Well I have been looking at Digital Pens for a while, even bought a Livescribe echo. It is a good pen, only downside is you need special paper for it to work. Which means you have to buy pads or if you have access to a postscript printer you can print paper.

Recently I found the Staedtler Digital Pen, what a breath of fresh air.

Points for it are

• The pen is a normal pen size so fits in your hand a lot easier than the livescribe
• The small blue receiver just fits on the top of your page, just hit a button when changing pages
• No special paper required, so your normal notepad is fine
• It comes with conversion software.

all you do is install the software and connect up the little blue receiver to USB, download the pages you have written to it ( this includes any diagrams you have as well ).

Then you can choose text conversion and import the text into word, ok you may have to proof read and change some small words, but in all a very good device.

With technology moving on and digital media being available for everyone it is now getting to the time when you have a home media server in the house.

You can buy off the shelf servers like medi8tor, but for anyone with a PC lying about doing nothing, can i suggest vortexbox.

Yes you can buy a ready built server from these folks. But they also offer a downloadable .iso file. Run this on your old PC and it will install everything for you. ( Note : I did have to do an update the first time to get the applications uptodate ).

For any CD or DVD just drop it in the drive and that will automatically be converted and pulled into your server.

Go check it out, for a home media server, this is making all the right moves.

VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC, it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files , and download the cover art. Vortexbox will then serve the files to network media players such as Logitech Squeezebox, Sonos, or Linn. The music files can also be streamed to a Windows or Mac OSX system.

Features

• Convert an old PC to a CD ripper / jukebox / NAS in 15 minutes.
• Based on Fedora so it’s easy to modify.
• Automatically tags all files from online music database.
• Automatically downloads the cover art.
• Automatic sharing of file to SMB (Microsoft) file shares.
• Automatic re-indexing Squeezebox Server after every CD is ripped.
• AppleTalk – for OSX or Bonjour for Windows.
• DAAP – Automatically shares all MP3s for streaming to iTunes and Roku Soundbridge.
• NFS – For Linux boxes and almost anything else, Solaris etc.
• DLNA support – Play music and video DLNA enabled players, XBOX 360,PS3, Windows 7 etc.
• Easy installation of mplayer for AlienBBC support.
• Good support for Sonos.
• Works well as a back end server for XBMC (XBOX Media Center) running on XBOX, Windows, OSX, AppleTV, or Linux.