Digital Camera For Moving Help
I recently moved to a new home and hated the thought of putting my china cabinet back together. I have a lot of keepsakes and it took me forever to arrange them all.
I decided to take a picture of each section of the shelves with my digital camera. After the move, I unpacked the cabinet contents and set them all on the table. Checking each picture on the camera, I was then able to choose the pieces that were grouped together and re-arrange them in their original places.
Thanks to my digital camera, organizing the cabinet was fast and easy. Try this idea with any collection that you need to move and set up again.
Portable Label Printer
My newest gadget and birthday present is a little label printer and it’s so cute. I wasn’t sure if I would use it that much, but tonight it came in very handy. I’m having a baby shower for my daughter and rather than wreck my wrist writing (say that quickly), I printed off the address on labels and pasted them on the invitations. They look nice and saved a lot of time and effort. Tomorrow I’ll do the envelope labels and I’ll be all set.
I didn’t like doing labels with my regular printer because it was so fiddly getting the data nicely centred. But this little printer does them perfectly every time and I can add little pictures, print all different sizes, and like I said before, it’s cute.
External Hard Drive
As a lover of shiny, new gadgets, I now have an external hard drive. Not your everyday, takes-up-a-lot-of-room-on-the-desk hard drive either.
I had a much loved laptop that died the week before (there’s something in the electricity here) and it had an 80 gig hard drive, full of my most valuable digital possessions.
So, clever old gal that I am, I bought an external hard drive case (about $25) and put my laptop hard drive into it. The case is a sleek silver beauty about the size of a cigarette case and has cables that plug into my desktop computer’s USB port.
Voila, I now have an extra hard drive on this old machine and since I am saving my work onto the external, when the old computer dies, my stuff will not go with it. Perfect!
A USB Hub
No, this is not a wheel for a sports car. It’s an inexpensive little gadget (under $25) that you plug into the USB slot (called a port) which looks like a narrow rectangle at the back of the computer. This port is where you would normally connect your digital camera, web cam, flash drive, or even some of the newer printers. Reaching to the back of your computer to plug these things in can be difficult, so the cord of the USB hub is attached instead and then extends to the front of your desk for easy access. Mine has 4 USB slots, so I simply plug my flash drive into one of them and never have to climb around my computer again, which is important at my age.
Wrist Support
Another new product I bought at the drugstore for under $10 is a wrist rest that you put on like a bracelet. Mine is called a C-Pal and gives my wrist extra support. I have already had carpal tunnel surgery and don’t want to injure myself again, so I like this idea. So far, it seems to work well. I can type for quite a while without any pain.
MP3 Speaker Bear
I have become the proud owner of a cute and cuddly, 9 inch tall, huggable speaker iBear. He looks like your regular teddy, except that the soles of his feet are speakers. He has a connection wire on his back to plug an mp3 player into. He’s light enough to carry from room to room, the sound is pretty good (better than I thought it would be) and if I record my voice and have it play, I can entertain my two-year old granddaughter for at least ten minutes – okay, maybe five.
USB Flash Drive
I bought a device called a USB flash drive. It’s about the size of a fat marker (some are even smaller)and plugs into your computer USB port. This is much better than saving temporarily on a disk because it’s more like a mini hard drive and will store the equivalent of about 44 floppy disks (more for the bigger flash drives).
I used it to save some of the files on my laptop and then transfer them to another computer so they could be printed. Later, I used the flash drive to transfer my new files from the laptop to my home computer. This is so easy to use, it’s amazing. A++
When I arrived home, I used the flash drive (or key as it’s sometimes called) to transfer my new files from the laptop to my home computer. Quick and easy.
