THE PAPER PDA

You start by using your computer's mouse to pull in individual templates for each page. You can have a page with a calendar, another for a shopping or to-do list, and you can even create a flap that holds business cards. Joy made one that starts with a page of Ben Franklin's list of "13 Virtues," then a shopping list, notes, a weekly and monthly calendar, measurement conversions, a Sudoku game and a couple of photos. When she folded it according to the directions on the Web site, each page was different.

We like to think of it as a paper PDA. PDA is an acronym for Personal Digital Assistant, and these are designed to be a kind of portable electronic appointment and record book. One of the first was the Palm, which is still made and widely used. The best known PDA now is probably the Blackberry. You can carry any of them in a jacket pocket or purse. Of course, you can do that with our paper PDA, as well.

The advantage of the paper PDA is that it's free and requires no batteries. The information it contains can be read even in bright sunlight and photocopied on any office copying machine.

We also found an excellent companion device for data entry. It's a thin wooden stick with a marking point at one end and a kind of rubbery "undo" button at the other. If you want to wipe out anything written with the data-entry point, you simply reverse the stick and rub the undo button over whatever is written. They're very cheap, have a long shelf life and are available in all the office supply stores.

Of course, unlike electronic PDAs, you can't access the Web or send and receive e-mails with a paper PDA. But you can unfold it and make a paper airplane.

All of which reminds us of a program called ClickBook that we've written about before. This, unfortunately, is not free, but it lets you easily print out many kinds of booklets and is handy for both home and business. You can read all about it in one of our older columns, or go to the company's Web site: BlueSquirrel.com. The latest version is $50, for either Windows or Macintosh.

ONE COMPUTER, TEN USERS

You can turn three computers into 30 by using Multiplier software from Userful.com, a Canadian outfit that is offering it free to schools. Your base computers must have the Linux operating system on board, but this too is free and can be installed on any Windows computer as a drive partition, without affecting the other operating system.

The Multiplier software lets each computer handle as many as 10 users. Each of those users must have their own monitor, keyboard and mouse, but otherwise it will seem to them that they are the only one on the machine. A calculator on the Web site lets you figure out your hardware and software savings -- typically 70 to 80 percent. Go to Omni-ts.com to get the free deal.

NUMBERS REPORT

A Survey.com study of more than 5,000 adults found that 88 percent of U.S. consumers said they never use their mobile phones or other mobile devices to watch videos; 84 percent said they never use their mobile phones or mobile devices to send e-mail; and 79 percent said they never employ them to play "games on the go."

WATER-COOLED COMPUTERS

Red Blizzard, from VisionMan.com, lays claim to being the first water-cooled computer available for under $1,000. Instead of using a heat sink and fan for cooling the CPU, it uses running water.

Water-cooled computers have been around for a few years but previously cost $2,000 and more. They are popular with gamers, who like to use overclocked central processors to provide fast action and ultra smooth graphics. Overclocked processors are chips pushed to run several times the number of cycles per second recommended by the manufacturer. This works but generates a lot of heat, which will eventually break down the processor. But that's life in the fast lane.

Water cooling can absorb 4,000 times as much heat as air cooling. According to Thomas Brunschwiler, a researcher at IBM's laboratory in Switzerland, water-cooling is the next step in building high-powered computers. The trend will be to stack computer chips on top of each other, shortening and improving communication between them.

Without special cooling, however, such a stack would generate enough heat to melt the chips themselves, even though the meting point of silicon is close to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, 1,440 degrees Celsius. Brunschwiler and others have been experimenting with water-cooling stacked chips. Water is pumped through a network of channels, each about the width of a human hair, that run between the layers of stacked chips. (Coming soon to the computer near you: "A River Runs Through It.")

YOUTUBE DOWNLOADER

Sometimes you're not satisfied watching a YouTube video online or embedding it in your Web site. You want to download and watch it off-line. But YouTube won't let you do that. Naturally enough, somebody has found a way around this.

It's a free YouTube downloading tool called Free YouTube Download. And it's a breeze to use. You just paste in the Web address for the video you want and click the download button. You can get it at dvdvideosoft.com, at least until the lawsuit is filed.

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