You’d expect the photo above to be in black and white with tattered edges, because that phone is ANCIENT. The Mayans had cell phones like that. Sadly, I also have a cell phone like that. Oh, my poor little cell phone! Once it was the shiniest, coolest gadget on the block. Then two minutes later it was complaining about arthritis and napping in the early afternoon.

I may work in information technology, but I am not a gadget person. My philosophy towards electronics is to keep it until it breaks. The Kindle and the iPad look nifty and all, but I feel no need to buy either one. However, iPads and Kindles are still rather rare, whereas smartphones have recently hit a saturation point. It seems like everyone has one. My friends are always whipping out their phones to check Twitter or Facebook or send messages on their QWERTY keyboards or to run the latest app or Google the answer to a question that has come up over dinner or to show me video of [...]

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I named my netbook Mini-Macaroni because I am the PastaQueen and I absolutely adore alliteration. Mini-Macaroni traveled to London and France with me, and took a trip to Chicago and South Bend, when suddenly he DIED. His little green light went out. Kaput. I would turn on the itty bitty computer and after 45 seconds it turned itself off before it could even finish booting up.

“Sounds like a cooling problem,” my smart, techy friend said.

“Oh, God,” I said. “That’s what I get for buying refurbished.” And, alas, I did not buy the extended warranty!

So, I unplugged Mini-Macaroni and let him sit in the corner of my office for four months, not ready to bury him, but not ready to try resuscitating his silicon soul. This week I was organizing all my to-do lists because I am the type of person who likes to organize my organization. I decided to take another look at Mini-Macaroni to see if he was salvageable, so I plugged him in, turned him on, and waited for him to shut himself [...]

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When I saw a TV ad for the new iPod Nano last night, I felt rather old. The iPod Nano can record video, as well as play music and make you a peanut butter sandwich, evidently. It’s smaller than a deck of cards and probably lighter than one too. Yet, all I could think of was my dad’s first home video camera, which looked something like this, though the camera itself wasn’t as fancy.

Yes, my dad lugged a 10-pound VCR with a handle around the Baltimore Science Center taping the animatronic dinosaurs exhibit. The camera itself did not have a video tape holder. You had to plug the camera into the VCR and drag it along with you. The battery life wasn’t that long either. But now, you can just buy a Flip Camera that fits in your pocket to achieve the same goal.

When Dad was recording things with his huge camera, I was probably watching Inspector Gadget, a cartoon broadcast in the 80′s that was sort of a spoof of Get Smart, though if [...]

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PastaQueen reviews The BodyBugg, a device that monitors how many calories you burn via fancy science stuff.

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