Onions and Orchids: Round 4

By Jerry Pournelle

January 30, 2006

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I have previously recommended the new Kodak EasyShare V750 "shirtpocket" camera; but whatever brand of digital camera you use, you will want to look into Kodak's free photo album management software. It's free for downloading, and let you build albums that are easy to use and understand. The neat part is that it's done with views and pointers: you only need one copy of a photograph even though it may be included in a dozen albums.

It's easy to use this to send albums to a few or a lot of people, and that all works painlessly.

Of course there are also hooks into Kodak's on-line photo printing service, and they hope you'll use that to order paper copies for yourself and as gifts, but you don't have to use that service if you don't want to.

This is one of the best free programs around. I'd be willing to pay money for this. And now that I have the Kodak V750 (which already gets a cold, dead fingers award), I expect I'll be using Kodak EasyShare software even more.

An orchid bouquet for EasyShare. Recommended.

Travel Power

If you spend much time on the road, you will definitely want to look at APC's web site for travel power equipment. The APC Universal Notebook Battery is nearly indispensable if you spend much time in airplanes. When I travel I try to book flights that offer passengers an outlet to supply computer power; and while I have managed to book such flights, I have yet to get any power from one of them. The APC Universal Notebook Battery, on the other hand, offers from a couple to several hours of supplementary computer power in an 8.5x10x0.5-inch pack. The UNB comes with a variety of power tips for both charging it and connecting it to your PC. There's a "forked" adapter for charging the battery pack while operating a PC on wall power. It's all complete, and it Just Works, delivering a selection of voltages to satisfy almost any laptop.

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