The Buzz

Have you ever wanted to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef or explore the secret life of bats? Well, now you can—and still get back in time for fifth period. That’s the promise of the Tandberg 2006 Connections Program, a videoconferencing series that offers select virtual field trips to teachers and schools. Available for free for users of Tandberg videoconferencing equipment, the program enables students to experience cultural events abroad, learn about scientific discoveries, or hear powerful oral history directly from people who lived through notable events. www.tandberg.net.

The iRecord, a new product from Streaming Networks, allows users to capture video and audio directly onto their iPod, PlayStation Portable or other USB storage device with the touch of a button. Previously, users had to go through a multistep process to record, including hooking up their computer to a home entertainment system. Simply plug iRecord into a TV, DVD player, VCR, iPod, or any other analog video or audio source and you can record directly to a playback device. iRecord includes a power adapter and audio/video cables. $200. irecord.com.

Surly crowds and violence erupting on the street, it’s just another holiday shopping season. Just days after the raucous launch of Sony’s PlayStation 3, Nintendo released its new gaming console the Wii on November 19 to a bit less hype and fewer arrests. Although Nintendo has shipped about four million units in the U.S., compared to the PS3, which are about as scarce as Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, the Wii is expected to sell out in stores. So if you haven’t preordered the Wii ($250), find an online locator, such as ps3seeker.com/wii or the Google Maps Wiiseeker, and let your fingers do the walking. If you’re in the market for a PS3 ($500–600 list), well, there’s always eBay. The PS3 features high-quality graphics like Microsoft’s Xbox 360, while the Wii boasts an innovative motion sensitive controller. To track the console wars, visit www.nexgenwars.com.

You’ve worked hard to build a good reputation—but then there was that photo from the Vegas trip floating around online, not to mention those frisky comments on MySpace. Where there’s a need, there’s another start-up, in this case, ReputationDefender. For a monthly fee, the online service will search the Web for compromising material about you or your child. For $30 a pop, you can have offending items nixed. For more information, visit www.reputationdefender.com.

So much of our lives—work, correspondence, financial records, even our personal photo and video collections—is electronically based. Have you considered the consequences when you die? Today, getting your affairs in order should include letting your wishes be known regarding your e-accounts and other online effects. Take e-mail, for example. If you died tomorrow, would your loved ones be able to access your correspondence or would you even want them to? Last year, John and Debbie Ellsworth secured a court order to gain access to the e-mail account of their son, Lance Corporal Justin Ellsworth, who was killed in Iraq in November 2004. Yahoo! had previously declined the request due to its privacy policy. As an alternative to going to court, consider storing all your passwords in a secure database, such as Password Safe, and granting access to a trusted party in the event of your death.

Anchor Audio has released a new, fully portable assistive listening system (ALS) designed to provide individual, interference-free reception in the classroom. For those students with significant hearing loss, traditional hearing aids are often not enough to enable comprehension, especially in noisy classrooms. Anchor’s wireless, 16-UHF channel ALS system helps hearing-challenged students by separating speech from background noise. A basic system includes one rack-mountable transmitter and four belt-pack receivers with earbud headphones. www.anchoraudio.com.

While amateur rock gods everywhere are rejoicing over the release of Guitar Hero II, a two-year-old girl in Virginia is getting a head start on her own shredding skills. Her father, Mike Smith, has modified her Elmo guitar into a functional Guitar Hero controller. Using the innards of a Playstation DualShock, Smith tricked out the Elmo unit, switching around the buttons for Oscar and Big Bird. So now instead of plunking out “The Wheels on the Bus,” his daughter can riff on “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man.”

A search engine devoted to library blogs? For information professionals, it just doesn’t get any better than that. The site, called LisZen, is the recently launched brainchild of Garrett Hungerford, a LIS student at Wayne State University and network manager at the West Branch (MI) Public Library. Say you’re itching for the latest talk about library 2.0, RFID, or information literacy. Just plug in your search term, and LisZen will scour more than 500 blogs, and the list is growing. Still want more? Hungerford hosts a related blog at libraryzen.com/blog. www.liszen.com.

Following similar moves by Yahoo! and Google, Ask.com now enables users to perform searches from their mobile devices. Ask Mobile features a special interface and search tools that are designed to minimize keystrokes and increase navigability on small displays. Enthusiastic blog reports seem to indicate that the service does indeed make for faster searching. From its home page, Ask Mobile provides direct access to search categories, including directions, business listings, maps, weather, Bloglines, area codes, currency conversion and, of course, Web search. Mobile.ask.com.