Techalyzer

Wacom newdrawing tablets have been out on the market for over six months and the jury is out. These are good products. They are called the Bamboo Fun Tablets. These are not designed for professional artists like the regular Wacom Bamboo tablet. It is just a gadget designed for fun. Wacom used to refer to them as the Graphire line.

Graphic artists prefer these tablets as they are easier to draw with than a mouse. You can also do simple editing with them and take notes. Some people use Bamboo tablets to edit photos as well.

In essence the Bamboo line is for professionals and the Bamboo Fun line is more for casual use. It is simple enough that a child can use it. The tablet has a fun mode that includes extra colors and silver and white colors. However if you do not want to get fancy you can operate it in “vanilla mode” which means black and white.

This is the sort of gadget that is ideal for cartoonist or young artists. Illustrators will also enjoy it. Enterprising types can use it to design e-book covers, posters and business cards. You can also take any photo and alter it using this pad.

It looks a bit like a lap top. The drawing tablet is on the top side. Inside there’s the tablet itself and a USB cable, mouse, pen, penholder, extra tips, instruction manual and a DVD that includes the drivers and software. Some reviewers have complained that it feels a little lightweight and cheap. The buttons rattle a little when you press them. If you don’t like things that are a bit Fisher Price in nature then you won’t like the Bamboo Fun Tablet. The Bamboo Tablet is a little less goofy, sleeker and feels more professional. However it is not that much different than the much smaller Bamboo Fun Tablet in terms of function.

You can get a large or small version of this tablet. The medium version is 11″ x 9.3″ x 0.3″, while the small version is 8.4″ x 7.3″ x 0.3″. The actual tablet-portion of the device measures 8.5″ by 5.3″ on the medium and 5.8″ by 3.7″ on the small.

Most reviewers really rave about the pen feature. The pen is very much like a real pen. It has a plastic body with a rubberized grip, two buttons in the form of a rocker, an eraser and has course the tip. The bottom button is for scrolling, and the top is used to right-click. It is apparently one of the easiest pens to draw with on the market. It also comes with an ambidextrous round shaped mouse for easy clicking with either hand.

Nothing is more frustrating and disappointing then having a stolen laptop. Replacing everything in it is a lot of work as well. Here are some ways to prevent it from being picked up by a clever thief in the fist place.

First of all you can try to lock it up. There are lots of locks on the market that physically offer you a way to chain it to your desks. They look like cable locks. A good example is the Kensington Microsaver Keyed Retractable Notebook. You can also get heavy duty travel locks for greater strength and security. A lock like the $24 Belkin Bulldog Security Kit very heavy and has steel anchoring plates and heavy-duty lock will daunt any determined thief. It also comes with a $500 anti-theft warranty.

You can also buy a notebook alarm, which acts in much the same way as a car alarm. The $55 Belkin USB Laptop Security Alarm sounds if someone disconnects the cable. Of course, this is only effective if you happen to be around.
The same goes for the laptop sensor alarms. This makes your laptop scream if someone who is not you picks up the laptop or tries to move it. The Doberman Laptop alarm is very effective and it only costs about thirty dollars.

A deterrent is to put a recovery tag on your laptop. Recovery services report recovery rates of 75 percent and higher on tagged items. Evidently, most people who find laptops will call the 1-800 number on the tag.

The services have you register each item on the Web, with identifying information; afterward they contact you to arrange return if an item is found. The price is nominal, usually around $5 to $10 per tag, with quantity discounts. Vendors that offer labeling and recovery services include ArmorTag, BoomerangIt (pictured), StuffBak, TrackItBack, YouGetItBack.com and zReturn.

If a theif nips your laptop, tracking and recovery software can help you get it back. Absolute Software’s Lojack for Laptops ($50 per year), Brigadoon’s PC PhoneHome ($30 lifetime), Inspice’s Inspice Trace ($30 per year), XTool’s Laptop Tracker ($40 per year for the Small Business Edition) and zTrace Technologies’ zTrace Gold ($50 per year) are tracking utilities that connect periodically to a central server that can actually tell you where in the world your lap top ended up. It is all very James Bond.

The service can trace your laptop’s location on the Internet and summon the local police to recover it. This is also a good way to get all your files back off of the stolen computer. Absolute Software claims that Lojack for Laptops can survive on a laptop even if the thief does something like reinstall the operating system, reformats the hard drive or trade in the hard drive. This is absolutely remarkable. So basically if it is stolen, your laptop can be tracked and found no matter what!

Solar cookers are inexpensive, convenient and ecologically friendly cooking devices. They save energy in any society but they are also proving to be a godsend in disaster zones and in developing countries where there is no power and where people are camping out day after day because they have to in order to survive. However you can definitely make your own solar cooker and take it camping with you if you need to.

These solar cookers use very little energy and they are a very simple home made gadget. Ninety percent of the energy usage in the world is for cooking food. Many countries that are reliant on wood for fuel and wood is now short of these resources. This is certainly true in many parts of the world. This shortage has actually been in evidence since the turn of the twentieth century as more than 2.4 billion people in the world rely on it as a fuel for cooking. As a result entire areas of the earth are absolutely stripped bare of all vegetation.

Cooking smoke from wood fuel is very polluting. It is the least green way of cooking that there is. However water must boiled somehow to prevent water borne illnesses in third world countries.

Solar cookers can be simple or complex beasties. You can even make your own cardboard cooker out of aluminum foil. This simple gadget is what the refugees in Darfur are using to cook with.

A simple solar cooker can reach temperatures of around 150° C (300° F), but food will cook as if the temperature gets up to about 90° C (200° F) – the only caveat is that it will cook really slowly. Basically it takes twice as long to cook food on a solar oven as it does a conventional oven.

There are lots of plans on the Internet for building simple solar cookers and you can actually make this into a class project for kids or do it as a practical craft with your own kids. It is also a good survival cooker in case of a national disaster or environmental disaster.

In fact it makes sense that these solar cookers which can be made so cheaply (you can make one for ten dollars) should be sent to places like China, Burma and other disaster sites to boil water. In fact making these solar cookers out of the cardboard and aluminum foil is a good philanthropic project for a charity or a class of school children to offer practical assistance in troubled areas. After all the way to stop plagues and infections after natural disasters is to boil water and that is exactly what these solar cookers can do – cheaply and effectively (but a little slowly.)