Bah! You kids today! With your cell-a-ma-phones and i-ma-pods and hand held Nintendies! In my day, if we had something that ran on batteries, they were either double AAs or those weird watch batteries. When your device went dead, you’d bug your mom for new batteries. End of discussion. If you wanted one of them newfangled rechargeable batteries, you’d put it in the charger overnight and hope for the best.

Then sometime ’round double aught, all these rechargeable battery packs started popping up. They weren’t interchangeable, and they didn’t play nice with their neighbors. If you wanted to recharge them, you had to plug your whole device into the wall. And dabgummit if they didn’t all have different pluggy things, so you couldn’t share adaptors. Came the time when your average desk or entry way table looked like big ol’ plate of spagetti, what with the wires and the tangles and the cables and the hoo-ha!

Sorry, just talkin’ ’bout it gets my angry up. Lucky for us, those whippersnappers over at Callpod have a solution. It’s called the Chargepod and it looks like a cross between a hockey puck and an old fashioned donut. You plug one end into the wall (or car if you want to get fancy pants, charging things in your car like some kind of big britches) to get the juice flowing. Then you have six other ports. Simply buy the proper adaptor for your products and you can charge six things at once. They have adaptors for dang near everything that needs power, and you can order them special adapties from their website.

Of course, you might be asking yourself “Is this better than a surge protector and just plugging in the adaptors that already came with the product?” It’s a heck of a lot more portable, making it ideal for a frequent traveler. It’s small and streamlined, making it more organized than just having a heck of a bunch of wires all strung out willy-nilly, with no rhyme or reason. But it is a dang sight more expensive than a surge protector, and you can’t use it to charge a laptop or anything of similar power drain. I’m not the boss of how you spend your money. If you have a lot of things to charge and don’t want a big old powerstrip everywhere, it’s the thing for you.

Now get off my lawn!

To get your own Callpod Chargepod:Power OctopusClick Here

What happens when you get a digital photo frame, load your favorite pictures in it and hit Slideshow Mode?

We ALL know what happens. Pictures slide by one after the other, another after another. In a few days, you would have relived all your most memorable moments so many times, they would cease to feel so special. It’s a wee-bit boring to see just yourself and your best friends frolicking in the snow, then in the sun, then in the sand, and all over again, isn’t it?

The first time someone mentioned the eStarling digital photo frame, I didn’t think it would become a fixture on my desk as it is today. When I heard the eStarling can connect to any wi-fi network, I wondered whether it was another beta with underutilized potential. But since I got my hands on this digital photo frame a few days back, I have realized that this is a perfect gift for any occasion – whether it is Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, li’l sister’s birthday, or grandparents’ anniversary.

The wi-fi is what makes the eStarling digital frame rock. Once you have set up the eStarling at home, connected it to your wi-fi, you can subscribe to any number of RSS photo feeds from Flickr, Picasa,
Photobucket, AOL, Smugmug, iPhoto, Gallery or Facebook. It’ll be a nice change from just watching your own photos! Plus, every time your friends upload pictures to their social networking accounts, you can watch them almost immediately on the eStarling digital frame. Of course there is also the option of adding photographs with a USB drive or with a memory card.

The next best thing about the eStarling is its emailing feature. Each frame has its own email address, and pictures can be emailed directly to the frame. That is such a wonderful thing for all the Moms and Dad far away from their kids and yearning to see them! One can also send short messages via email or from the cell phone.

All I have to do is email a picture from my regular email account to the photo frame’s unique email address. Bingo! Dad sees the picture almost immediately on the eStarling photo frame perched on his writing desk. Brilliant, isn’t it?

In fact, you can even email pictures from the frame by hitting a simple button. If a lot of your friends have the eStarling, you can group the frames and send pictures to all of them using a single email address.

The only frustrating bit was setting up the eStarling for the first time. It took me a little reading and exercising of the gray cells to hook it up successfully to my home wi-fi network. Once it was set up though, the rest was simple. I registered the frame on the eStarling’s sister website, and subscribed to several different photo feeds. The best and the latest photos in the world now keep popping up on the photo frame – there’s no way I can get bored because the RSS feeds keep showing me new pictures.

And to top it all, the eStarling is sexy – its 8 inch sleek black LCD screen and rounded edges are perfect for a modern home. The picture quality is bright and brilliant, and can be turned off at night for power-saving. I am definitely going to gift one to Dad this Father’s Day!

• You can get your own eStarling digital photo frame by Clicking Here

• You can check out pricing comparisons by Clicking Here

I don’t know about you, but I love setting meat on fire. It’s a fantastic and educational hobby. Recently, however, I was shocked (shocked I say!) to discover that once you’re done setting meat on fire, if you do it properly, you can eat the burnt meat! It was a total revelation to me as well.

Meat Burning, or “Grilling” as it’s known to practitioners of the hobby, is quite complex and difficult. Cook something too long and it’s all dry and crumbly, cook it for too short of a time and you risk killing yourself and those you cook for. What makes matters more complicated is that different meats cook for different lengths of time.

It takes careful timing and a close eye with a meat thermometer to make sure that you’ve grilled your meat to perfection. But what if you want to invite a bunch of people over to set meat on fire with you? Then you’re stuck alone by the meat fire, jabbing it with a prong and hoping that you’ve killed all the bacteria hidden within. It doesn’t make for a very fun party.

Well, worry no longer. The Oregon Scientific AW131 Grill Right Wireless Talking BBQ/Oven Thermometer has come to save the day. You just jab the transmitter’s probe into your piece of meat, set the receiver with meat type and target doneness and walk away. The receiver on your belt will let you know when the food is just about done, and then let you know when it’s ready to roll. It has a great range and it’s loud enough to hear it over party music.

There are a lot of products like this, but I’m really fond of this model for a couple of reasons:

• Stylish: It has a cool red finish, and it doesn’t make you feel stupid walking around with it
• Accurate: I’ve used digital meat thermometers before, and I’ve been less than impressed by how well it can tell the difference between “Medium” and “bloody.” If I wanted a rare steak I would have ordered unicorn.
• Loud voice: You don’t need to use one of these things when you’re grilling for the family. You bust something like this out when you’re having a party, and parties are loud. It’s nice that the device is loud as well.
• Manual set timer: I like to time out things like pre-heating and veggies and such. It’s nice that it’s a timer as well

There is also one downside to the Oregon Scientific AW131 Grill Right Wireless Talking BBQ/Oven Thermometer. When you select what type of meat it shows a little digital picture of what you’re going to cook. There’s a little sheep for lamb, a cow for beef, etc. I know what the word “Pork” means without needing to see what the animal was before it was cut into delicious pieces.

All in all, for the difficult task of safely setting meat on fire while being a good host, you can’t go wrong with the Oregon Scientific AW131 Grill Right Wireless Talking BBQ/Oven Thermometer.

• You can get your own Oregon Scientific Grill Right Wireless Talking Thermometer by Clicking Here

• You can check out special pricing options by Clicking Here

• You can review pricing comparisons on this product by Clicking Here