Bad cellphone reception? Try installing a mini-cell tower

Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are now selling gadgets that act like mini cellphone towers. They broadcast wireless phone service over a small area, one house.

If you have really bad cellphone reception and reliability, a mini-tower would cure the problem. You plug any of the various devices, called femtocells, into your broadband network through which they acquire a signal from your provider’s network.

AT&T and Verizon don’t mention it, but they are giving away their devices to selected customers who have very poor reception.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg says the towers won’t do much if your reception is already pretty good, but they can be a godsend for those who need it. He recommends the MicroCell.

AT&T’s MicroCell, made by Cisco, is an 8.5-inch tall, white plastic gadget. It costs a one-time charge of $150, though AT&T will knock off $100 if you buy an optional $20-a-month plan that gives you unlimited voice minutes while using the MicroCell. It’s sold only by AT&T. MicroCell can cover a 5,000 square foot house, will serve up to 10 phone numbers and takes about an hour to install.

Verizon’s device, which isn’t 3G-capable, is called the Network Extender. It sells for $149 with a $100 rebate and no monthly fee. Verizon is working on a unit that will be 3G-capable.

Sprint’s version is called Airwave. It costs $100, but requires a monthly plan ranging from $5 to $20. It has 3G capacity.

Facebook grows up with many visitors over age 35

The number of Facebook visitors 35 and older more than doubled in June to 11.5 million, or about 41 percent of the site’s visitors.
 It’s a new demographic that will bring changes.
 Right now, Facebook allows people some control over what information they reveal to various levels of “friends.” Level one is probably ex-dorm buddies and girlfriends, level two might include sales contacts and fantasy-league teammates, and level three is likely to be anyone who signs off on performance reviews.

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 Visitors find they can build social capital with little effort, maybe just by sending a birthday greeting.
 One employer uses Facebook to reach people he can’t otherwise find.
 On the Web: facebook.com

Technology and You

PhotosExternal backup could save your photos, memories

If you are a tech-wise computer owner, you may have a collection of old and new photos on your computer, a collection of maybe a hundred of your favorite songs, videos of your kids, and folklore about family history.

You have put a great deal of time into it all, but how would you feel if your computer went bad and everything was lost? You might never have the time, strength, and references to recreate everything.

To prevent disaster, external storage is the answer. A Harris Interactive poll conducted for Seagate Technology shows that more than a third of people with such collections don’t have external storage. They just have their collections on PCs, iPods, and TiVos.

Search the internet for “external storage” for help. Some devices are small and inexpensive.

MX Air mouse a tech advance

With Logitech’s MX Air mouse you can surf the web, play games, and control a home theater PC from up to 30 feet away.

It features a gyroscope from Hillcrest Labs that senses the nose of the mouse angling up and down or side to side. An accelerometer tracks the device’s movement in any direction as you point it at the screen.

It knows which way is up, so you don’t have to worry about holding it level. And its processor crunches motion data so it can filter out things like slight shaking of your hand.

Marking the 10th anniversary of the blog

December 23, 1997
Marking the 10th anniversary of the blog
 It has been 10 years since Jorn Barger started gathering links to items he liked, adding some of his own comments, and putting them on a Website.
 On December 23, 1997 on his Robot Wisdom site, he wrote: “I decided to start my own Web page, logging the best stuff I find as I surf on a daily basis.” The Oxford English Dictionary says his statement is the root of the word “Weblog,” now referred to as blog.
 Others were doing similar things at the same time, but Barger announced what he was doing and has been named as the first blogger. By June 2007, Technorati counted 89.4 million blogs, but most spell check programs don’t recognize the word. 
 Blogs have evolved from being mainly a series of links to including more lengthy and opinionated writings. Some of them should probably never be stated, but expressing opinions is what a blog is all about.
 Newspaper people, who constantly check facts before printing, are shocked by what appears on blogs. On the other hand, blogs provide with a source for investigative ideas.
 Today, blog surfing is made easier by software or Websites known as news aggregates or readers. They include Google reader (google.com/reader), Bloglines (bloglines.com), and Netvibes (netvibes.com).
 Instead of going from one blog to the next, a user signs into the site where he stores a list of blogs to be tracked. The reader scans the list for new entries.
 Once you have a collection of blogs you are tracking, you can sort them into different categories.
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