Tech Faves & Knaves for 2007

I got to play withtry out a bunch of interesting products this year, some for review, some by actually buying them, including a few digital cameras (for TechRevu.com), Bluetooth mobile phone headsets (for InformationWeek) and ultralight notebooks from a Lenovo and Panasonic (for eWeek.com).

My favorite hardware is the Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth phone headset, which I tried as part of a three headset review for Information Week. I can easily use this several times a day, particularly when I forward my home office number to my cell phone while walking my dog.

Trying the Jawbone, and other headsets (mostly in "what am I calling from now" chats with fellow techno-tryer Ernest Lilley), yielded one interesting fact: I couldn't directly test the most important aspect, namely, how I sounded. Leaving messages on my answering machine isn't the same as replicating the callee's experience.

The Jawbone suffers from one common design flaw -- unnecessary use of a proprietary -- non-standard -- port, for the charging cable. It's especially annoying as the Jawbone charger cable has easily-bendible wires in it; I managed to gronk the cable and make it unusable. Fortunately, I'd already ordered two spares -- one for my travel kit, and one extra to make the most of the shipping fee. Competitors like Gemma and Plantronics manage to use mini-USB, which would be harder to damage, and easily replaced in any drug or convenience store (or my stash of spare cables).

I've been doing daily data backups pretty regularly, most of the time, to an external hard drive... but have never felt this was sufficient. What if something happens to that drive (which is in my home office, after all)? Not to mention being at risk for up to a day's work.

I recently wrote an article about online data backup services, which save data from one or more of your computers to off-site, and let you retrieve some or all data, including, ideally, to other computers, via a web browser.

More recently, I tried one out, Data Deposit Box... and liked it so much I've stayed on as a user.

Unlike most, possibly all, of the competition, DDB has a simple pricing model -- two dollars per gigabyte per month... for no matter how many (Windows) computers you're saving from. For example, at the moment, I've got two desktops, and one or two notebooks all saving to this account -- of which one machine is very active, the others only sporadically so. With other services, it would be costing some multiple of five to seven bucks per month.

I haven't yet had to rescue any files I lost or deleted -- but I use my Data Deposit Box a lot, as a "USB drive in the sky" -- an easy way to grab a file or two that I'd been editing on my notebook, which might be turned off; grabbing it from the web site is quicker and easier. Or getting a file while at I'm the library (at one of their computers). And I have, come to think of it, used their "versioning" feature, to retrieve a paragraph or three from an earlier version of a file several hours previous. Nifty, recommended. (Tell them I sent you.) (Note, be sure you understand what Data Deposit Box is -- and isn't -- doing, and that while I recommend it highly for work and personal data files, it's not your cheapest bet for saving copies of music, pictures or video.)

I do my own taxes, Schedule C and all. I've been very unhigh tech about it; I journal my entries in pen, in categorized notebook pages, sum up with a calculator. It's far from efficient; discovering that federal forms (but not Massachusetts ones) were available in fill-in-able PDFs a few years made a big difference...but not big enough, the checking, recalculating and correcting is still a royal PITA (pain in the fundament).

This past year, I tried tax software. After due research, I tried H&R Block Tax Cut Pro.

It was cheap enough, by argh, did it suck--incomprehensibly so, for a program that could easily be the one non-Office app many of its users would employ. For example, on the install, it failed to complete, saying "You need to be administrator" -- which I was. Turning off the anti-virus and firewall (ZoneAlarm) -- first disconnecting from the Internet, of course -- resolved this, but this is IMHO an unacceptable and unnecessary complication. (Note, the documentation did mention needing to turn off Microsoft firewalls -- but the error messages didn't suggest alternative reasons.)

TaxCut Pro was such a royally hard to use, down right bad program I was ready to return it and ask for my twenty five bucks back. (I never got around to that, of course.)

Then I ordered a copy of Intuit TurboTax. The Home and Business version cost more than TaxCut Pro, but was much, much better. It's still far from perfect--for example, there's no obvious way to up the font size, short of changing my screen resolution (do they think all their customers have perfect vision), and it's incredibly hard to zoom into a form--in-progress and force a change on a line entry. But it did the trick, so I'm happy enough. Perhaps, now that I'm using automatic online backup, I'll also go to electronic record-keeping.