I had to walk to school in the snow with no iPod

This is one of those things going from one inbox to the other on the Internet, but it's interesting, because it lets us step back for a moment to see how far we've come. When I tell my kids about the time when there was no World Wide Web, they look at me blankly.

My grown son can sit on the couch in a position that resembles a deranged yoga posture, watch the Yankees -- and interrupt me if I try to switch to a rerun of Law & Order, read political essays on his laptop, text his sister and send funny cat photos to his mother on his personal phone, and reply to business emails on his Blackberry. I sit there trying to remember why I thought I wanted to get up and go to the bathroom.

Here it is, author unknown:

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... both ways.

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.  You've got it so easy.  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia.  

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it

1) When I was a kid we didn't have the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog.  

2) There was no email We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen.  Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there.  Stamps were 10 cents.

3) Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us.  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe.

4) There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes.  If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yoursel.

5) Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up.  There were no CD players.  We had tape decks in our car.  We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless.

6) We didn't have Call Waiting.  If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it.

7) There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". Oh my gosh.  The horror!  And then there's texting.  You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

8) And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was.  It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!  You had to pick it up and take your chance.

9) We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics.  We had the Atari 2600.  With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'.  Your screen guy was a little square.  You actually had to use your imagination.  And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen.  And you could never win.  The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died.  Just like life.

10) You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on You were screwed when it came to channel surfing  You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel.  No remotes.

11) There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.   We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons.

12) And we didn't have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove.

13) And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long.  Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort.  And if you came back inside... you were doing chores.

14) And car seats - oh, please!  Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on.  If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place.

You wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970.

(Thanks, Lainey)

When you're trying to find someone

There's an app for that. A new company, Uncommon Projects, has created something called Marco.

The product, which is called Marco after the popular children’s game Marco Polo, works through text messages or an iPhone application. It allows two people to share their location with each other, and then helps them meet by offering directions to a meeting point.

Tarikh Korula, who came up with the idea, says the goal was to create a simple one-to-one connection that did not require logging in, a robust social network or broadcasting one’s location to everyone.

“Is it realistic to expect parents, partners and colleagues to adopt social networking services just to meet one another? There needs to be a simpler way to find someone and connect.” Mr. Korula said the service was “something my mom could use, something private instead of social, an experience that is always opt-in.”

I'm thinking this would work when Goodwyfe gets lost in the grocery store, which happens every time we go in together.

 

Unseen visitors to your computer

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following your every move online.

A startup called PubMatic is launching a new tool to help websites determine how many tracking files are being installed on users’ computers, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“The harm is that profiles [of users] are being built without the publisher knowing about it,” CEO Rajeev Goel says. The company using the hidden tracking files can then make money by selling the user’s profile to advertisers without the Web publisher’s knowledge, he said. And the files can slow the website down as well.

Mr. Goel said the number of tracking tools used varies widely depending on the website and the ad network involved. He said he sometimes sees as many as 10 to 12 invisible tools — often referred to as “pixels” or “beacons” — being placed via one ad.

A competitor, Rubicon Project, is testing a similar technology.

Those smart pens at work

Clive Thompson describes how Cincia Dervishaj, a student in New York City, uses the smart pen from Livescribe. It suggests to me -- a former reporter who took notes for a living -- how things might radically change.

Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said.

Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream.

Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them. 

Imagine how you might use this pen.

Protect yourself at the ATM

From Wired: Authorities in Europe have seized a nice video recorded by a group of carders showing the criminals installing a skimming device and hidden camera at an ATM in the United Kingdom to steal customer PINs.

Filmed from the hidden pinhole camera itself, installed above the ATM, the video shows how easy it is to capture the PINs as customers enter them on the keypad. But a few wily customers, who are wise to the carders’ tricks, manage to thwart their scheme by shielding the keypad as they type in their number.



Some safety tips from The European ATM Security Team:

• Protect your PIN by standing close to the ATM and shielding the keypad with your other hand.
• Check to see if anything looks unusual or suspicious about the ATM. Jiggle the card slot. If there appears to be anything stuck onto the card slot or keypad, don’t use it. Don’t try to remove suspicious devices.
• Be cautious if strangers offer to help you at an ATM, even if your card is stuck or you’re having difficulties, and don’t allow anyone to distract you.

