Ideas from Mark Stout

I've been using Backupify for a while now to backup my GMail, Google Contacts, Flickr photos and more.  I have a post from January explaining the free service. They have now enticed me with an opportunity for a free Premium account for five friends.  If five people I invite through their site all sign up for the free account, each of the five, get a free subscription to their Premium Service. So if that sounds good to you, e-mail me at MarkStout at Gmail (replace the at with an @ of course) and I'll submit you.  Then when you get the invite be sure to follow-up and sign up.  If all five do, then then each gets a Premium account. In the interest of full disclosure, there is something in it for me.  I'd get a Business account for free, and also entered to win an iPad.  The sharing of one in the family is somewhat problematic, so that would be useful.

A few interesting things are going on, I haven't had a chance to post. Google Voice is now open to all.  If you don't have one of their free accounts, get one.  I've written about i t a lot here and will be writing more soon.  There are some good tips in that link for new Google Voice users. Evernote is now two years old.   I wanted to make their Meetup last night in DC, but the press of other engagements, don't you know.  I've also written a lot of good tips about it, including my most read post "Your First Day with Evernote" . And finally, Dropbox has a new sharing model if you don't mind using a pre-release version.  And here are my previous Dropbox posts .

I hear every fall from teachers that their students come back to school and seem like they have forgotten to bring their brains.  When the brains finally arrive, they are dusty and sluggish from not being used all summer long. This week's Family Tech is some thoughts of how you can use the allure of technology to trick your kids into using their brains over the summer.

Summer began for many children this weekend.  In this week's  Family Tech column , I suggest ways parents can use technology to keep their children's brains engaged over the summer. One idea I only had a line or two to suggest, was to have your children make a movie.  I've never actually done this with children, but for dramatic kids, or techy ones or those who like telling stories, this may be a fun activity. If your family already has a video camera, and a PC or Mac, they have what they need to make a film.  Just add some imagination and some effort that hopefully they will regard as play, and you may set the next budding Spielberg on his or her path to greatness. Films are showing up at Sundance made from the same ingredients, so having kids make a movie at least the family will want to see is quite doable. What you really want to do, is try and get children to think about a story first and then figure out how to put it into a video.  You'll need slight...

I think the iPhone 4, and the Evo and upcoming cell phones with front facing cameras are going promote video calling.  Not sure if it will be a sustained us, and what the unintended consequences are going to be.  I ruminate on this in this week's Family Tech column .

For all their vaunted care about "user experience" Apple panicked me in my first moments with my then new iPad on release day April 6.  When I hooked it up to my PC to do its initial sync (why is that even necessary?), I looked up at the battery gauge and saw the words "not charging". Was my iPad broken?  Why wasn't it charging from the USB cable? I plugged it into the power outlet and it charged, whew? The mystery was solved when I went online and started reading others first impression of their new iPad.  Apparently standard PC's do not put out enough power to charge the iPad.  Macs do though. Then reading the net on my iPad the other night, I found a reference to Asus passing out a new USB driver, the AI ReCharger ,  that allows some PC's to charge the iPad.  I downloaded it and ran it, and it works.  At least in the few minutes i tried it. My iPad spends precious little time in my home office.  It travels dur...

With vacation season approaching,  this week's Family Tech is about online travel resources.