MICROSOFT
Pictures tell story as real family fare shows up on TVs
PC owners never again need bore friends and relatives with slide shows of their vacations, baby homecomings and office picnics by unrolling a projector screen in their living rooms. Now we can bore people to distraction on our big-screen television sets thanks to TV Photo Viewer for Windows–an ingenious (really clever, honestly) piece of hardware from software giant Microsoft Corp.
This small, $160 box uses ordinary floppy disks and displays up to 20 color images per disk on any TV set or VCR through an ordinary RCA video cable. A remote control clicker moves through the pictures and delivers special effects like rotating images. Custom Windows software creates the special floppy disks required for shows by creating video-optimized copies of each of your scanned or digital photos.
The resulting display is pretty impressive, even though the resolution on a television set is much less than on a PC monitor.
SOFTWARE
CD takes flight as Americans are driven to open highways
With suddenly airplane-phobic Americans taking to the open highways in droves, the latest CD-ROM Street Atlas USA ($50) by cartography giant DeLorme arrives at a most opportune time.
Street Atlas 9.0 would be welcome anyway, with its huge database of services as well as route-planning and map-printing features, all updated effective as of Sept. 1.
If forced to drive where you used to fly, popping a DeLorme disk into the laptop will let you find everything from strategically placed motels along the route to handy ATMs to a filling station guide keyed to your own car and gas mileage. If you don’t want to mess with the laptop, a printout can be used, including a map, names and phone numbers of selected motels.
Flying remains far easier, but this two-CD set makes life better for road warriors forced to take actual roads.
Filter guides help to make toast of annoying spam
We need all the tranquility that we can get right now, and getting rid of the infernal waves of spam glutting our e-mail in-boxes makes an excellent starting point.
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood notes that a recent Ferris Research study found average corporate e-mail takes up roughly two hours of the workday. She penned (actually, she used a word processor) a handful of books titled “Overcome Email Overload” for various software programs, including Microsoft Outlook and Eudora ($30 each).
The books walk a reader through the confusing filtering rules built into Outlook and Eudora that let the software automatically detect sales pitches, political blather and other digital dreck and incinerate it on the spot.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based spam buster admitted in an interview that she prefers the paid version of Eudora for e-mail. Details at www.webfoot.com.
