Posted on May 24th, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Browser extensions are much like apps. But instead of something you install on your phone, extensions are useful when surfing the web. The trick is not to install too many of them or they’ll slow down your surfing.
We found the following interesting extensions in the Chrome Web Store at chrome.google.com/webstore. They’re free.
- Lyrics in Google Chrome– When you’re listening to a song on YouTube, Last.fm, Google Music or GrooveShark, click a button and you can see the lyrics. In our tests, the lyrics didn’t load on the same page except when using Google Music. But if we opened a new browser tab and typed “lyrics” and a song title, we got a clutter-free page of lyrics, without the usual ads and tiny type we’ve seen on other sites.
- NoteBoard displays a large corkboard for notes. Simple, straightforward and easy on the eyes.
- Eye Dropper lets you identify the color on any part of a picture displayed on the screen. Click on the eyedropper icon, and hover over any color to get its name and numerical values. Putting the eye dropper on a couch in a painting by Toulouse Lautrec, we found the color was called Rosy-Brown and we were given the technical requirements for reproducing it.
Filed under: apps, browsers, Google, Internet, Internuts | Add New Comment »
Posted on May 23rd, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Recent market research from IBM found that 90 percent of email marketing goes unread. The solution, says tech strategist Daniel Burrus, is to use text messaging. It’s just the reverse. People read and act on a text message 90 percent of the time.
The trick is you have get potential clients or customers to request a text message. On all of Burrus’ print and marketing materials, he puts the message “Text Burrus to 99000 for a special handout on this subject.” For more on this topic, go to goo.gl/5B26A.
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Posted on May 23rd, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Recent market research from IBM found that 90 percent of email marketing goes unread. The solution, says tech strategist Daniel Burrus, is to use text messaging. It’s just the reverse. People read and act on a text message 90 percent of the time.
The trick is you have get potential clients or customers to request a text message. On all of Burrus’ print and marketing materials, he puts the message “Text Burrus to 99000 for a special handout on this subject.” For more on this topic, go to goo.gl/5B26A.
Filed under: business, email, text messaging | Add New Comment »
Posted on May 22nd, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Some may wonder why we recommend free anti-virus solutions like Avast and free anti-spyware programs like Malwarebytes when we pay $60 a year for BullGuard Internet Security. Well, many readers ask for free programs, and we like them too, but we’re willing to pay if something is really good.
Recently, for example, Joy’s Windows 8 computer crackled and sputtered something awful when the Spotify music service was running. Even at boot-up, her computer’s central processor would typically be running at 99 percent capacity. So a click on “live support” at BullGuard.com got an expert who connected to her computer through “LogMeIn” and she fixed the problem. She spent about half an hour, working fast, but there was no charge. The free tech service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So what was the problem? In our case, the music sputtered because there were too many things running in the background. The chief culprit was Malwarebytes Pro, the paid version of an excellent anti-spyware program. The tech turned off their real-time anti-virus protection, since we already had that through BullGuard. She freed up a lot of stuff, and we’ve been listening to music comfortably ever since.
Our respect for BullGuard is not a lot of bull; in recent comparisons by independent testers AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, BullGuard achieved a perfect score for protection. It was tested against AVG, Norton and McAfee, which did not get perfect scores.
By the way, we repeat again: we have no financial or personal interest in the products we write about, and never have had.
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Posted on May 21st, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Speaking of the coming decline of cell phones (as they quietly morph into the power of Google Glass), our cell phone is sometimes set on vibrate instead of ring and we miss calls. There’s a $130 fix for that. That may seem a little high, but these days there seems to be no limit in the cell phone category.
The “Renny Home Ringer” uses blue-tooth wireless broadcasting to ring your phone and announce the caller. This works even if your phone is set on vibrate or silent instead of ringtone. It’s a small device about the size of a short can of peas. The claimed range is 200 feet, but that’s if your cell phone is in a line of sight with the can of peas – no thick walls in between.
The device is a wireless transmitter and can transfer calls to two cell phones, each one getting a different ring, so you can tell which is which. There are some similar products on the market but this one doesn’t automatically shut off after the cell phone has been out of
range for ten minutes. There’s a video of Renny in action at RennyRinger.com.
Filed under: apps, gadgets, phones | Add New Comment »
Posted on May 20th, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
In case you’ve been wondering about the coming of “Google Glass,” let us clear the view. Google Glass is the latest in eyewear. Some call it “Google on your face.” So far the only users are a group of beta testers willing to pay $1500 for the privilege.
We’re tempted to call this new product “Google Glasses,” but unlike a pair of glasses, there’s no glass, only a tiny viewer (very tiny) attached to one side of the frame. A small receiver (very small) attaches to the glasses frame and projects a display onto a tiny (still very tiny) screen in front of one eye. It not only displays incoming data, you can ask questions and send messages.
Google Glass is far more social than a smart phone, enthusiasts say, because you can keep looking at a person while using apps, rather than looking down at your phone. You can say: “OK, Glass, take a picture,” instead of fumbling for your phone, finding the camera app and snapping a photo. You can watch a map unfold as you walk around in a new town. As you turn your head, the map rotates to show the new direction.
Market testing has found high enthusiasm for the product among potential users under 21, but much depends on the price. The Internet buzz says if it’s $200, a lot of people will go for it. Take our word for it, it will be much more than $200, but high prices didn’t stop the sale of smartphones or iPads. If you want to see it in action, take a look at the slideshow on Mashable.com; just search on “Google Glass.”. This is early days for Google Glass – in fact as early as you can get – but the potential seems huge. We’re not converts yet, but we’re older than the target market.
Filed under: electronics, gadgets, Google | Add New Comment »
Posted on May 19th, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Flash drives are cheap these days — around $15 for16 gigabytes — which is a lot of storage. We tend to back up everything on them. But what if something goes wrong with that drive and it just doesn’t “flash” anymore, so to speak? We better have it backed up somewhere else.
The obvious way to go is to drag and drop files from one drive to another using Windows Explorer, (“File Explorer” in Windows 8). Or you can upload the files to your private storage space on the Internet usingGoogle Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and any of several other services.
But this is slow going if you have a lot of files to copy. A $212 hardware alternative is Startech’s “Flash Drive Duplicator.” We think it’s over-priced but it’s lightning fast. Plug three drives into the duplicator and everything on the first drive is copied on to the second and third in seconds. What we didn’t know when we tried it recently, is that everything on the second or third drive got wiped out. So be sure you copy your stuff onto an empty drive. This is basically an extension of disk duplicating devices, which have been around for many years.
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Posted on May 18th, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
A reader asked us if he should have his computer registry cleaned. A pop-up on a website wanted to charge him $129 for this service. Back away, we said.
Registries don’t get dirty and don’t need cleaning. Cleaning the registry is a common scam. Many times when you go to a site to download a program, that site will have links to something you don’t need. Often you have to actively uncheck some box on the screen to avoid being sent somewhere you don’t want to go. Besides registry cleaning, you’ll often see warnings about Flash software, viruses and spyware. Stay with what you want to do, which is get the program you came for, and ignore all the bogus offers.
Filed under: anti-virus, spyware, tech support, troubleshooting | 2 Comments »
Posted on May 17th, 2013 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Nextdoor.com is a site to help you keep up with what’s going on in your neighborhood. Information categories include “crime and safety,” “classifieds,” “free items,” and “lost and found.” They verify you are you by sending an automated phone call. We got welcomed by neighbors when we tried it. If there isn’t a category for gossip, there soon will be.
Filed under: Internuts, social networks | Add New Comment »
