I get a ton of audio gear here at Ask Dave Taylor and I'm definitely not complaining. From headphones to speakers, we have enough gear that there's a separate audio system in every single room in our office. And we have a lot of rooms. Much of it proves uninteresting once I put it through its paces, like little external speakers that sound tinny and are way too quiet to work in any but the most tomb-like of spaces to headphones that miss all the nuances in good music (our test music is usually classic jazz vocals like Ella Fitzgerald, in case you're curious).

Still, there are areas of audio tech that are new and worth exploring, and both of the products reviewed in this article fit that bill. The first, dblogic earphones, are earbuds designed specifically to max out at a reasonable sound pressure level, helping avoid any hearing loss, particularly in younger music fans like my kids.

The second device seems more magical, though it might be a bit less practical: iFrogz Boost is a near-field audio amplifying speaker which lets you put any audio source on top of it and have that audio play through the device too, louder and usually with better audio fidelity. That's right, put any cellphone on the gizmo and suddenly it sounds way better. Even speaker phone calls.

Read on for my hands-on experience with both...

Given how much energy your home furnace and air conditioner consume, it's rather amazing how little innovation in HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, a common acronym in construction and architectural circles) we've seen in terms of the controls. Look at the thermostats in any public place, office building or home and you'll probably see a sensor and control device that's essentially unchanged since the 70s.

They work quite simply: the temperature at the thermostat is gauged and if it's hotter than the 'cool' setting, the device closes a circuit and the air conditioner turns on until the temperature drops down into the comfort zone. For heating it's the opposite: if the temperature at the thermostat goes below a preset limit, then the device closes a circuit and the furnace / heater turns on, pushing warm air throughout the space until the thermostat registers a sufficiently warm temperature that it can power things down for a period of time.

The problem is that we aren't always in the space, and that there are certain times of day where even if we are home, the temperature can safely go to a wider band of comfortable without a problem. For example, if you're asleep at 3am, why use the energy required to keep the house (or office) at the same temperature that you'd desire at 3pm, the middle of the day? In an office building, weekends should have a considerably lower "energy footprint" (a green eco-term) because they're quite likely empty.

Some companies, notably thermostat giant Honeywell, have introduced programmable thermostats for home and business, but they're difficult to work with, confusing, and quite often people just ignore the programmability and just set a heating or air conditioning "target" temperature. Super inefficient, but understandable when the programming task requires you pushing the same button a dozen or more times to slowly - painfully - get it set just so.

Enter Nest Labs of Palo Alto, California. With the design team that brought us the music paradigm shifting iPod, they set out to create the first truly smart and user friendly thermostat and having just installed one in my own home, I'll share that it's indeed elegant and fun. But there are some definite problems...

Hi Dave. I want to buy a new ipod or mp3 player. which one you suggest? And which company you suggest?

I'm so psyched to get an Apple iPod after all this time, and now that I've figured out how to get some music on it, want to also put a movie on the device so I can try out watching it on the tiny screen during my commute. How do I add a movie to my iPod?? I'm on a PC running Windows 7 if that's important.

I just realized that my daughter has my iTunes account password because I got a receipt for about $25 worth of purchases that I'm sure I didn't make. I don't even like Eminem, Lil Wayne and don't even know who Wisin & Yandel are... ?

I'm dealing with my daughter, but it seems reasonable to also change my iTunes Store password. Except I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Help! How do I change my iTunes account password?

I have a new iPod Touch which is awesome, but one thing has stumped me: how do I add photos to my iPod? My friends on Mac systems can somehow hook it up so that their newest albums in iPhoto are automatically copied across, but I don't have a Mac, I have a Toshiba running Windows Vista, so am I stuck?

Crazy frustrating. I have a laptop of my own and a desktop computer at work and when I went to my parents house to share some movies on their new AppleTV, it complained that I'd already authorized five computers with my account and wouldn't proceed. Sucks! How do I fix this?

This is driving me crazy: I have a ton of music on my iPhone and listen to it instead of my iPod. Easier, less gadgets involved. Problem is, if I shake or jostle my iPhone then the iPod app decides I want to jump to the next song. I don't! Can I turn off shake to shuffle and if so, how??

I have a nifty wireless wifi speaker setup in my office where we use AirPlay on our Apple devices to send music to the speakers from iPhones, iPads and our Mac computers. Works awesome and it's built around an old Airport Express, but I realized that anyone can find and access the speakers, not just people in my office. Is there a way to password protect the speakers?

Just heard on the news that there's a new operating system firmware release for my beloved Apple iPad but don't see how to get the update downloaded and installed. When I try with the App Store, it doesn't report that there are any updates? How do I update my iPad to the latest iOS release?

This is really bizarre: I'm trying to buy the latest Eminem album, "Recovery", and the "Buy Album" button is grayed out and I can't click on it. What the heck? What does that mean and how do I fix it so I can buy this in iTunes?

I want to give my daughter my old iPhone so she can use it as an iPod Touch sort of device and am concerned that she'll listen to material that doesn't meet my approval as a parent. What I'd like is to put some sort of limiter or lock on the phone so that any music that is marked as having explicit lyrics is skipped or prevented from playing. Possible?

We see tons of questions like this: "My iPod went through a huge wash, and the screen is black, when I hold the flashlight to it, it is seeable, but, it's very inconvenient to have a black screened iPod nano in the public." that ultimately boil down to: my iPod's busted, how can I get it fixed cheap?

Dave, I have two iPods and I want to give one to my almost 9 yo son, but some of MY songs are inappropriate. I have a folder specifically for him on my iPod, but how do i sync ONLY that folder to the iPod that I want to give him?

This is just weird. I've been using Aperture 3 on my iMac for quite a while and it's been going great, I love this program! Problem is, I just got an iPad and want to drop some photo projects onto it from Aperture on my iMac and when I click on "Sync Photos from Aperture" I get an error about the library not being visible and previews needing to be shared? But I can't figure out what needs to be tweaked for things to work!

I'm about to throw my Apple iPhone out the window, Dave, so help me out! I bought an audio book on CD-ROM from the local used bookstore, ripped all the tracks in iTunes, then set the files to "audiobook" format. Sync'd on the iPhone, they show up as audio books, but when I go to play it, the tracks are in shuffle mode, and there's no way to prevent it! How do I fix it??

I listen to a lot of music and have thousands of CDs on my iPod and now my Apple iPad too. On the iPod - and on my PC - I can get to the "equalizer" and adjust the audio profile for small speakers, jazz, etc. On the IPad it doesn't seem like that's available any more. Did Apple just axe it in the iPad version of iTunes, Dave?

In addition to having a ton of music on my Apple iPod, I also have a copy of it all on my laptop, which is great. Any time I want I can plug in my headphones and listen to it while working. Except there are some songs that I just don't want to show up when I'm in "shuffle" mode in iTunes. Can I mark them as not eligible for play during a shuffle?

I've been hearing rumors for months about Apple releasing a tablet computer but they give me very odd looks when I ask about it at the Apple Store. Then at Christmas dinner someone told me that it's on the way and it's going to be called the iSlate. What? How could they know, and what's your best information about what an iSlate will be?

I have an iPod shuffle and it's pretty neat, though of course I'd love to have a tiny screen on it. Problem is, a lot of the time the music that iTunes drops onto the iPod isn't what I want. I do aerobics, and there's nothing that's a buzzkill faster than a slow song in the middle of a workout!