OTHER TECH

I have seen the future of wireless memory cards for digital cameras, and its name is EYE-FI. Okay, maybe that's a little over the top, but this is truly a step forward for anyone who uses a digital camera.

You know the drill. You go to an event or a special occasion - birthday party, wedding, vacation - and you take a bunch of pictures. Then one of the following three things happens. 1) You come home, hook your camera to your computer, and download your pictures. 2) You come home, take out the memory card, stick it in the card reader, and download your pictures. 3) You come home and leave the pics on the camera indefinitely. (My camera still has shots of my son's final football game from last year.)

With Eye-Fi ($100; eye.fi), the transfer to your computer is nearly instant and requires no wired connection. It has a wireless reader that plugs into any USB port, and it comes with a 2-gigabyte wireless memory card. After you do the install and then restart your machine, you'll be brought to the setup page, so you can choose exactly where on your computer you want the pictures sent. You also get a choice of 20 different online photo-sharing or social-networking sites.

When you shoot a photo, the card uses your home wireless network to send it to the USB reader and right to your computer. After I took a picture of my kids, I watched it load to my computer in 8 seconds! I then went to the beach to walk my dog and snapped about 20 pics there. When I got back to the house, I made sure my camera was on. By the time I took off my jacket and listened to an answering-machine message, the photos were waiting for me. Nice.

This whole process seems so simple that I wonder why no one thought of it sooner. Good thing Eye-Fi was on the case!

Gary Dell'Abate is the executive producer of The Howard Stern Show. There's a joke here about his teeth being an eyeful, but we're above that sort of thing.