Last week I wrote about the Technosonic turntable that can rip your favourite vinyl records into MP3s directly onto USB memory sticks, Flash cards or supported MP3 players. But I received many emails from Sync readers asking if I knew of a cassette deck that can be used to convert old tapes into MP3 files. So I did some digging…

Question: Marc, how do you know when you need a new mouse? Mine is an old one and has been acting up, but I don’t want to buy a new one if I don’t have to.

Is it just me or is it ironic a company called “Honest Technology” has just introduced a webcam that can secretly monitor what’s happening at home (“Nanny cam,” anyone?).

If you’re into computer games or movies, it’s easy to justify why you need a beautiful new widescreen monitor for your desktop PC. Problem is, your boss (er, or spouse) might not buy the argument. Well guess what — you can also improve your productivity on a widescreen monitor. So take that, naysayers.

Wow! Sync received some heated comments on yesterday’s blog post: “Would you work on the way to work?” Click here if you missed it — and tell us what you think of it.

According to the results of a new survey, converting “idle time” into “productive time” on daily work commutes could help shrink Canada’s productivity gap with the United States.

Question: I’m buying a new laptop computer and want to connect to the Internet on the road. Is it easy to set this up?

Wrestling with mutliple video formats can be a drag. This new tool takes the headache out of format conversion and you can use it from any computer that has a net connection.

Coincidentally, while reading my colleague Simon Cohen’s interesting blog post on being mindful about how much power our gadgets consume, I received an email from a reader asking which monitor type is the more energy efficient.

Question: I selected to print something by mistake and I didn’t know how to stop it once it started. It was 10 pages long so I was worried about using up ink. I didn’t know what to do so I just turned off my printer. When I turned it back on later, it continued to print. Please help.

- R. Singh from Toronto