Will iPads replace laptops on the road?

Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist, took an iPad instead of a laptop on a 10-day trip to Paris, and here's what he discovered.

The experiment was a pleasant success. With a few exceptions, I got everything done that I would have done with a laptop. Yet I toted a lot less weight, enjoyed much better battery life, and had a computer that started up instantly whenever I reached for it. I also was able to combine the functions of a comfortable e-reader with those of a laptop.

I devoted part of each day to wading through hundreds of emails, reading and reviewing documents, keeping up with work-related news on websites and social networks, and doing other non-vacation chores. The iPad had no trouble coping with these tasks. It was a no-hassle experience.  

But it won't work for everyone.

I wasn't producing long documents, using specialized company software, creating and delivering presentations, or doing some of the other things typical on business trips that might have required a laptop, or been more easily done on one.

Still, it's amazing what he was able to do.

During the trip, I read or skimmed thousands of emails, and reviewed and made editing suggestions on a colleague's column. I perused documents in PDF and Microsoft Office formats, using both the iPad's built-in document viewers and a handful of productivity apps, including Apple's iWorks suite, Quickoffice, GoodReader, and DocumentsToGo. At one point, I needed to consult a document on a computer back home. It was no problem. I merely used the iPad version of SugarSync, a backup and synchronizing service, to find and fetch the file.

Not bad.

Coupon clipping goes high tech

Some new ways to get a few cents off at the grocery store:

• ShopRite, Kroger, Safeway and other stores allow shoppers to digitally load coupons onto their store loyalty cards via the store’s site and third parties such as Shortcuts.com and the Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) eSaver. Swiping the card at checkout automatically redeems eligible coupons.

• More stores, including Victoria’s Secret and Zales, are pushing into smart phone-based scannable coupons for use in stores—just show your phone, coupon side up, and a cashier rings up your savings. 

• Location-based apps like Foursquare also offer deals for frequent shoppers. And Cellfire offers a variety of grocery coupons--and lets you save some of them to your grocery store loyalty card—to show in-store.

• As more retailers target coupons to consumers who sign up for email lists, there are still plenty of codes to be found at online coupon aggregation sites, says Warren Storey, the vice president of product and marketing insight for Epsilon, a marketing firm.

• People on store email lists share the codes on sites like RetailMeNot.com and CouponCabin.com--both coupon aggregation sites that collect codes from users. RetailMeNot.com reports that during the first half of 2010, site visitors redeemed coupons worth $63.6 million in savings. For all of 2009, their savings totaled $52.4 million.

At play in the Internet of things

Here's something you can do to contribute to the future of mankind, and you don't have to be any more tech savvy than a pig farmer or a bartender.

ARM Holdings, the British chip designer, has created a program called mbed, the research effort puts a kit for a microcontroller – sort of a basic, low-power computer on a chip – in the hands of engineers and hobbyists for about $59. Then, ARM provides a set of software tools for bringing that microcontroller to life and linking it with other interesting items like accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, displays and thermometers.

The New York Times reports:

“I was intrigued by the fact that people in the microcontroller industry won’t actually be the people who invent what they’re used for,” Mr. Simon Ford, the ARM researcher leading mbed. “If there is a guy who knows about microcontrollers and a pig farmer who knows about pigs, it will be the pig farmer who will see how to automate feeding his animals so he can sleep more.

“I want to see how you get people to experiment. Maybe a washing machine repair man will figure out how to get the machines to report back to him and revolutionize the machines to get a competitive advantage. The point is that I don’t know what they’ll be used for.”

The mbed device can plug straight into a U.S.B. port on a computer, appearing as a flash drive to the PC. People can then create programs or download existing modules from the mbed Web site and get off and running in a matter of minutes.

The idea of a chip in everything isn't new. When I was at IBM in the late 90s we were exploring this concept. CEO Lou Gerstner decided on a name for it: ubiquitous computing. What is interesting about mbed is that ARM is enlisting the creative power of the masses. The big companies are doing this, because they realize that their scientists and engineers don't hold a monopoly on ideas.

Be the first on your block!

iPod, uPod, we all Pod

Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the iPod, and I've been seriously thinking about looking into buying one.

I'd like to be one of those people walking around with white wires coming out of their ears. I'd also like to wear all black and take my dog to work.

