An industrial-strength way to clean and repair the DVDs
HARDWARE
I had just tucked into one of my favorite Star Trek episodes recently when William Shatner's face, his lips pursed, froze on the screen. Pixel by pixel, the picture crumbled before my eyes.
When I inspected the DVD, it looked as if someone had used it as a dinner plate.
There's more than one way to fix a scratched and filthy DVD or CD. I use a cheap mechanical device that fills scratches with a drop of waxy fluid and a few turns of a round brush. But if you have a large library of discs and want to keep them in top shape, you may want something a more industrial-strength.
The Cadillac of disc cleaners has got to be the Skip-Away, from Webster-based VenMill Industries Inc.
(The website is www.venmill.com.)
Based on a technology used by television operations divisions and libraries to maintain their disc collections, the Skip-Away uses dry processes to clean and repair DVDs and CDs. The AC-powered Skip-Away heats the plastic discs enough to make just a few microns at the top of their surfaces malleable and fixable.
VenMill plans to release the $250 device (which includes two cartridges that must be replaced periodically) in time for Christmas. The three pound Skip-Away comes in several colors and has a boom box carrying handle. It will clean and repair HD DVDs. But it can't fix scratches on the specially coated Blu-ray Discs, which are the high-definition standard competing with HD DVD.
Mobile Computing
From Nokia, an affordable PDA phone, the E62
Cingular last week began shipping its PDA phone, the Nokia E62, which some are calling ``a Blackberry/Treo killer." You can get this beauty for the price of many flip phones: $150, with a contract.
I wished I'd brought the E62 along last week as I slogged through a West Coast trip with sporadic wireless Internet access. Where I could not catch a WiFi signal, the E62 would have delivered my e-mail. I could even have instant-messaged my buddies and associates back East during those awful layovers.
The device has all the requisite PDA phone features, such as a comfortable QWERTY keyboard with backlit keys for punching out replies to urgent e-mail messages. The E62 also runs BlackBerry Connect and other ``push" technologies that deliver new messages to your handset automatically.
The E62 has a bright, 2 3/4 -inch high-resolution color screen. It weighs just a hair over 5 ounces. And it has 80MB of built-in memory and a miniSD card slot for additional storage. The downside to all that memory is you end up with more to lose. That's why the E62, if it is lost or stolen, covers your backside with remote lock and wipe and other security measures.
Messaging
Send text messages from a full-size keyboard, to virtually any cellphone
If you're feeling left out of the SMS loop -- the one your kids are probably in -- a new service will let you exchange text messages with virtually any cellphone from the comfort of your full-size QWERTY keyboard at home.
Joopz (www.joopz.com), from Boston-based MobileSphere, is a clever service with a goofy name. It lets you send messages to mobile phone users in North America, regardless of who their carriers are. It overcomes many other limits of other Web-to-phone services, such as Yahoo, which won't send your children's replies to your ``where are you?" after-school pings.
Joopz also has an ``SMS forwarding" feature that lets you pick up and continue an ongoing message thread on your own cellphone. You can also schedule text messages to go out at specific dates and times, and send them to groups of up to 20 people.
