2 MegaPixel digital camera. The price is $499 for a 4Gb model.

I’m waiting to see if Apple ever releases the rumored iPod Video and will it similar to the form of the iPhone. There has been much debate if a touch screen is the right way to go for an iPod Video. And of course it would probably have to be hard drive based since 4G is rather small for a video device.

I have received the following error message on a number of my computers:

Application failed to initialize: 0×800106ba. A problem caused Windows Defender Service To Stop. To start the service, restart your computer or search help and support on how to start a service manually.

Apparently a lot of people are receiving this error as well when they start their computer. It looks like the license has expired for Windows Defender and we are supposed to install the latest version.

How lame is it that it’s not on autoupdate or the error message give a little more help as to the exact nature of the problem with Windows Defender.

I was at NewEgg looking to buy a USB Flash drive. I never considered doing research or comparing specs since I thought they all were basically the same item with different housings.

I was aware that certain drives were U3 compliant which means they will allow you to run certain application directly from the USB drive itself. One popular U3 application is Firefox. It is prety cool to plug in a flash drive into any computer and run Firefox. To learn more about U3 check out the official site.

So I was searching for USB drivea at NewEgg and I was basing my choice on price and style. A comment in one of the reviews caught my eye. It mentioned that a certain model was “slow”.

I never considered read and write speeds when choosing a flash drive. Well after a few hours os research I have learned quite a bit.

Apparently there are different types of technologies to manufacturer flash memory chips. One is SLC (Single-Level Cell) and the other is MLC (Multi-Level Cell) Flash technology. SLC chips are faster. I almost never saw SLC or MLC mentioned in any specs, so the it’s pretty useless knowledge.

One item you will mentiones in flash drive specifications is transfer rates. There are usually differences between read and wrote rates but I’m going to assume it’s all the same. The slowest USB drives transfer data between 3-6Mbs. The fastest can approach 20Mb/s and even higher. Keep in mind that USB 2.0 is specifies a max transfer rate of 60 MB/s but I have never seen that rate approached by any USB device in the real world.

If you are simply storing word documents or a few music files then the speed won’t really matter to you. However I plan to transfer many files that can easily use up a Gig of space. There is a pretty big difference between taking 50 seconds versus 200 seconds to transfer data.

So which drive am I going to buy ?
As of right now I am looking to get a 2GB drive. I reviewed test data at Toms Hardware and then cross checked this info with prices at NewEgg

I have narrowed it down to the following choices.
Corsair 2GB Flash Drive @ $35
Transcend JetFlash @ $39
OCZ Rally 2GB @ $35

The Corsair has many great reviews, it looks cool and has a rubber casing to help protect it better. However it is a little bulkier because of the casing. There are times when space is an issue when plugging in the USB drive to a port.

The Transcend and OCZ drives are speed demons and a little smaller.

I probably will be a total geek and carry the drive on my keychain so the Corsair is looking like the drive of choice for me.

The plot does thicken a bit if you consider ReadyBoost when choosing a USB drive. ReadyBoost will be a technology available in Windows Vista which will aloow you to use your USB Flash Drive as RAM to boost system performance (in theory at least). I have no intention on upgrading to Vista in the near future so ReadyBoost is not a consideration at this time for me.

In order for a USB drive to be used with ready boost it must meet certain requirements that rae tested when you plug the USB drive into your Windows Vista computer.

-The USB Key must be at least USB 2.0
-The device must be able to do 3.5 MB/s for 4 KB random reads uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s for 512 KB random writes uniformly across the device.

Now just because your USB drive’s specifications says it can perform 10Mb/s transfers does not meant it will work with ReadyBoost. The 3.5 MB/s is for random reads. Most manufacturers sates transfer specs for sequential reads rates.

Many reviewers mentioned that the OCZ Rally did pass the readyboost test. I suspect the Transcend JetFlash would work as well since it has a very random access time compared to other USB drives.

Apparently Microsfot is working with manufacturers to help them test their devices so they can label their USB Flash Drives as “ReadyBoost capable devices”.

Here is a nice ReadyBoost FAQ

According to CBS News a company is ready to launch footware with embeddded GPS technology. The inventor is Isaac Daniel.

I think this is a pretty cool use of GPS especially for concerned parents or hikers. The shoes start at about $350. This is a nice step up from the Digital Angel RFID chips. It looks similar to the Global Pet Finder technology only for sneakers. Cool.

6 months ago I had 3 Ipod users in my household. There were two Nanos and one Ipod Video. I installed I tunes 6 and was hoping that each user on Windows XP could mangae their own Ipod and playlist. Needless to say it didn’t go very well and I pulled my hair out.

This Christmas we updated one of the Ipods to an Ipod 5.5 30G, which requires Itunes 7. I waited till I had a few days of free time to attempt the upgrade based on my past experience. I backed up all three playlists for each user and then crossed my fingers as I installed Itunes 7.

I’m happy to say it all worked perfectly !

All three users sharing the same Windows XP computer can manage their Ipods.