In Brief

By Anita Hamilton

BRINGING UP DIGITAL BABY It cries, it fidgets, it coos, and it does doo-doo. But this is no ordinary baby. It's a virtual tot that crawls around on your computer screen after you install the PC CD-ROM called Babyz by Mindscape ($30). And why not? If we can practice our nurturing skills feeding Tamagotchis, tickling Furbies and ordering our pet robots around, surely we can "adopt" a virtual baby or two. After naming your bundle of software joy, you can pop it into the changing room for a bath and dress it in impossibly cute bunny suits that come in every flavor from powder blue to tie-dye. Next, try your luck in the kitchen as you prop your baby up in a high chair and watch it hurl food on the floor. (Ingrate!) After the feeding fiascos, head to the backyard to water the flowers and play on the purple dinosaur slide. With Babyz's built-in voice-recognition feature, you can even teach baby to talk. Our favorite room, however, is the nursery, where the little rascal falls fast asleep in seconds.

PRINTS CHARMING You bought that nifty digital camera for a cool $500 (or more), but after a while looking at pictures on a fuzzy screen gets tired. Now you have two new options. Upload your faves to eframes.com which will print them on glossy, 4 x 6 photo paper, mount them in stylish frames and mail them to anyone you choose (for $11-$27 apiece). Or get Hewlett-Packard's PhotoSmart P1000 ($400), a camera-ready combination photo/inkjet printer that works as well for 8 1/2-by-11-in. cover letters (at 11 pages per minute) as it does for 4 x 6 prints.Two slots accept either SmartMedia or Compact Flash cards used in many digital cameras. Simply take the card from your camera, insert it in a slot, and you'll have a stack of glossies in about 15 minutes. No sweat.

--By Anita Hamilton