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GRINCH ME! Bored at work? With IM Games' new instant-messenger versions of classic board games, you can grab a buddy for checkers, chess and backgammon any time of the day or night. Just download the free software from flipside.com, and you can play checkers in real time with anybody on your buddy list (special game pieces for the holidays feature the Grinch and Cindy-Lou Who). One downside: the games are only for ICQ users. Everyone else will have to find some other way to kill time.

ON THE RECORD Secretaries who take dictation may have gone the way of three-piece suits and two-martini lunches, but Sony's new digital voice-to-print recorder ($300 including software) fills the gap. The MS1 records up to 131 minutes of brilliant ideas. Instead of a cassette, it uses a tiny memory card. Pop it into your PC (with an adapter), and the software transcribes your words into a text file. You can even highlight the transcribed text and listen for errors. They're working on the martinis.

TOUCH AND GO Admit it. Your company spends thousands of dollars on a secure computer network, and you keep your password on a Post-it note stuck to the monitor. Siemens thinks it has a better way--a mouse ($150 at siemensidmouse.com) that doubles as a security system. A silicon plate embedded in the top of the device reads your fingerprint and confirms your identity by matching it to a digital image. Fingerprints make excellent passwords, says Siemens spokesman Thomas Tesluk: you can't forget them, and if you lose one, hey, you've got nine others.