ART TV DISPLAYS THOUSANDS OF PAINTINGS

Two decades ago, Bill Gates began filling his enormous mansion with digital picture frames to display the world’s best art. Now you can too. “The Frame” is a Samsung TV made to look like a painting, complete with a matte finish. With a $5 a month subscription, it displays 2,300 pieces of digital art, including a new Salvador Dali collection in partnership with an institution founded by the painter himself. The 2023 model is considered a vast improvement over the version that came out in 2017. For one thing, it’s a lot thinner, nearly melting into the wall.There’s no gap. It’s a smart TV too. But when the TV’s off, the Frame goes back to displaying art. It even has […]

Read more

GADGET SOLVES PLASTIC PROBLEM

I hate to see my friends throw their clean, dry plastic bags in the trash. But even if they sort them, 95% will not be recycled. So I decided to do something about it. On Indiegogo.com, I pre-ordered the “Obaggo,” a 10.5-inch-tall trash compactor that will sit on my kitchen counter. With a little heat and a lot of pressure, it turns 20 to 25 grocery bags into dense hockey pucks about six inches in diameter. Recycling centers can shred the disks and turn them into pellets, the kind industry uses to make new products. If you use thicker bags, like those blue and white ones from Amazon, it will take fewer. You can also use vegetable bags, cereal box […]

Read more

IS IT ENOUGH?

A reader writes: “I switched from Norton AntiVirus to Kaspersky. Now, I’ve received a notice that I’ve exceeded the secure connection limits. I don’t even know what this means. Did I make a mistake switching? I paid $20 for it. Norton was $50.” We found out that the $20 is like a trial subscription for Kaspersky’s anti-virus, because it’s almost impossible to keep within the introductory “connection limits,” which only allow 200 megabytes worth of data per day. An upgrade costs $30 a year and covers five devices, with unlimited data. That’s still cheaper than Norton. After an introductory period, Norton costs $80 a year for one computer. Kaspersky gets excellent reviews but is based in Russia. Because of that […]

Read more

WHAT’S APP, DOC?

Our friend Olga called us from the Dominican Republic, using the free app, “WhatsApp.” It’s a great way for travelers to avoid having to buy a local SIM card for their phone, or face expensive roaming charges. But we’ve often wondered what other advantages WhatsApp has, considering all the alternatives, including Skype. One big one is simplicity. Because WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, you automatically see Facebook friends who use it. With Skype, you must know the person’s user name. Our friend Olga didn’t use her last name so she was particularly hard to find on Skype, but easy to find on WhatsApp. However, call quality on Skype is usually better. You can use either one for a video chat, […]

Read more

SEE IT LATER

Pressed for time or feeling sleepy? “Pocket” is a free app for saving articles and pictures to look at later. The app is available for Windows, Macs, phones and tablets. That’s everything but billboards. To get started on your computer, go to GetPocket.com and install it. If you use Firefox as your browser, it comes with it. Once installed, you can click the tiny picture of a pocket in the upper right of your screen any time you want to save an item for later viewing. To find the stuff you’ve saved, click on the pocket and “view list.” It might also save whatever you’re looking at right at that moment at the same time, but live with it. So […]

Read more

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Our attention was captured recently by a Wall Street Journal article about executives playing video adventure games. One was 34, another 49. Their ages were apparently meant to surprise us, but in fact it’s normal. There has always been an assumption that only kids play video games. It depends on the game. In fact, in the decades we have been writing this column — and it is the oldest and longest running technology column in the known universe (and parts of New Jersey) — the great majority of video game players have ranged from their mid 20s on up. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average male player is 35, the average woman 44. We’re talking about complex games […]

Read more

LOSING SKYPE

Our 96-year-old friend Ida uses the free Skype service to have video-chats with her friends in Australia. One day, her account was wiped out. Could this happen to you? (Think of that question as having been asked in scary monster movie title type.) You might think this had something to do with her age, and she must have hit the wrong button or spilled something on the keyboard. But no, we found dozens of similar complaints on the web. One guy wrote: “Where has my account gone? I do business all over Europe and today you just trashed my account with the credit I had as well?  You idiots.  If somebody within Microsoft made the decision to do this – […]

Read more

IT’S A MARSHMALLOW WORLD

Less than five percent of Android phone owners have the new “Marshmallow” operating system. A third have the previous version, Lollipop. the rest are so far back the operating systems were written on stone tablets.

Read more

MOVE OVER DOT COM, MAKE ROOM FOR DOT FAMILY

There were 900 unique websites in 1995, 20 million in 2000 and now there are more than 120 million. You may have noticed that they’re not all “dot com.” Common endings include “.org,” “.net,” and “.edu.”  One of the newest endings is “.family.” If your name is Joe Doe, you might like a website called Doe.Family. Your email address could be joe@doe.family. Your wife might be jane@doe.family. Other new extensions include dot LIVE, dot SOCIAL, and dot ROCKS. To get one of these new names, you have to pay for it and register it. GoDaddy.com has some of the cheapest prices. They run around $1 to $40.  

Read more

THE NUMBERS REPORT: OVER 1 TRILLION PHOTOS TAKEN EVERY YEAR

The number of photos captured worldwide every year has increased six times in the last ten years to 1.2 trillion photos. That’s around 3.3 billion (yes, billion) photos a day. Around 79 percent of smartphone users take photos with their phones, 88 percent of those ages 18 to 24.

Read more