While it’s a far cry from pocket-sized, the Reader is a two-handed device that’s about the size and thickness of a hefty paperback. The body houses a high resolution (5-megapixel) camera with autofocus and a full-powered Linux-based PC with the Intel Atom processor.

The user aims the camera at the printed page and snaps a picture. The picture is then converted into the spoken word and played back via the internal speaker or headphones. Or the printed page can be converted into text and magnified on the unit’s built-in 4.3-inch monochrome screen. There’s sufficient on-board memory (4GB of solid state memory with 2GB for user storage) to house one-half million text-only printed pages.

Going far beyond traditional books, the Intel Reader can magnify or translate things that hold folks back from having a normal life: monthly bills, instruction manuals, a recipe from the paper, an offer in the mail, even labels on pill bottles.

The Reader cannot display graphics, just text. The price tag, $1,499, is a bit of shocker, but if you compare it with other low-vision solutions, it’s actually on par. Perhaps the biggest downside is that photographing an entire book, page by page, to turn it into an audio book or a large magnification screen seems like a lot of work. The unit has an optional stand that holds the camera in place ($399) and helps when photographing multiple pages.

I don’t expect the 55 million people who could be helped by the Reader to charge out there and buy their own. I suspect that institutions such as schools, libraries, and other public places may lead the way. But one thing about Intel, when they enter a market, they’re usually in it for the long run, and that’s a good thing.

As I thought about legacy I started to think about legacy products.

Here’s an obvious one. Legacy Locker is what it says it is, a locker for your digital assets. This is sort of like digital equivalent of an online safety deposit box. You can specify a beneficiary to have access to your digital assets in the event that you die or become incapacitated.

The beneficiaries aren’t permitted any access until they show up with a death certificate or some certificate proving that you can no longer manage your accounts.  This is not a sexy product, but it’s an important one.  And it’s not a bad deal, especially since you’re walked through how to name people, compose legal letters, upload and download. You can store everything from passwords, to access codes to music and photos. The only limiting factor is your pocketbook. There are full featured offerings for  $29.99 per year, or $299.99 for a lifetime subscription. A trial version with limited features is available for free.

Fast Pencil is a legacy of a different entirely color.  The youngsters may be busy living life, but older folks are busy sorting out these blasts from the past and letting their creative juices fly into Act II.  Boomers are the heaviest users of self publishing software; they’ve got lots to say and more time to say it.

Some publishing programs like Blurb (Blurb can create extraordinarily beautiful photographic books. Lulu, another self publishing program prides itself on creating speedy printed books on demand.  A new program I looked at last week,  Fast Pencil  is not dissimilar. It provides templates and typefaces and editing tools to get your printed pages to behave. What it gives you that the others don’t is a social network. Bookwriting no longer needs to be classified as a lonely task,  The social media part is the fun part – if you like collaboration that is

Researching your family history?  Why go it alone. Get them all involved, Comment, Edit . Set up chapters.  Putting together a family cookbook?  A travel book?  It turns out that Fast Pencil is a great way to manage group collaborations.  The site is also building a network of supporting talents whos work is for hire,  Need a graphic artist? Special typography?  Copy Editor, — the entire publishing community is invited to swap gifts. A recently launched addition to the product is called Color Book Creator (which has nothing to do with coloring books)  lets you import photos and illustrations into your book.  Even if only your five BFFs and three relatives buy a book you’ve created a legacy.

So what was going through Dad’s head when he invited everyone in his AOL address book to join him as a friend on a porn dating site? According to Dad, his friend Eddie made him do it. Dad fell for the old “can’t-say-no-to-a-request-from-a-friend”; that’s just part of his upbringing.

Eddie never sent the invitation out to his friends either. Both of them received messages from people they knew really well, asking them to become friends. Once they accepted, the site asked if they would like to invite others to be friends. Once Eddie and Dad clicked on the “yes” to invite others, the site’s program went to work, looking at all of the email addresses in their address books and immediately sending out the same “join my group” invitation.

But it was the reaction of family and friends to Dad’s invite that showed how different generations react. In general, the elders fell into two categories: naïve enough to accept and then send out their own invites or mortified, terrified, and violated. I got the same Desktop Dating invitation from a few other “mature” relatives the next day. They did it because it came from Dad.

The younger kids didn’t lift an electronic eyebrow. They hit the delete key. Of all of the many young cousins, grandkids, nieces, and nephews, only three of them made any comment to their parents. It was something along the lines of “Got a weird email from Grampy today.” My own daughter warned me of Grampy’s request by forwarding it to me with the comment, “looks as if Grampy’s new computer is lonesome.”

The best response came from an octogenarian. Cousin Marty wrote my dad a rather lengthy apology for not accepting his date. “I’d love nothing more than to be your desktop date,” said Marty in his email to Dad, “but it seems as if Verizon does not want me to be your date. They won’t let me join.” He went on to offer a solution: “I’ve forgotten my password on Facebook, but I do have an account. Maybe we can date there instead.”

Dad’s a bit PO’ed by the whole event. He hates looking dumb (and haven’t we all been there). The elders have proof that the kids don’t react much to out-of-the-norm web events. The grownups are reminded again that even your best friend Eddie can be someone else on the web. I’m reminded of the big gap between the two and wondering how my kids’ kids will react to it all. I’m also reminded of how great it is to have your extended family as web friends; the generation gap has always been there, but now we get to experience it in all sorts of new ways.

