Family tech: Shop on Christmas - via Internet

Among procrastinators like me is the growing inkling that Christmas is coming.

The last thing I want to do the week before Christmas is go anywhere near a store. And by now, any online orders will have to come via expensive express shipping. There is always the uneasy feeling that you risk family alienation should a package go astray.

Not to worry. The same Internet that brings us news and nonsense, and lets us order pizzas and Five Guys all online, can sell us gifts that need no shipping.

If someone in your family is a free user of Dropbox or Evernote, two programs discussed here before, you can always buy them a subscription. Dropbox lets them backup and store files on remote servers. While they can store two gigabytes of files for free you can buy them 50 gigabytes for $9.95 a month. Dropbox even keeps all versions of your file for the last 30 days, or for $39.95 a a year, keeps every version for-ever.

Evernote is a note retention and search program. You can upload 40 megabytes of notes, PDF files, images and sound files every 30 days. Or for $45 a year you can bump it to 500 megabytes a month. Evernote is my single most useful new program of 2009, with Dropbox a close second.

You can even put off your shopping until Christmas morning by having some gifts delivered into your loved one's inbox. Amazon has offered that to for years, as does iTunes. iTunes even have a clever ability to pay part of your kids allowance though iTunes credit.

If your recipient uses Flickr or Google Web Albums to store their photos, you an always convert them to FlickrPro with unlimited photo sharing for $24.95 a year. You can also buy additional storage space for Google's Picasa Web Albums.

If you are visiting relatives over the holiday, you can give them peace of mind, by subscribing them to Carbonite or Mozy or one of the other off-site, online backup services. For about $5 a month, their files will upload to the backup service protecting them from data loss if anything catastrophic happens to their PC's, like hard drive crashes or theft of the equipment.

Links to all these services are on the link page named at the end.

Last week's column named some useful and fun tech oriented gifts. I forgot two of the best. National Geographic has a DVD set containing 120 years worth of their magazine. All the text, and all the photos are there and searchable. It is $59.95.

I'm not sure how much I'd use this, but if your family had every National Geographic they ever received, only to part with them during some family move, this relieves some of the guilt for parting with them, is a cool thing to have on your bookshelf.

ThinkGeek.com has world's most powerful consumer flashlight. This $299 monster projects 4100 lumens of light.

I once thought my little pocket AAA Maglite that got me through 48 hours of an earthquake caused black-out projected a lot of light for its size. It sent out 15.6 lumens. It would take 263 little Maglites to best this beast. It does have some drawbacks. The rechargeable battery is only good for 30 minutes of light, and as seen in their marketing video, the lense gets hot enough to cook an egg.

If you are giving a computer as a gift, my blog has a post on how to prepare it so it is useful for the user from day one. If you get one as a gift, check out that post too.

And for whatever you get as a gift, search on the web to see if the owners manual is available as a PDF file. I have a folder on my PC with all the manuals I can find of things we own. I can find those easier then I can the printed manual.

It's always good to not only read the manual when you first get something, but read it again after using the product for a while. It will make more sense after you have used the product a while, and you will learn some new ways of using the product.

Comment on this column at InsideNova.com. Let's get a dialog going. Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark's blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his email address is

Comment on this column at InsideNova.com. Let's get a dialog going. Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark's blog is at markstout.blogspot.com and his email address is markstout@gmail.com.