LOOK MA, NO GLASSES PRESCRIPTION

I asked a friend to be a guinea pig for the “EyeQue,” a $60 gadget that tests your eyesight and gives you a prescription.  Results were great for him, not so for me — but that wasn’t the machine’s fault. Besides giving you a prescription, EyeQue will send you a pair of John Lennon-style glasses for an additional $19. They call them “try-ons.” They work well and look fine, but you’ll probably want another pair. For instance, the bridge width and earpiece length may be slightly off, since EyeQue doesn’t ask for these measurements, which are typically found on your old pair of glasses. My friend ordered new frames from GlassesUSA, which is not affiliated with EyeQue. He now sees […]

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DROPPING THE PASSWORD

One of the most annoying features of Windows is the sign-in. This is the so-called “default” setting, which is to protect you from someone else using your computer. Of course, you may know that you’re the only person using that computer. But what if someone sneaks into your home in the middle of the night, just so they can watch movie trailers from Netflix?  Ah ha!  Fortunately, we can save you. To remove the sign-in, go to the search bar in the lower left of your Windows screen, and type the letters “netplwiz” without the quotes. We know that doesn’t make sense but just do it. When it comes up, uncheck the box next to “Users must enter a username […]

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JUST GOOGLE IT

More often than not, the best way to solve a problem is to Google it in the same words you would use when describing the issue to your techiest friend. Recently we were trying to digitize our CDs so we could play them on our computer, but Windows Media Player couldn’t identify any of the tracks. We were stuck with “Unknown Album” and “Track 1,” “Track 2,” etc.  Windows Media player is supposed to name your tracks automatically, but it didn’t. The Windows Troubleshooter popped up to tell us that our media player was corrupted but offered no solution. It dumped us out on a general Microsoft page where we could search vast reams of info from other users. So […]

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TV OR NOT TV

A reader writes that his daughter signed up for “Hulu Live,” dropping her cable TV. What do we think? It’s $40  a month for more than 60 channels. Similar services include YouTube TV, Playstation Vue (no Playstation required), Sling TV, and DIRECTV Now. They’re all about the same price except for Sling TV, at $25 a month, which we haven’t had a good experience with. We currently pay AT&T $167 a month for TV. So we’re trying out the seven-day free trial of  the $40 a month Hulu service. So far, it’s OK, not great. Hulu Live brings us our live favorites: Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and 60 Minutes, as well as sports. It also has our favorite movie channel, […]

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EASILY DONE

Topics: A better way to do email, alternatives to cable TV, Internuts, trends, and kid’s coding book.

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DOS IS BOSS

Topics: Using DOS instead of Windows to save photos quickly. Virtual reality for kids. Internuts. Digitizing a paper photo with the free Google PhotoScan.

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LEARNING TO SCRATCH

“The Official Scratch Jr. Book” by Bers and Resnick, is $20 from NoStarch Press and is designed to teach you, the adult, how to teach children ages five to seven, how to create programs using the computer language “ScratchJr.”

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EVERY CHILD CAN CODE

EveryChildCanCode.org teaches children computer programming using “Basin,” a free language similar to BASIC.

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GOOD OL’ COBOL

The programs sitting in IBM mainframe computers might be perfectly good but unusable on today’s machines. A company called Raincode is offering a free solution.

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BOOKS AND SPRITES

“Build iOS Games with Sprite Kit,” by Jonathan Penn and Josh Smith, $34 from PragProg.com. It shows you how to make games for the iPhone and iPad. You learn how to build two games that are fun: One is a pinball game and the other a version of “Asteroids.”

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