Entries for March 2007

Like most of us, I love/hate banks. We need them, but I definitely don't like being beholden to one–I want the freedom to walk when rates fall or fees rise. So I've worked to free my family from dependence on our bank's bill-paying service, which we access through the Web. The convenience has suckered us into a long list of payees that would be a pain to reconstruct at another bank.

If you're getting bored with what's on your TiVo, maybe you want to tune into me and mine. Our own TiVo channel, that is. Eventually, there'll be lots of home movies of our boys and their exciting life of playgrounds and T-ball.

Fast-moving, often violent weather is part of life in the Midwest. It was a leap forward when the first, somewhat crude radar images were available on cable TV, giving us a chance to see what was coming–and to get cars under cover from spring storms laden with twisters and hail. Then came the Web, and radar moved online, where it took a new leap this month with an upgrade at the Weather Channel's site.

Getting TV and movies over the Internet is said to be the next great thing. It's already good at our house. We've discovered free shows and entertainment that are available for downloading as part of our abandoning cable and its steep monthly fees. Now Apple has released a $300 device to make the process easy, but I don't think I'll be buying.

One of my favorite Web services, LogMeIn, lets me stay connected to computers from afar–and just got a bit easier to use. LogMeIn is among several products that allow you to connect to a computer across the Internet and work on that PC as if you were sitting in front of it. LogMeIn is my favorite because it's free.

My wife did a little jig the other day. Scooba, our robotic mopper, had arrived. The turtlelike device is the sibling to Roomba, which had already won our hearts for its automated vacuuming. We've found Scooba to be at least as charming as it scrubs and polishes our hardwood and tile.

So a Washington, D.C., coalition wants to force us to use fluorescent bulbs, instead of the incandescents we've known since the days of Thomas Edison. The group's members would enact new energy standards that would essentially outlaw the inefficient lightbulbs we now use. Fine, as long as their new regs include standards for how fluorescents perform.

A format war, not to mention outrageous prices, is stopping most of us from investing in a high-definition DVD player. So I decided to test a standard disk player that tries to convert the image into something close to the clarity and vivid picture of high definition. I've been testing one of the latest models from Oppo, a company with a good reputation for "upconverting" players. I even tested it head to head against an HD DVD player from Toshiba.

Teaching kids about money is a tricky process, as we are discovering with our 5-year-old. The problem goes beyond his burning desires, which this month are for Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. It's also tough to remember the weekly allowance, much less lessons on budgeting and saving. So I checked out a Web service launched this week by Intuit, the company that sells personal finance software.

The sun will be rising a bit later next week, which is a blessing for some of us and a hassle for all. A hassle because your PC may need updating to understand that daylight saving time starts this Sunday, March 11, which is three weeks earlier than in the past. It also lasts a week longer into autumn.

When it comes to the price of PC memory, let's try to remember 2005. That was a fine year for folks who wanted to boost the power of their computers, and not such a good year for companies that make the chips. Now it appears this year might be shaping up the same way.

Tables without legs. That's what my wife wants now, one of a number of adjustments we're willing to make for life with Roomba the first robot we've welcomed into our home. Roomba is the robotic vacuum cleaner that looks something like a big turtle or Frisbee crawling about the floor, sucking up dirt as it bounces from wall to wall. We love it.

Finally, it's becoming less painful to get digital TV. As of March 1, TV makers are no longer shipping dead-end equipment that can get only analog signals–the government is forcing them to ship only televisions with digital tuners.