How private is your music collection? No, wait, let me write that another way. How private do you want to keep your music collection? More…

Yup, in case you haven’t heard, this guy : - ) is now 25 years old. And he doesn’t look a day over 19.

It is interesting to me to see how many bits and pieces of computer history are actually preserved. Like we really do know who invented emoticons. It was a professor at Carnegie Mellon that claims that he was the first to put together some punctuation marks and tell people to “turn your head sideways” to read them.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started.”

Read the full story on Yahoo

When Did This Happen?

I’ve been a loyal winzip user for years. Frankly, why wouldn’t I be? I paid my shareware registration years ago, and their agreement lets me use the program on as many computers as I have. I don’t remember which version I started with, but it could very well have been 1.0. The original author allowed free upgrades for life, meaning each time a new upgrade was available I was able to download it, install it, and enter my registration code.

Not any more.

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Not too long ago I read about a survey from a British insurance company. It seems that they talked to 2,000 adults about their driving habits. The result? Men apparently waste six million hours a hear driving around lost. Yes, male drivers waste an average of 20 minutes when they get lost before stopping to ask for directions, while women wait an average of only 10 minutes. See? That’s justification for a gadget purchase if I ever heard it. More…

The special “Science, Technology, and The Future” issue of Discover magazine arrived a few days ago. One of the articles was about how much the Internet weighs. Turns out they didn’t really solve the question that they asked, but who am I to quibble.

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The next post in my “GotM” series brings you the Snap Server 2200. It’s not sexy, but it does its job very well. What is that job? It’s a hard disk enclosure with an ethernet port. Plug it in to your network, run a very brief install program, and you have network-attached storage for a home or small business network. More…

The Epson P-2000 is a multi-function device that I use primarily to download and review pictures from my digital camera but it’s actually capable of quite a bit more. I purchased it after taking a 4-day camping trip a few years ago. It’s much more convenient to download my digital pictures from memory cards to this than to lug around my laptop and have to worry about running out of power. More…

A long time ago I worked in the technical support department for a software company. This company made what was - at the time - the number one backup utility for personal computers. The product was named FastBack, and it would dump your hard-drive to floppies faster than any other product on the market.

Working in technical support was my first computer-related job. And it was also a source for some humor.

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Last month I started a series of “Gadget of the Month” posts. Right, so one post hardly makes a series. Don’t worry; there are a few more coming. But recently I read an interesting article about five new “gadgets” to skip right now. There were some interesting choices.

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I’ll admit it, I’m a gadget freak. Most of my gadgets relate to cameras or computers, but that’s okay, right? Anyway, I thought I would start sharing some of my favorite gadgets… whether I own them or not. The first entry in this series is the Laser Virtual Keyboard, offered by the fine folks at thinkgeek.com.

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