Wanna catch a real “lunker”:http://www.southerntierbass.com/Lunkers/lunker_27.jpg? Then Ronco’s “Pocket Fisherman”:http://www.ronco.com/products/pocketFisherman.di4?productID=10 is for you! The Fisherman clocks in at number 92 in MobilePC’s “_The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time_”:http://www.mobilepcmag.com/features/2005_03/top100gadgets.html.

Also making the list are the “Pez Dispenser”:http://www.pez.com/ at 98, the “Trash-80″:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 (erh, the Radio Shack TRS-80) at 87, the “Space Pen”:http://www.zoinger.com/files/seinfeld_the_pen.wav at number 80, Atari’s “Pong”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong at 70, Sony’s ground-breaking digital camera the MVC-HD5 at 48, the SanDisk CompactFlash card at 38, Apple’s “PowerBook 500″:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook at 22, Tivo Series1 at 10… and at number 1… well, I’ll let you read the article.

“MobilePC”:http://www.mobilepcmag.com/index.html last week published “_The Birth of the Notebook_”:http://www.mobilepcmag.com/features/2005_04/birthofnotebook.html, an extensive article looking at the birth and evolution of the laptop/notebook computer. The article spans from 1975 with “IBM’s 5100″:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100 “portable” computer to today’s offerings such as the “OQO”:http://www.oqo.com/hardware/basics/. Some pretty good reading.

The article offers up some juicy bits like:

bq. NEC also has the honor of claiming one of the industry’s most boneheaded moves: It dropped the UltraLite name in favor of “Versa,” and ultralight quickly became a generic term for small notebooks.

Hum… I wonder if this would fit on one of those airline tray tables?
!http://www.zoinger.com/img/IBM_5100.jpg!

SanDisk has a pretty cool link of compact, USB card readers called “MobileMates”:http://www.sandisk.com/retail/mm.asp. As the verbage on their site says:

bq.. SanDisk’s MobileMate line of Mobile Readers are the smallest readers on the market & unique in its compatibility class (SD/miniSD/MultiMediaCard/RS-MMC/TransFlash & Memory Stick/Memory Stick Duo/Memory Stick PRO/ Memory Stick PRO Duo), ideal for memory-enabled mobile phone users and photo travel needs. The flash memory cards can be plugged directly into the readers. No card adapters are required. Carry it with you so you always have access to your important data.

p. !http://www.zoinger.com/img/sandisk_MobileMate.jpg!

These would be pretty handy if you have an old laptop like mine that doesn’t have a card reader built into it. Plus, they are pretty “cheap”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000652LUG/, running about $20.