I seem to always be multiple generations behind in technology. I was down in the basement the other day -- always a scary proposition -- and came across boxes of cassette tapes. Remember those? Music for the car, but cars don't have cassette players anymore. And a ton of brand spanking new blank tapes.

Time to retire our old stereo system with its big speakers -- great for lamps and plants, btw. So I'm thinking of getting an iPod and a Bose thingy with a dock for the iPod. I'll have to get all these CDs onto the iPod but maybe there's a thingy for that. (I was about 10 years behind on CDs, too.)

So iPod has come out with a new line of toys. Here's what you can do with the iTouch.

Music, movies, TV shows, videos, games, applications, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, photos, Safari web browser, email, Maps, FaceTime, HD video recording and editing, Nike + iPod support built in.

It won't change a flat tire. With 64 gigabytes, it can store 80 hours of video or 14,000 songs. Who has 14,000 songs? How many songs are there anyway?

Some folks at WikiAnswers have wrestled with that. Here are two responses.

On Average, there are 50 albums released every week in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1878 but it was always a very poor seller. The first artist to sell serious numbers of records was Frank Sinatra in the 1940 (250,000,000 records in his lifetime), so lets start there!
Lets also assume that there are 12 songs per album.
50 albums per week * 52 weeks = 2500 per year
2500 per year * 69 years = 179,400 unique albums (since 1940)
12 songs * 179,400 albums = 2,152,800 songs
So the average points to about 2,100,000 songs being released in the United States of America and the United Kingdom (and nowhere else) in musical history, give or take.

A visit to Gracenote's media database shows 97,206,484 songs in the database. This includes international music, different edits of the same song, and recordings of classical music, but indicates that the 2.1 million above may actually be a low estimate. 

Okay, there you have it, give or take. This does not count that antidepressant jingle I can't get out of my head.

Oh, nearly forgot. The original purpose of this post was to tell you that Popular Science has reviewed the new iPods.

Parents, don't let your kids see this

Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster.

The researchers found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.

"It's not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster," author Daphne Bavelier said. "Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference."

People make decisions based on probabilities that they are constantly calculating and refining in their heads, Bavelier explains. The process is called probabilistic inference. The brain continuously accumulates small pieces of visual or auditory information as a person surveys a scene, eventually gathering enough for the person to make what they perceive to be an accurate decision.


"Decisions are never black and white," she said. "The brain is always computing probabilities. As you drive, for instance, you may see a movement on your right, estimate whether you are on a collision course, and based on that probability make a binary decision: brake or don't brake."

What your digital photos reveal about you

I watch too many crime shows on TV, but one thing I know is the good guys can zero in on the bad guys by tracking their cell phones. It seems like every show uses cell phone tracking in one way or another. I have no idea if any of this is true.

PC World says some of it is: The geotagging data contained in many mobile phone images lets strangers know exactly where you are. Whoa, dude!

When you upload an image to Twitter a subset of the 75 million Twitter users will know your exact location. Digital photos automatically store a wealth of information--known as EXIF data--produced by the camera. Most of the data is harmless, but about 3 percent of all photos posted on Twitter contain location data, and that figure is growing. Anyone on the Web who can read the data knows where the photographer was standing.

Thank goodness I don't know how to do that! Here's what can happen:

Mayhemic Labs' Ben Jackson detailed how he found personal details about a man in a photo. Using accompanying geotagging data, Jackson located the man's house on Google Earth. Then he found a name associated with the house where the photo was taken, leading him to a Facebook account that yielded a birth date, marriage status, and friends. A second username listed on the Facebook page led to a second Twitter account, and so forth. The point here is that once you start pulling on the thread of information contained in a geotagged image, a single photo can reveal a whole trove of personal data--far more than you might think.

Book 'em, Dano!

PC World explains the science and how to disable the geotagging feature on smart phones here.

More life from your batteries

If you're like me you long ago gave up on trying to remember what to do with all the rechargeable batteries in our lives. Fully charge? Let them go dead before charging? What?

Popular Mechanics went after this question and basically acknowledged the confusion. Here, the magazine says, is what we do know.

