The Gadgets Page

Remember two years ago, when I was searching for the perfect watch? You don’t? Then check it out here:

• Gadgets Page » I Hate the Watch Designers of the World

I was looking for a watch that did the following:

• Women’s watch
• Digital
• Metal case and band
• Time and Date on the display at the same time
• Stopwatch
• Countdown Timer
• Light
• I would also like Dual Time, but I’m willing to give that up

The latest iteration of the Casio Baby-G doesn’t quite fit all my qualifications, but it’s very close. It is technically a women’s watch, even though it’s pretty large. You can see it takes up most of my wrist here:

It is digital and displays the time and date on the face of the watch. It also has a stopwatch (chronometer), and countdown timer, light and dual time. In fact, it has features that I didn’t even know I wanted like an accelerometer that can notice when I’m holding the watch up and looking at it and change the display to show slightly bigger numbers when I do:

If you think this photo is the same as the previous one except that it’s a little out of focus, then you can understand why I find the accelerometer feature useless. The numbers are ever so slightly bigger in the second picture, but the difference is so minute that it makes me wonder why they bothered.

Their execution of dual time is clunky. Sure, the cool thing right now is to have your time attached to wherever you’re living, but that is an extra feature that hinders rather than aids time setting. Instead of making me find the nearest city in my time zone, how about you just let me tell you what time it is now? Is that alright?

Oh, and when I set the time in the other time zone, don’t make me choose yet another city. Just let me change the hours. Can you keep the minutes and seconds to match the original time line? No? Why is that? What planet do you live on? We’re all just separated by hours, not minutes. Is it really necessary for me to reset the minutes and seconds in EACH time zone?

If you are in love with your shiny white Apple MacBook or your brand new 3G iPhone, then can have the Casio Baby-G to match. Otherwise, it’s just a bulky white watch that is close, but no cigar. It’s serviceable, but it is by no means the perfect watch.

If you have a need to figure out what a person is doing with their computer, for example to monitor what your teenagers do online, there is a class of devices called Keystroke loggers that security and HR professionals often employ to capture everything that is typed on a computer. This includes passwords, websites, outgoing email, and instant messages.

If you need a keystroke logger, you can’t do better than the Keelogger Flash USB, from www.keelog.com. This clever device records all the keystrokes that go through it to a text file stored in flash memory on the device. At any time, you can press a set of keys simultaneously (by default, “kbs”) to connect the device as flash memory. When you do this, another drive will show up in “my computer” automatically (or on your desktop in Mac OS X) and it will contain a simple text file of all keystrokes logged since the file was created. You can copy that file to your computer, and then simply eject the flash drive to re-enable the keyboard functionality. There is no software or drivers to install to read the data from the device.

It’s a huge boon to my security practice because we can read data directly on the computers we need to monitor without giving away the presence of the device to the people being monitored and without removing it.

There are caveats to the use of any keystroke logger however: It is physically obvious that something is connected between the keyboard and the computer. Should someone notice it, they could move the keyboard to a different USB port and them move it back when they’re finished—giving you the impression that you’ve captured all keystrokes when you haven’t. The only solution to this is to disassemble the keyboard and install a keystroke logger inside it, which is technically somewhat difficult. You also can’t use a keystroke logger to capture data from a laptop keyboard or from fingerprint sensors, so monitoring laptop users requires a software solution. Finally, keystroke loggers can’t pickup data from remote control software such as VNC, Macintosh Screen Sharing, or Microsoft Remote Desktop.

The Keelogger is considerably simpler to use than the keystroke loggers I’ve used in my IT security practice in the past. Without getting into the morality of spying or admonishing you to trust people before spying on them, the keeLogger is a simple, effective device that requires no software to perform it’s job.