1. MP3 players like iPods generally work best in standard room temperature, say, around 72 degrees, but can function fine in a range of 32 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. (That would be 0 to 35 on the Celsius scale).
2. Don’t leave your MP3 players, tablet computers or other mobile gear in a hot car, especially one in direct sunlight. According to the National Weather Service, even if it’s just 80 degrees outside, the inside of the car can get up to 123 degrees in an hour.
3. If you do have a device that gets really hot, bring it into the hotel room and wait until the gadget cools down to room temperature before trying to use it.
4. Try to avoid hauling anything like a laptop or a tablet to the beach. Oceans tend to involve elements like salt spray in the air, water, hot sun and sand – and none of these things is good for electronics. If you do need to bring an e-reader to the beach, cover the electric and USB ports with electrical tape to keep out sand and salt — or invest in a tight-fitting protective case designed to keep Mother Nature out of the device. The same goes for camcorders and cellphones. In a pinch, keep your mobile phone sealed inside a plastic bag.
5. If you do haul gear out in to the sun, consider storing it in a dry cooler (with no ice inside) to keep it out of the sun and sand.
6. Wear sunscreen. If you’ve just applied sun-blocking lotion, be sure to wipe it off your hands before handing your electronics — especially touchscreen devices.
7. A can of condensed air back in the hotel room is helpful for blowing off any sand that may have dusted the gadgets.
8. And, if you happen to be reading iBooks on an iPad under an umbrella on the hotel balcony or in the room after a long day of sun and fun, remember that you can choose a different color-scheme theme that just black text on a white background. Just tap the Fonts icon in the top corner. In the menu that pops up, tap the Theme button for the option to switch to Sepia for a soothing light brown pages or Night, the high-contrast white type on a black background. The Fonts icon also has the screen brightness controls if you need to make the iPad’s screen dimmer or brighter.
9. A good weather app on your smartphone is a great way to keep up with any alerts for heat advisories, approaching storms and other nature-related event that may be on the way to harsh your vacation fun.
10. Drink plenty of fluids and stay hydrated so you don’t become woozy and drop your gear in the sand or water.

If you’re looking for an orb-like streaming media player, Google’s new Nexus Q may fill the void. Introduced at last week’s I/O conference and reportedly even made here in the USA, the $300 black sphere connects to your audio and video system to music and video right from the cloud to your home entertainment center. (Catchy name, eh? Sorta make you think of this Nexus and this Q…)

The Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation liked to meddle — something Facebook is still being accused of after last week’s “let’s-change-everyone’s-default-email-address” incident. Seems the address swap messed up a few smartphone contact lists and The People are not happy about it.

Amazon has apologized for major outages to clients using its Amazon Web Services cloudware after power-disrupting massive thunderstorms and pesky software bugs knocked a few sites offline. The Leap Second of June 30 also tripped up a few sites, although Google smartly planned ahead for that extra tick on the clock.

MobileMe went down for good this past weekend, but that was intentional, as Apple retired the service for good in favor it its big puffy iCloud. Apple also kept up the patent lawsuit heat on Samsung, which still can’t sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the U.S. Off to appeals court, we go!

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to tout its new Windows 8 system that’s due out later this year. A Windows Team blog post reports you can even upgrade your existing Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC to the spiffy new Windows 8 Pro for a mere $40 when the new system lands.

Twitter is marking American Independence Day this week by releasing its first Twitter Transparency Report detailing international government requests for both user information and requests received to remove content DMCA takedown notices were also noted. As a post on the Twitter blog notes: “Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves.”

Happy American Independence Day for those who celebrate it! And for our beloved international listeners, party on anyway.

Hey, why go to other social networks when you can just build your own? Perhaps that’s Microsoft’s motive for dropping $1.2 billion dollars in cash for Yammer, a four-year-company specializing in making corporate social networks. At least if you have your own social network, you don’t have to worry about Facebook constantly changing stuff up on you, like it did recently when it switched everyone to a facebook.com e-mail address and made it visible on profile and timeline pages. (At least you can change your settings back as sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker nicely explain…but still.)

On a happier note, Facebook named its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, as its first female director, elevating her to a board that includes seven men. (Hey, does this general female-male ratio vaguely make you think of a certain recent movie, too?)

Sony’s got a new smartphone to add to the mix – its Xperia Ion is a 4G LTE Android phone with a 12-megapixel camera and 4.6-inch 1080p HD screen; according to at least one review, call quality seems to pretty far down on the feature list, though. It’s available through AT&T and will cost $99.99. (Hey, doesn’t Sony have a big ol’ summer movie of its own coming out next week?)

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out on e-books and public libraries that’s interesting, but what’s even more interesting — and possibly a bit enraging if you’re a traveling Mac user — is that the Orbitz site told the Wall Street Journal that it showed Mac users different and often more expensive hotels compared to people who surfed the site on a Windows PC. They said it was an experiment and they never showed the two groups the same room for different prices, but I plan to experiment by never using Orbitz again for my future travel plans.