The safest life for lithium-ion is one of moderation. The only way to minimize all of the factors that eat away at capacity is to pretend that there's less effective capacity. Never charge the batteries to 100 percent, and never let them come close to empty. The narrower that band of charge and discharge, the better, since what amounts to the cells' metabolic activity slows at 40 to 60 percent capacity. Chevy takes the choice out the user's hands, keeping the Volt's battery within a range of 20 to 80 percent charge.

Isidor Buchmann, founder and CEO of British Columbia-based battery-testing firm Cadex Electronics, has no proof, but suspects that the higher cycle counts of Apple's newer built-in laptop batteries use a similar approach, cutting off the voltage to cells before they reach 4.2 V. Whether it's true or not, that appears to be the best strategy for the current generation of li-ion (particularly the cobalt oxide variety found in consumer electronics). Ignore cycle count, and focus on keeping gadgets as close to half-full as circumstances permit. Full batteries are fine for travel, dead batteries are an unavoidable setback, but for day-to-day operation, let the Goldilocks standard be your guide.

Here's one other thing we know: Leaving li-ion plugged in is a problem. Even when persistent heat is not an issue, a constant state of charge is tantamount to working your batteries to death.

I'm not sure we've figured this thing out yet.

A Facebook warning

Police in Nashua, NH, arrested three men who used Facebook to target and burglarize dozens of homes, looting between $100,000 and $200,000 worth of property and goods, Fox News reports.  

The two teenagers and a Massachusetts resident used sites like Facebook to find people who were on vacation or away from town -- and then targeted their homes. In addition to featuring status updates, Facebook includes a feature called Places, where users can check in to a specific location, notably one that isn't their house.

In February, a website gained notoriety for highlighting the risks of such actions. It's name: PleaseRobMe.com.

Tech News Daily has some guidance on using Facebook safely.

• Do not include your home address in social networking profiles and set your general privacy settings to "Friends only".
• The default setting in Facebook for check-ins is "Friends only" but because most Facebook users have friends that are really only acquaintances or connected loosely to other friends, it's important to customize this setting. Open the dropdown menu associated with "Places I check in" and select "Customize." Add friends whom you know and trust.
• Next you'll need to adjust the "People Here Now" setting, because although you've limited your check-ins to specific people, anyone who checks in to a location where you have already checked in will see that you are there. Uncheck the box next to "Include me in 'People Here Now' after I check in."
• Finally, consider blocking the ability for friends to check you into a location to avoid practical jokes or worse. Go to the "Things others share" section, select the dropdown box associated with "Friends can check me in to Places" and select "Disabled."

Is this you in the near future?

Using Wikipedia wisely

I turn to Wikipedia many times during the day, particularly for background information when I'm blogging. It has a reputation for being unreliable -- students are advised not to cite it in their papers -- but I'm familiar enough with judging the quality of information from many years as a journalist and editor that I'm comfortable with it.


Here's what Wikipedia says.

As a wiki, articles are never considered complete and may be continually edited and improved. Over time, this generally results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a neutral representation of information.

Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as displaying a single viewpoint; and, after a long process of discussion, debate, and argument, they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus. 

Others may, for a while, become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time—months perhaps—to achieve better balanced coverage of their subject. In part, this is because editors often contribute content in which they have a particular interest and do not attempt to make each article that they edit comprehensive. However, eventually, additional editors expand and contribute to articles and strive to achieve balance and comprehensive coverage. In addition, Wikipedia operates a number of internal resolution processes that can assist when editors disagree on content and approach. Usually, editors eventually reach a consensus on ways to improve the article.

I would not rely on Wikipedia for anything critical or controversial, but I'm okay using it for, say, biographical notes on people. It's easy to judge the reliability of a piece by the information it contains and by checking the footnotes, which I do often. Obviously, what it says about health matters is useful, but I wouldn't self-diagnose from it. Or anything else on the Internet. Duh.


Here are some fascinating facts about Wikipedia.

• It has 3,407,151 articles, and 21,482,217 pages in total.
• There have been 411,792,023 edits.
• There are 849,873 uploaded files.
• There are 13,019,628 registered users, including 1,754 administrators.

Those numbers come from Wikipedia's own entry about itself, which is constantly updated. And this is one of the strengths of the site. As it says:

Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years.

Because I'm usually looking for basic facts about something, I'll go to Wikipedia first. And for most topics, I've found, Wikipedia is nearly always at the top of a Google search.

Is someone listening in on your phone?

