THE ENDLESS WHITEBOARD

Whiteboards are the modern equivalent of our old school blackboards and they're great.

Bob's ideal room would be a duplicate of one he saw in a documentary shot at some university he can no longer remember. The name doesn't matter. The important thing was the room. It was a medium sized lecture hall and the walls were all whiteboards. A mathematics professor could write really long equations as he walked around the room. Then instead of trying to copy it all down, the students could just take pictures with their cell phones.

You can get a free online version of an endless whiteboard at Dabbleboard.com. Not only is this a great tool for working out ideas, but, if you permit it, other people can sign in to your Dabbleboard and add their edits and comments. They can go there whether you're in or out, so you don't have to hang around for the slow thinkers.

Dabbleboard.com provides a library of images you can use on your board, or you can bring in new material from the web or your own files. There are lots of shortcuts to help move things along. For instance, if you start to draw a square, it completes it for you. When you're through story-boarding your next movie or designing the next Mars-Lander, you can save it as a file online; keep or make changes later. A professional version of Dabbleboard costs $8 a month and lets you bring in diagrams and illustrations from Microsoft Visio and Adobe Illustrator.

Memory Loss

Nine thousand memory sticks are lost at dry cleaners in the United Kingdom every year, left behind in the pockets. Hopefully none of them contained passwords, incriminating photos, military secrets or other damaging information.

If you're worried about what you might have left behind, you can go to SafeHouseExplorer.com and get free software that locks your documents and videos and makes their file names invisible. This also works for files stored on CDs, DVDs, MP3 players or your own computer. The software is for Windows computers only and can create hidden, private storage vaults of up to 2 terabytes. Users may create any number of vaults, and each vault appears as a new disk drive letter.

Wikipedia on your Cell Phone

The free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, can now be downloaded into your cell phone, if you have a Blackberry or your phone uses the Windows Mobile system. It uses four gigabytes of the cell phone's memory, but once it's there you can look things up without any further calls. Wikipedia has 12 million articles, and that's just in English. You can get it for $10 from wikipock.com.

Identity Theft

The free AVG Anti-Virus is one of our favorite programs and has been recommended by most tech support people because it doesn't slow down your machine. Now they're offering an Identity Theft protection program for $20. If it spots suspicious activity, such as attempts to steal your credit card info, it stops it in its tracks.

Picture Perfect Turk

SnapMyLife.com is a photo-sharing site that makes it easy to send photos from your camera phone to an online gallery where they can be shared. It uses a service from Amazon.com called the "Mechanical Turk." (The name refers to a chess-playing automaton bearing the bust of a Turkish Gentleman. It toured Europe in the 18th century and was a big hit. It was supposedly a marvelous mechanical device but was eventually revealed to be a cleverly designed box containing a midget. The midget was a really good chess player. He even beat Napoleon.)

Amazon's Mechanical Turk employs real people to tag photos with keywords and place names so various categories of photos are easy to find. When you sign up, you get a special email address to forward your photos. Joy forwarded photos of some greeting cards she made and got instant comments. She didn't get any from Flickr.com, a much larger photo-sharing community. There are around 600,000 SnapMyLife users so far.

Internuts

• Buuuz.com is a news and information sharing service with a really pleasant interface. The site shows a cartoon sea with small islands. You click on a menu to put a new island in your sea, and then type in the words that describe your special interest. News items and messages from friends and colleagues that fit that category appear in a bottle floating next to the island. Gamers might have an island for their favorite game, for example. Joy created a recipe island and just got a new potato pancake recipe from Betty Crocker. We also have a gadget island that brings in gadget and gizmo news. It's a very relaxing setting.

• PolicyNewslinks.com is a site aimed at reporters and editors. It sends a daily email with news gathered from over 2,300 websites maintained by the federal government, U.S. Congress and approximately 1,000 advocacy groups. The first day we signed on we learned about a drug bust yielding 4,000 pounds of marijuana, and 43 companies dumping waste in South Gate, California. There were hundreds of stories. The service is free for the first 30 days.

• GreenByDesign.com has environmentally friendly stuff for sale. We liked the biodegradable trash bags and bamboo utensil holders. They also have hand-cranked radios, and chaise lounge chairs made of cork these last are expensive, but they float.