Productopia | Christina Lindsay

Purchasing music online and downloading it digitally to computers, MP3 players and phones has certainly changed the way we discover and listen to music, not least of which is releasing us from the need to own physical CDs. However, this freedom has come with its own, new, set of problems. The almost overwhelming selection of music, literally tens of millions of songs, available at low prices means that some of us now own too much music: too much to organize and too much to store, maybe even too much to listen to. If you add in the further complication of making sure that the music we want to hear is on the device that we want to use at the time that we want to listen to it, owning digital music seems like a lot of work. Read more

As we were updating our reports on monochrome and color laser printers, we were reminded that printer specifications are full of numbers, from the model identification itself to the much-advertised cost per page. To decide which printer is right for you, it's helpful to know what's behind the most frequently-cited numbers.  Read more

If you're intrigued by the thought of hidden treasure and by old maps with an X marking the "spot" then geocaching just could be the game for you. Bringing treasure hunting into the modern day through the use of GPS technology and handheld GPS receivers, geocaching is an outdoor game, and even a competitive sport, in which people navigate to a set of coordinates and then look for the container, the geocache, hidden at that location. The thrill of the hunt is in finding the geocache and discovering its contents -- be it just a logbook where you can record your accomplishment for posterity or a small trinket or knick-knack that you can take with you as the spoils of victory. Read more