Finds your best waking moment.

I have become my Grandmother. She was the one that spent  a bulk of each day pleasantly sleeping in front of the television. The instant she’d wake she’d fret about the fact  that she never slept.  As we age sleep problems do increase, but so does fretting about them. While I’m not my Grandma yet,  I’m now a card carrying member of the generation who can’t sleep at night. Just one more thing that technology proposes to remedy for me.

My first foray into managing sleeplessness was the SleepTracker,  a plastic, oversized, digital stopwatch type device that sells for around $170. The watch tracks your sleep patterns and serves as your alarm clock (both vibration and ringing), but with a high tech twist.

The watch can track small body movements and determine whether you are in REM sleep (the deepeet of the sleep cycles) or a lighter sleep. Because REM sleep is the deepest, most restful sleep, you’ll feel better if you’re awakened during the lighter part of your sleep cycle. When you set the SleepTracker alarm you set it for a window of wake-up opportunity. The alarm will wake you at a time during that window when you are in a lighter sleep. Theoretically you’ll wake more refreshed. 
After trying it for a week I learned that wearing a big plastic watch on my wrist at bedtime drove me nuts. I also found that monitoring obscure terms and obscure push buttons for Data 1 and Data 2 was too much to think about. Finally my sleep patterns were irregular, too irregular to provide much of a baseline. Ultimately I found myself worrying  about the  gadget enough to be losing sleep over it. 

Next up is Pzizz, a software for power napping (or getting a restful night’s sleep). According to its creators, Pzizz combines Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), music, sound effects and a binaural beat that puts you into a relaxed state of mind. Very new-agey. I really did feel more awake and energized after listening to a pzizz session, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t have felt  equally as rested if I’d just allowed myself a quick catnap minus the pzzizz and I’m to my mind computers and resting are a bit of an oxymoronic mix. The good thing about pzizz is that it gently wakes you after a specified nap time. Try the free download of pzizz soundtracks at http://pzizz.com 

The emWave Personal Stress Reliever  from HeartMath can help you sleep more restfully or do just about anything else that calls for lowering stress levels. Based on biofeedback principles that monitor your pulse, breath rate and other autonomic body indicators, , the unit sense your stress level and then you concentrate on lowering it.  It costs $199.

Light has also been known to play a big part in sleep. Back in the pre-electricity days, people went to sleep when it got dark and woke up when it wasn’t. These circadian rhythms create a natural pattern for sleeping and waking.  Most lightning solutions try to mimic circadian rhythms. There are many lighting devices designed to gently wake you by simulating daylight, but the Lamborghini of sleep devices is The Starry Night Bed  http://www.starrynightbed.com/ . This bed would feel right at home in the honeymoon suite at a hotel. It adjusts lighting and positioning depending on whether you want to read, romance or just get some shut-eye. You can program the bed’s temperature, monitor your sleeping and breathing patterns, or just entertain yourself with the bed’s  built-in  iPod docking station and Microsoft Media Center.  The bed sells for upwards of $20k; the price of a  good night’s sleep?  Priceless.

Late Breaking Update:  Here I am playing around with stopwatches while David Pogue played with his Zeo Alarm Clock as reviewed in the New York Times. His clock sits on his nightable (not his wrist) and the monitor gets stuck to his head where it measures brainwaves as he sleeps.  $400 — and lots of data to analyze if you’re really sleep obsessed.

As our PCs and our emails hold more and more of our most intimate musings, and as boomers face mortality, the question of how to treat our online lives in the afterlife is a big one. I hear more and more stories of loved ones who die leaving their memories online and inaccessible to their families and friends.

I first looked into what happens to your online accounts after you die in 2006. Most websites were completely clueless, way too concerned with the here and now to worry about future problems.

Today, Facebook has a very clear policy about death. You can decide to memorialize the deceased profile (certain features, like status updates are shut off), which keeps the site viewable but frozen in time, or you can have the site deactivated (which doesn’t remove the contents). What Facebook doesn’t do (at least not without a big fuss) is release the deceased’s log-on information.

That means, unless they’re willing to fight, your family may be unable to use the site—say for contacting your friends with an update. Or finding out who your friends were or, in some cases, even how you might have died. LinkedIn, MySpace, and others have similar policies. You can have an account memorialized (on MySpace) or removed completely, but don’t count on being able to access the contents.

Planning for the Afterlife

Given these policies, like most death-related issues, the best thing you can do is to start thinking about your digital legacy while you’re still alive. Public radio recently ran a story about the legal wrangling of getting access to a deceased family member’s password. The broadcast identified Legacy Locker, a new website that lets you bequeath your online properties as a solution.

Other alternatives involve simple common sense, low-tech solutions.

1. Give your passwords to a trusted family member—an envelope that gets stored in a desktop drawer until needed is the lowest tech way to protect your legacy.
2. Don’t trust the keepers? Provide a list of passwords and account information to your attorney or executor. Ask that your will be modified to include a statement about what happens to your online persona.
3. Lock up your passwords in a vault to be opened in the event of your death. Leave specific instructions as to how to use these accounts.

If you think I’m just finding things to worry about, then think about this. According to a recent census of social media users, 3.24% of all Facebook users were actually dead. Dead MySpace users trumped Facebook at 7.46%. That’s a lot of souls floating around in social networking purgatory.