Phone hacking is likely to be far more widespread than anyone has acknowledged, The Economist reports.

Many corporate telephone systems and answering machines allow for the remote collection of voicemail. Voicemail passwords are often set to match the voicemail extension, or are set to the easy-to-guess codes. And brute-force attacks to reveal a PIN may also be possible in some circumstances.

In America it appears it is trivially easy for anyone who knows a little about phone systems to access someone else's voicemail by "spoofing" the caller ID. From AT&T:

We are aware of companies that offer “spoofing” technology, which enables others to gain unauthorized access to wireless voicemail accounts that are not protected by a password. If you are concerned about unauthorized access to your wireless voicemail account, we recommend you add a password to your voicemail account.

The Economist on how they do it:

You can either call a central number and key in the mobile phone number, or you can tie up the mobile phone on one call while a second call is diverted to voicemail. The four-digit personal identification number (PIN) is then easy to guess, or trick out of the phone companies.

The New York Times reports that often, all it took was a simple four-digit PIN, such as 1111 or 4444, which many users did not bother to change after buying their mobiles. But even if PINs were changed, there is a short list of very frequently used codes which are easy enough to guess. Users prefer numeric passwords such as 1234, 4321, 2345, 3456 (etc), 0000, 1111, 2222 (etc), 369 or 741 (which form vertical lines on a telephone keypad).

This is not your father's note-taking

As a reporter I've spent my career in search of the perfect combination of pen and notebook. I'm still looking. I use a digital voice recorder today, but now I'm starting to look at these fancy new digital pens.

Wired has a review of Livescribe's Echo.

Packed with an ARM 9 processor, an infrared camera, a built-in speaker and mic, the Echo lets you write, record and then seamlessly transfer all your notes (with the help of the company's free desktop software) to your Mac or PC.

Well, of course that's impossible. Of course I'm old enough to remember hearing about some called a "CRT" (cathode ray tube), a TV-like screen on which reporters could type and letters would appear. Impossible, I said.

You're looking at something around $200 for the Echo, depending on how much memory you want -- and depending on the memory of how much you have left in the bank. However:

The real allure of the Echo remains the way the software and hardware work together to make your life easier. Yes, there's something immensely satisfying in seeing your deranged scrawlings rasterize onscreen. And for college students and journalists in particular, the Pencast option is quite simply a Godsend. Simply hit the record icon on the included paper and start taking notes as you usually would. Once you've finished the lecture/meeting/interview, you can not only replay the entire recording, but also instantly move from one section to another by simply tapping on a specific note. The pen will automatically play back the audio from that precise moment. This has the obvious benefit of helping you navigate long, meandering lectures, but it also frees you up to write random or tangential thoughts without the fear of missing important information. 

I feel like a new toy coming on.

How to find your car in a parking lot

"I found it!"

Wandering aimlessly through parking lots is a thing of the past with some new gizmos for smart phones. Wired has the details:

Parking Mate is an all-in-one parking app for the iPhone. You can set a GPS marker for your car's location, use the parking meter timer, take a photo of your car's location, set a schedule for street sweepers in your 'hood, and see all that data at a glance in the "Current Parking Details" function.

Carr Matey is an Android app that not only will tell you where you left your car, but it will fulfill your daily need for things pirate-themed. Want to set a GPS trace? Just mark your "vessel" with the "drop anchor" button, and you'll get step-by-step directions on how to get back before high tide. If you're parked underground or indoors, which can interfere with GPS, the compass feature will guide you to your vehicle. Carrr Matey even has a setting called Harbor Mode, which lets you input the level, letter, color, and space number of your chosen parking space. And, as with Parking Mate, this app includes a meter timer for those left out on the street.

Looking for a space? Google Open Spot (also for Android) can help. Users can mark when they've left a parking space, alerting other users that a space is available. Oh, the kindness of strangers.

Foursquare (all major mobile platforms) is useful for remembering the locations of parking garages around a city center. Check in whenever you park and you'll have a reminder of where to find your car at the end of the night, as well as a searchable list in your history. Bonus: Check in at any one garage more times than anyone else and you'll become the mayor. What's the benefit? Pretty much just bragging rights. But ask the manager of the facility if they have a special deal for Foursquare mayors. They'll probably look at you like you've just escaped from a hospital, but they might swing you a discount.

