This is the season when people get technology gifts, but it’s also the time of year when we get rid of our old gadgets. We might want to get that end-of-the-year tax write off by donating products to a worthy charity, or maybe we just want to clear out our closets to make room for the new stuff.

Whichever the case, you shouldn’t throw your old technology products into the trash. I won’t fill this column up with a long diatribe about electronic waste - suffice it to say that it can be toxic. And if you decide to recycle, make sure you’re dealing with an organization the does so responsibly.

On its Web site, Greencitizen.com says that “80 percent of U.S. electronic waste collected for ‘recycling’ is dumped in Asia and Africa.”

A good recycling company will make sure that the waste is properly processed with safe disposal of all toxic materials. At www.Computertakeback.com is a list of responsible recyclers broken down by state. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, at svtc.etoxics.org, has plenty of additional information on its Web site.

Another option sometimes is to send the tech item back to where it came from. Some companies offer their own recycling program for their equipment. In California, all cell phone companies are required to take back old phones. In some cases, they are given to domestic violence victims  or others for whom your old phone could become a lifeline. If you’re buying a new PC or Mac and want to recycle your old one, check the manufacturer’s Web site to see what they can do to help. Apple will take back iPods at any of its retail stores, and will send you a coupon for free recycling of any brand PC if you buy a new Mac. Dell provides free recycling for any Dell-branded product. The easiest way to find out what your manufacturer offers is to type its name along with “+ recycling” into a search engine.

The end of the year is when a lot of people give old equipment to a non-profit to get a write-off of the fair market value. This is indeed a noble idea but don’t just drop off that old PC on the doorstep of your nearby church, school or non-profit organization. Equipment that might be obsolete for you might also be obsolete for that organization.

The National Christina Foundation is an organization that matches donors to worthwhile charities while maintaining minimum standards.

If you’re thinking of donating to a specific organization, make sure you talk with its staff or volunteers first to make sure the computer is needed.

Of course, you can always try to sell your old equipment. But you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth the hassle.

Another option is to hand it down to a friend or family member. My son took our old 36-inch Sony TV to his apartment at UCLA. I was glad to get it out of the house and he and his roommates are happy to have a relatively nice TV.

BUYERS of consumer electronics are haunted by one question: Should I buy now or wait for new features, better performance and lower prices?

READ MORE AT NYTIMES.COM

by Larry Magid
Reposted from
San Jose Mercury News

Lots of us are getting digital cameras for the holidays. My gift to myself was a Canon S5 IS. Unlike the other cameras I’ve owned, this one has a 12x optical zoom and a body that looks almost like one of those professional SLR (single lens reflex) models, only smaller. At $330 on Amazon.com, it’s a lot of camera for the price. But you don’t have to spend that much to get an excellent digital camera. Even if you spend less than $100 on a digital point-and-shoot camera, you’ll wind up with all the equipment you need to take excellent photographs. Kodak’s C513, which sells for only $79 at Kodak.com comes with a 3x optical zoom, a 5 megapixel sensor and a 1 gigabyte storage card. My older Kodak camera takes great pictures.

One thing you don’t get with many small cameras is an optical view finder. For those too young to remember, all film cameras had a little hole near the top that you looked through. Today, most people take pictures by looking at the LCD screen at the back of the camera. One advantage to an optical view finder is that the image won’t wash out in bright sunlight. Another is that when you’re holding the camera up to your head, you’re helping to stabilize it. Mainly for us old folks, it’s a force of habit. I’m just used to holding the camera up to my eye.

Some small cameras still have view finders, such as Canon’s PowerShot SD850 IS which sells for about $250.

Another thing I prefer is cameras that take AA batteries. They’re not as efficient as some of the proprietary rechargeable batteries, but they are cheaper and easier to come by. Worst case, you can buy disposable AAs. But you and the environment are much better off with rechargeable AAs, including a relatively new generation of rechargable batteries, such as the Sanyo eneloop that come ready to use and have up to a year of shelf life. Some small cameras from Kodak, Nikon and others use AAs, though most small digital cameras use proprietary batteries. To my delight, that larger Canon camera I bought last week uses four AAs and is rated for 450 shots on a single charge, depending on use of flash and the LCD display. When it comes to a zoom lens, pay attention to the optical zoom but ignore digital zoom specifications. Optical zoom involves the movement of the lens to give you a good close up. Digital zoom uses software to simulate a zoom, resulting in a loss of quality. Besides, all digital editing programs give you the ability to blow-up images on a PC or Mac, which is all that a camera’s digital zoom accomplishes.

How you use a camera is probably more important than what camera you buy. I’m no expert but I’ve been taking lessons from my friend George Margolin, an award winning photographer and former technical editor of Popular Photography. Margolin agrees that “virtually any of today’s digital cameras will take very good pictures,” and he recommends using the camera’s “auto” feature for most picture taking.