Apple seems to be taking a sharper focus on Mac OS X security, including backing off that “Macs don’t get PC viruses” claim and reportedly increasing the frequency of security-update checks for the looming Mac OS X 10.8 Cougar — I mean, Mountain Lion — system. Meanwhile, Google plans a standalone version of its Google Maps app for iOS and recently updated its Gmail app to work with the iOS Notification center. The company also found time this week to announce its new Nexus 7 Android tablet (among other things) during its I/O conference.

And finally, in the Not So Much News Department, a study from McAfee security reports in a new study that 70 percent of teens hide online behavior from their parents. The Internet may be relatively new, but really, kids have been sneaking around for centuries…

P.S. Like fries? Check this out.

After at least one false start, Microsoft is getting back to tablet business with its own spiffy new tablet computer called the Surface. Although the name may bring to mind other products, the hardware is memorable: a 10.6-inch HD screen, dual cameras, a kickstand to prop up the tablet screen and a thin smart-cover that includes a functioning keyboard for those times when you need to type on a real set of keys. No word yet on final pricing and availability, though. (Sure, IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer may be a bit larger that the Surface, but hey, it’s overtaken a Fujitsu K computer as the world’s fastest for crunching big numbers.)

Facebook just acquired the Israeli company Face.com, which makes facial recognition software and while it had the checkbook out, settled that lawsuit over sponsored stories for 10 million dollars. Google is also having some legal action of its own, reportedly threatening to lower the boom on the YouTube-MP3.org site for misuse of the YouTube API to rip songs from videos.

Most prize-winning authors are already available in e-book form, but about 40 books written by one Sir Winston Churchill are finally getting digitized and ready to go on sale in e-bookstores next month. For those of you waiting for a lighter version of A History of the English Speaking Peoples and his other works, fire up your e-readers.

Weekend’s almost here. After a scorching couple of days here in New York City, air-conditioning and frosty drinks are in order. Hmm, perhaps a Pixar movie.

For the two or three folks out there who may have been on vacation in an Internet-free zone this week, Apple made a bunch of announcements at its World Wide Developers Conference. These included a preview of its coming iOS 6 software for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, hardware updates to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and a new MacBook Pro with the super-sharp Retina display screen. And the next version of Mac OS X — Mountain Lion — drops next month for less than $20.

But while Apple may be hogging the limelight with new product announcements, Android is quietly humming along. According to a tweet by Android guru Andy Rubin, Google is now activating more than 900,000 new Android devices a day. The current number shows an increase from even this past February, with 850,000 activations per day. The general number of activated Android gadgets is currently thought to be around 390 million.

If you have multiple gadgets that need Internet access and you have Verizon Wireless, the company’s new Share Everything data plans may be for you, as it offers unlimited voice minutes, text, video and picture messaging for 10 Verizon Wireless mobile devices.

Social media is a great way to keep in touch with family members around the world, but be careful who can see your profile. The F.B.I. has a warning up on its site for a little hustle known as “The Grandparent Scam,” in which evildoers often use information gleaned from social media sites to convince grandparents that their grandchildren are in danger in foreign countries and need money wired immediately. Yeah, these old cons never really go away, do they?

A few last new nuggets here: An article on the MIT Technology Review site suggests that malicious software has become too sophisticated for old school antivirus programs. The Amazon Cloud Player app is finally available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Incoming Seton Hall freshmen are all getting brand new Nokia Lumia 900 smartphones, thanks to the university’s Mobile Computing Initiative. Blizzard Entertainment dropped the banhammer on several thousand user accounts of Diablo III players suspected of “found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or modifications in any form…” And speaking of hacks, there was this Dutch artist and his deceased cat…I know the pet has passed on, but this sorta thing just makes me wanna go save living animals in need.

Hey, look at the calendar! This week was Patch Tuesday and it sounds like Microsoft had a few big Band-Aids to dispense. Let’s be careful out there, people.

On this week’s episode J.D. and I discussed my search for a browser that would sync my bookmarks across multiple OSes and devices. The hunt was precipitated by my frustration with the Safari browser. Of course you could save yourself a lot of hassle and just throw money at the problem by signing up for a service like Xmarks but with two mini-Kaisers at home I have to watch every pfennig.

I settled on a dual approach with Atomic Web Browser and Skyfire for Flash enabled sites on my iPad. I also tried the stripped down, very fast, and apparently home brewed Perfect Web Browser. Mercury, from iLegendSoft, offers support for Firefox Sync but I found the Firefox Home app easier to use for accessing my bookmarks.

On the Google Android front I encountered many of the same apps that I did on iOS. The zippy Puffin Browser is available on iOS and Android and supports Flash. Dolphin HD is also available on both platforms but despite the developers claim that it is easy to use I found it difficult to get used to.

If you’ve listened to Episode 02 you already know that Opera and Firefox both came the closest to being the one browser to rule them all but a strong contender was Maxthon. No support for Mac OS X forced it out of the race but It is an impressive browser on iPad, Windows and Android.