With gas prices heading toward $4 a gallon, who wants to hop in the car to go rent a movie?

Netflix had that figured out from the start by eliminating stores and mailing DVDs to customers.

But who wants to wait until the postman cometh?

Introducing the Netflix Player, a small box about the size of a paperback book that hooks up to your TV set and links to your wireless home Internet connection (you can use a network cable if you choose).

Netflix Player gives you instant access to 10,000 titles, although very few of them are current best-sellers. Unlimited viewing plans start at $8.99 a month, a price that still gets you one DVD at a time via snail mail, too.

The first Netflix Player available, from a company called Roku, is $99, a one-time fee. Other players from different manufacturers are expected to follow, but Netflix says this is likely to be the lowest-priced player.

While Roku's box it provides connections suitable for widescreen, high definition television sets, Netflix doesn't yet offer any HD titles for download.

You may remember that we showed you a similar box that delivered movies over the Internet last September. Vudu is a technically more sophisticated product because it has a hard disk drive built-in for storage of rented movies.

The Netflix Player (at least the first version of it) simply connects to the Internet in real time. If you lose your connection, you lose your movie, too.

Vudu does have some high definition content in its 6,000 title library, and it also lets users purchase movies for permanent access. But under the Vudu model you pay for each rental instead of a flat fee for unlimited viewings like Netflix.

Apple also has a box that connects to your TV: Apple TV, introduced more than a year ago. Like Vudu, it has a hard drive for storage, but its price tag — $229 — is slightly more affordable.

Apple TV is more versatile than either Vudu or Netflix Player because it provides a big screen gateway not only to video content (including high definition titles) from the iTunes store, but also to your personal music and photo collections.

The iTunes streaming video catalog, however, is more limited than either Vudu or Netflix, with only about 1,000 movies available.

For my money, Apple TV seems like the best buy right now if you're looking for instant, no-car-needed access to a library of movies, simply because of its versatility.

But I'm still waiting for the box that will take what Apple TV offers and also give you access beyond iTunes or Netflix to the entire Internet, so you can also watch clips from YouTube or programs from Hulu from the comfort of your sofa.

Attention music lovers: You now have a new online outlet for your tunes.

Well, Napster is not exactly new. You know the name, of course; it was the first big site on the Internet for trading MP3 music.

But that was nine years ago.

Napster went legit in 2003, and since then has been selling copy-protected music that can play on your computer and some portable devices, but is incompatible with iPod, the biggest-selling player. Napster's music, saved in Microsoft's WMA format, was also impossible to burn to a CD.

But on Tuesday, Napster announced it is going back to its roots by offering its complete six-million track catalog in the MP3 format without any copy protection whatsoever.

You do still have to buy the tracks, but they are priced competitively at 99-cents each or $10 for most albums.

And once you download a song, it's yours. You can burn it to a CD or transfer it to any music player, including iPod. Napster even offers the cover art to go with many albums.

If you buy a lot of music and you've been using Apple's iTunes, you might want to consider what Napster has to offer. MP3 is a universal audio format, and having your music collection saved as MP3s provides some insurance that you'll still be able to play it back in five, 10, or more years from now.

Got a file cabinet at home? There's probably all sorts of medical information stashed away in there.

Now Google is offering to help you consolidate your health-related data online. Google Health is a place where you can create and store your personal medical profile for free.

Select from a list of diseases and conditions, allergies and test results to help get your profile going. But perhaps the most interesting feature is the ability to import medical and prescription records. The list of participating providers is limited now, although it does include Walgreen's pharmacy.

Google offers some security assurances, but I was surprised that there is no enhancement to your regular Google login (like a secondary password or some additional challenge) required to access this most personal of data online. For that reason, I don't think it's likely that many individuals will choose this method over a filing cabinet for their medical history records — at least not yet.

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