Still, there are times when you might want to override the automatic settings, such as when taking pictures in low light or photographing a moving object. For that, Margolin suggests using the scene function (often abbreviated “SCN”) available in many cameras. That function typically provides various modes, such as bright light, sports, beach, indoor and snow. Most cameras also have a “macro” setting that you can use to take close ups of small objects such as jewelry or flowers.

Most cameras also have manual settings that can get you into trouble if you’re not careful but free you up to take some great pictures if you learn to use them. You often can adjust the aperture or F-Stop (size of the lens opening) and shutter speed and set the “ISO,” which is the equivalent of using a different speed film. (more…)

Facebook’s now self-admitted privacy blunder should serve as a wake-up call to all Net users. When you’re online, it’s up to you to keep an eye out for your personal information.

The storm at Facebook began in November when the company introduced its Beacon service, which automatically informed all your Facebook buddies about purchases you made at participating merchants. There was a way to prevent the information from being sent out, but the “opt-out” process was cumbersome and the default was set for sending the data rather than maintaining user privacy.

On December 5, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology admitting on his blog: “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them.”

The apology came after Moveon.org gathered 50,000 signatures on a petition to the company complaining that its advertising strategy invaded users’ privacy. Facebook has also been criticized by security company Computer Associates, which accused the company of giving users “only marginal control over the annoyance concern and zero control over the privacy concern.”

Along with his apology, Zuckerberg offered users the ability to completely opt out of the Beacon program which is certainly a step in the right direction. But even without Beacon, users of Facebook and other Web services should still be on guard to make sure their information remains under their control.

For example, users need to be careful when using some of the new applications that you can add to your Facebook profile. I tried out the New York Times Quiz on Facebook just to see how it worked. I tested it on a day when I hadn’t yet read the New York Times or any other newspapers or news Web sites and, as one might expect, I didn’t do very well. No worries - I was just trying it out. But what I didn’t realize was that the application would beam my score to some of my Facebook friends. I can laugh about it now, but as a journalist and contributor to the New York Times, it was quite embarrassing. (more…)

I’ve been a big fan of GPS navigation systems for years. In fact, the technology may be responsible for saving my marriage. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but the navigation system in our car has prevented many an argument between my wife and me. Instead of having to argue whether to turn left or right, we let the GPS make that decision for us.

Most of the time GPS’s advice is right, but every once in awhile, a GPS device has steered us in the wrong direction. Admittedly, this happened several years ago, but one early GPS unit I tested encouraged me to drive my car into a lake to get to the other side. Fortunately, I was looking out the window and overruled it before the wheels touched the water.

Lately I’ve been testing the Magellan Maestro 4200 series GPS - a $349.99 unit with a 4.3-inch-wide color screen, a voice to tell you where to turn and voice recognition to let you access some of its features without having to take your hands off the wheel. Magellan also makes the Maestro 3000 series, which is nearly identical in features but smaller (3.5-inch screen) and cheaper, starting at about $250.

Although it comes with a cord for the car’s cigarette lighter, the device also has a battery that can run the unit for about four hours and it’s small and thin enough to slip into a pocket so you can easily move it from car to car or - as I do - and take it with you on trips to use in a rental car, when you probably need it the most.

The unit is pre-loaded with maps of all 48 contiguous states along with Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Canada. It also has a points of interest database of 1.3 million locations including gas stations, restaurants, ATMs, hotels, parking lots, public parks, airports and other places you’re likely to drive. When looking for a place, you can search by name or category or search through data from the AAA tourbook. (more…)

If you’re looking for a very useful holiday present for a friend, loved one or yourself, you should definitely consider an external hard drive. I realize that a storage product isn’t nearly as exciting or instantly gratifying as a digital music player, a digital camera or a large screen TV, but it can be incredibly useful.

To begin with, you can use it to backup your hard drive - always a good idea. Most external drives come with backup software but you can use any backup program or merely use the operating system’s file copy functions to backup your content.

If you have a Macintosh with the new Leopard operating system, you can use the “Time Machine” backup program that’s included. Time Machine makes backing up and restoring files easy and strangely even fun. Microsoft Windows Vista also comes with a backup program that’s relatively easy to use but not nearly as appealing as Time Machine.

In terms of basic functionality, it hardly matters which brand external drive you get - there are excellent ones on the market from Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Simple Tech, LaCie and others. Your most important decision is how much storage to get.

The more the merrier, of course, but in most cases, you probably don’t need to buy a higher capacity external drive than the number of gigabytes in your internal drive. And you might not even need that much storage since you don’t necessarily have to backup the operating system and your software: your data is what counts. (more…)