Use Facebook's mobile website or the latest version of Facebook's mobile app to check in through Places and you'll be able to keep a record of where you've parked in your Facebook news feed.

Oh don't we love to be connected

A survey by Synovate, a global marketing and research firm, of 8,000 mobile phone users in 11 global markets found that smart phones and other mobile devices are becoming consumers’ universal “remote control for life.”

• Three-fourths of global survey respondents — including 82 percent of Americans — never leave home without their phone.
• One fourth  of respondents across 11 markets own more than two mobile phones. One third of Americans most likely own at least two mobile phones and at least 20 percent own a smart phone.
• The most popular activities on mobile devices — aside from ubiquitous voice calls and texting — are the alarm clock, the camera and games. Americans generally concede they don’t know how to use other features on their mobile phones.
• Text messaging, now as important as voice calling, is changing the way people manage their relationships (from flirting to lying to breaking up). In fact a U.S. study by AT&T Wireless earlier this year determined that texting plays a significant role in romance. 

Don't think it's serious? A survey of 300 Bostonians conducted for Samsung reveals that one-third would rather forgo sex for an entire year than give up their cell phones for that amount of time.

If you need the Internet everywhere

I don't have a smart phone. I don't want one. If I want to know the forecast, I'll just, you know, look up.

But I have a friend who is forever googling away whatever we're talking about by talking into his smart phone. I can see the amusement factor, but I'm already busy talking to myself and formulating replies.

Another friend just sits there reading the news. I don't want to read the news. I frighten easily.

These folks might try this: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.

David Pogue at The New York Times reviews this dandy:

You can just leave the thing in your pocket, your laptop bag or your purse to pump out a fresh Internet signal to everyone within 30 feet, for four hours on a charge of the removable battery. You’re instantly online whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera, game gadget, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Virgin Mobile has released one that costs $150, but here's the deal:

First, Virgin’s plan is unlimited. You don’t have to sweat through the month, hoping you don’t exceed the standard 5-gigabyte data limit, as you do with the cellular-modem products from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. (If you exceed 5 gigabytes, you pay steep per-megabyte overage charges, or in T-Mobile’s case, you get your Internet speed slowed down for the rest of the month.)

Second, Virgin requires no contract. You can sign up for service only when you need it. In other words, it’s totally O.K. with Virgin if you leave the thing in your drawer all year, and activate it only for, say, the two summer months when you’ll be away.

Third, the service price for this no-commitment, unlimited, portable hot spot is — are you sitting down? — $40 a month.

All this has Pogue flummoxed.

I’ve pounded my head against the fine print, grilled the product managers and researched the heck out of this, and I simply cannot find the catch.  

If you're interested, read the rest.

Medical bracelets go high tech

Not your father's medical bracelet

And not just looks, but the ability to carry a load of medical information that might be useful in an emergency. Laura Landro at The Wall Street Journal reports:

New bracelets and other medical-identification systems can fill in first responders on practically a patient's complete health history. They're a far cry from the simple identification bracelets of the past, which with a few engraved words informed medics that a person was, perhaps, allergic to penicillin. They can steer first responders to a secure website or toll-free phone number, or initiate a text message, to get the medical and prescription history of a patient who may be unconscious or unable to talk about their condition. 

If you're not the jewelry type, you can carry a specially marked USB flash drive loaded with emergency data that medics can read from any computer in an emergency.

Engraved on bracelets issued by MedicAlert are a patient's member number and a toll-free number to access a 24/7 hot line for information. The service costs adults $39.95 for the first year and $30 annually after that; children's fees are less. MedicAlert has added services like notifying family members in an emergency. 

Other options:

For people whose doctors don't keep electronic medical records, companies like MedInfoChip sell software programs for about $50 that help consumers set up their own health records on a computer and load them onto a USB device. American Medical ID offers a flash drive in a dog-tag style pendant for $44.95 that can be engraved with basic medical information and loaded with a patient's medical records.

Another program, called Invisible Bracelet, does away with the need to wear a bracelet or carry a device. The program allows members for $10 a year to upload personal medical data to a secure website and receive a personal identification number. Members get cards to place behind their driver's license, key fobs and stickers that can be put on, say, a bike helmet that show their identification number and the website address.

Also posted at Tell Your Doctor