KATHLEEN HAS BEEN CORNERNING THE MARKET IN RIO MP3 PLAYERS. A trip to eBay reveals that these players are still available and many of them are selling for less than $50. Rio was a pioneer in the industry, and the company got a lot of things right. What’s really wonderful is that it is expandable with an SD memory. The devices have gotten a bad rap for dependability, and indeed one of the players, a cute little khaki-colored Rio 256-MByte player, did go south—worse, it went south on a defenseless younger relative of ours who was given the thing as a gift. What did he do? He went right out and bought an iPod. It just works, you know?

However, being the fogies we are, we use our Rio Forge to download the daily news from Audible and to go for a walk as well as transfer our favorite tunes to go for a run.

A close second in favorite music devices is the Napster player, which Napster gave out for free as a promotion. This little ugly duckling makes up in tiny what it gives up in looks. It only has 256 MBytes of memory, but here’s what’s really cool. It’s easy to download a couple of playlists from Napster and take off. Feel like listening to classical in the morning? Download a playlist and run it through the stereo. Replace it later with SpeakerBoxx. No one has to know. Same goes for those Boston flashbacks. If MP3 players had worked like this in the first place, Apple would not have waltzed in and taken the market.

It would be really nice if there was a tiny flash player that supported subscription services and Audible, but so far we can’t have everything. Some day we’re pretty sure we will.

Speaking of having everything, the Sony PSP wants to be the only toy in the knapsack. The PSP displays pictures, plays movies, plays music, and plays games. Unfortunately, with the exception of games, the PSP doesn’t do these other things gracefully. But, it’s pretty neat that you can do almost anything if you’re willing to put a little effort into it, including copying TV shows from the Tivo to the PSP, copying DVDs, playing music, and so on and so forth. We just bought a copy of ExtremeTech’s Hacking the PSP. Don’t expect to hear from us for a while.

Our noise canceling headphones. We didn’t spend a lot for them at Brookstone (mainly because we lost our very wonderful folding Sennheiser headphones and we couldn’t bring ourselves to spend a lot in the airport). But we have come to realize that these things will save marriages and soothe the savage beast. Recently, we were trapped in the Las Vegas airport for 6 hours. Actually, it seems like this happens to us every month or so. But anyway, this time we hunkered down at Brookstones with our tiny little Toshiba Libretto computer with docked DVD drive and watched Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. It was enchanting and the airport disappeared. The same thing would probably happen if you watched T2 except for the sweet dreamy feeling that carried over into the airplane ride.

And software?

The one piece of software we use every day, aside from Windows and Excel it is Picasa 2. We use it to transfer images from our camera, to crop them, and to resize them for publication. We have plenty of other copies of imaging software on our computers and we put them to work in specialized situations, but when it comes to the job of fast image processing, we’ll tell ya what, Picasa is all we need. The caveat we have is that it doesn’t do us much good on raw. There we go to Digital Darkroom, which seems to work pretty much the same way and it came to us with the camera. And okay, we wouldn’t like to live without the Canon Eos Rebel xt1. It gave new meaning to the lenses gathering dust in the closet and it drove us out into the streets to buy more accessories for the camera. And we really needed to get out of the house.

Oh yes, and the Treo

Along with the computer the mobile phone has changed our lives forever. But, sometimes we’re not sure the change is for the better. Now we can work anywhere, everywhere. What are you going to tell your boss when you don’t answer his voice mail/e-mail/IM—I forgot to recharge … everything? The phone was bad enough when it was just an evil black thing squatting in the hall. Now it’s with us everywhere. Having the damn thing implanted isn’t really going to make much of a difference, is it?

However, at least the Treo 650 we’ve been living with for over a year now does it all well. We can get our emails and IMs fed to us. We can play games. We can watch the news. And, we can listen to music. As terrible as it is to be a virtual slave to our employer, the Treo at least lets us sing in our chains.