A quick travel tip, don’t put your home address on your luggage. Makes it a bit easy for thieves–they know you are on the road, they know your address. I usually put my office address. There’s always someone there to answer phones if the airline calls, they have better security than my house.

The easiest way to make a luggage tag is to use MMMLS8535G – Self-Sealing Glossy Laminating Pouches w/Loops for Luggage Tags
. Take your business card, put it in the Pouch, press together. Voila, a nice neat, tough luggage tag. As a bonus, it makes your luggage a bit easier to spot on the carousel–especially if you have standard black luggage.

A cool utility knife?  Really?  Well Milwaukee has managed to create a well-built, useful and cool utility knife–Milwaukee 48-22-1901 Fastback Flip Open Utility Knife.   The design of the knife centers around ease of use and speed of use.   If you read the promo material they advertise that you can open the knife 3x faster because you open the knife one handed.  Press the button and let gravity do the work.   When the knife is locked open, we never felt a wobble.   Make sure your fingers are out of the way though when you close the knife–otherwise it can hurt you.

1. As a regular utility knife
2. As a wire cutter
3. As a gut hook (when closed) that allows you to cut string or twine without opening the knife

The knife is well built and the frame is a bit thinner than most utility knives–makes it slide into a pocket or tool belt easily.  The Fastback also has a wire clip to allow you to clip it to your pocket.

All in all a cool tool and perhaps a good stocking stuffer.   You can buy it for about $13 at Amazon and other tool retailers. Milwaukee 48-22-1901 Fastback Flip Open Utility Knife

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system.   A great deal of my initial knowledge of computer systems came from dial up BBS’es–to this day I remember the phone number of long-gone BBS’.

Now before you go off and start posting in a forum, you need to learn a bit about forum etiquette.  My first bit of advice–read a few of the existing forum posts.  Reading forum posts will give you an idea of the style of that particular forum (is it closer to a neighborhood club or more like a university classroom).  Pamela Stevens has a good list of 25 Forum Posting Etiquette Tips that are worth reading.

Here are some of my favorite forum based sites to get you started:

Photography

Photo.net – www.photo.net

Photo.net is an online community with hundreds of thousands of active members and many more casual viewers visiting daily. Photo.net was started in 1993 by Phillip Greenspun and is one  the best peer-to-peer educational system for people who wish to become better photographers.

Luminous Landscape – luminous-landscape.com/forum/

Luminous Landscape is one of my favorite sites about photography.  The articles are great.  The forums are a great source of useful information from professional photographers as well as photography enthusiasts.

Watches

Watchuseek:  http://forums.watchuseek.com/index.php

Watchuseek claims to have the world’s busiest forums.  A lot of great knowledge.

Poor Man’s Watch Forum - http://www.pmwf.com

Can’t afford watches that cost 4 to 7 digits (yes 7!).  Poor Man’s Watch forum will guide you to much more reasonable but still high quality forums.

Travel

FlyerTalk – www.flyertalk.com/forum/

Want to learn how to travel from frequent flyers?  FlyerTalk provides up-to-date information on travel-related loyalty reward programs and so much more–the best luggage, what to pack, hotel deals, where to eat, …

Flashlights

Candle Power Forums - www.candlepowerforums.com

Hard to believe that there are hundreds of discussions on Flashlights–LED vs. Incadescent; What’s the best LED?; What reflector works the best.

http://www.ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/laws/cellphone_laws.html

Even though this technology is still in its infancy, it is remarkably effective. Standing alone as the first ever comprehensive catalogue of cell phone numbers, a reverse phone number lookup has many common uses. Currently, users say that they perform reverse lookups to track down the identity of telemarketers so that they can have their numbers removed once and for all. This technology is also quite useful if you are being bothered by a prank caller or obscene caller, and, of course, this service provides the best call screening possible.

When you consider just how useful these new types of searches are, it is surprising to learn just how cost effective they really are. If you are attached to your cell phone throughout the day and you simply don’t have time to talk to anyone that is calling you about frivolous things, a series of reverse phone number lookups can act like your own professional answering service, weeding out unwanted and unnecessary calls from the ones you really need. Most people would pay hundreds of dollars per year for such a service, but reverse number searches cost significantly less.

The magic powering these searches is due in large part to private record information. Unlike a regular, old fashioned search engine that simply scans the information on the Internet, a reverse phone number search queries private databases dedicated to storing large amounts of cell phone data. When a user searches a 10-digit phone number through a reverse phone directory, the search function sifts through the database until it finds a match for the queried number. The phone owner’s first and last name is then compiled onto an organized PDF file and made available to the user.

The technology is fairly simple to use and can be purchased for $15-20 per search. For more long-term users, year-long memberships are often offered between $35-40.

• GigaPan Imager A robotic camera mount for capturing gigapixel images available for $279
• GigaPan Stitcher Automatically combines thousands of photos into a single panorama.
• GigaPan.org View, share, explore and discover using the amazing GigaPan Viewer.

the GigaPan System provides a complete, low-cost and powerful solution for creating incredibly high-resolution photos.  Sample impages can be found at www.gigapan.org

Gigapan Systems Online – Gigapan Systems Homepage

• Play games (Duh!)
• Connect to my computer to play music and show pictures
• Connect to Netflix and watch movies on demand

Unfortunately Microsoft decided to charge $90 for it’s Wi-Fi Dongle.  Ridiculous!  Gizmodo has a article about some much cheaper options.  Their choice is to get the original Xbox dongle and it works.

How To: Add Wi-Fi To Your Xbox 360 Smartly and Cheaply

Oh yeah, we have found that a wired connection works significantly faster and is more reliable but sometimes it is way too difficult to string wires through the room and walls.

Mr. Kelly helped co-found Wired magazine and remains the Senior Maverick. 

Cool Tools

See it here (requires Google Earth) via Madpixel

Free High Res Images of Earth – Boing Boing