Your Technology

BYTE THIS Lost your appetite for outputting photos from digital cameras on fuzzy, low-resolution ink-jet printers? Here's a tastier option: e-mail your images to , and it'll print them out as sugary frosting on rich, edible shortbread cookies. Using a spray-on process similar to ink-jet printing, the pictures come out clear and bright. The cookies don't taste bad either.

CHEAP PIX Sharp Electronics hopes to dazzle showgoers at this week's PC Expo in New York City with its tiny, 5-oz. Internet ViewCam ($699), the first digital video camera to store images in the new MPEG-4 compression standard. Why should you care about MPEG-4? Because it squeezes files so tightly that video clips can easily be e-mailed to friends or posted on personal Web pages. A 10-sec. MPEG-4 clip, for example, could take as little as 10 seconds to download on a 56-kbps modem. PC users can view the files using the Media Player built into Windows 98. Mac users, once again, are out of luck.

SITTING PRETTY The newest entry in the $3 billion-a-year office-chair business just might unseat Herman Miller's stylish $1,000 Aeron, the current favorite. As you lean back in Steelcase's Leap Chair ($700 to $1,300, available in August), the seat glides forward so you can keep typing or reading your computer screen without straining your eyes or wrists. Separate upper- and lower-back controls mold the chair to the contours of your back, no matter how much you slouch.