CONCEALED ZOOM LENSES? Avalanche-proof backpacks? Listening devices and sabotage by software? If you want to be James Bond, we have the technology.
2. Quick, simple and fits in your pocket: those are the three qualities most people seem to put on their checklists when considering a digital camera. There are few cameras out there as compact as the 3.2 megapixel Minolta Dimax Xi, which is little bigger than a tea biscuit but packs a built-in zoom lens. Normally, changing the magnification on a zoom lens will extend it beyond the camera body, but the zoom mechanism of the Dimax Xi is internal. Mirama Camera, G/F, 25 Stanley Street, Central, offers the Dimax Xi for $3,150.
3. If you are into bird-watching or observing other sorts of wildlife, you will know how difficult it is to put down your binoculars and pull out your camera quickly enough to record what you're looking at. Worse, a 35mm camera requires a long and expensive lens to match the magnification of the cheapest binoculars. Now you can have it all in one package. The Pentax DigiBino DB100 looks like a standard pair of binoculars with the addition of a pop-up LCD panel. The panel helps you use the built-in digital camera, which takes advantage of the binoculars' 7X lens. Unfortunately, however, the camera is not a stunner, with less than a megapixel of resolution. The DB100 costs $2,450 from Mirama Camera.
5. Almost as aggravating and disheartening as finding your inbox filled with spam is knowing how little there is you can do about it. Spamfire is another piece of spam-filtering software that intercepts your mail, removes spam and sends only valid messages to your mail software. What makes Spamfire stand out from other programs, however, is the little pull-down menu at the top marked 'Revenge'. It allows you to bounce messages back to the sender, making it look as if your account does not exist. It also extracts a list of toll-free numbers from spam messages automatically so you can call the guilty companies and harass them on their phone bills. Best of all perhaps is the WebBugs function. Opening a spam message can send information about you back to the spammer, encouraging him to spam you again. The WebBugs function in Spamfire causes erroneous data to be returned, at least wasting his time and at best crashing his database. Note that Revenge is available to