We listed a job on Elance, saying we wanted someone to fix a problem on our web site. Esther Rosie of England, responded and not only fixed our problem but did some additional work for free. Nick Ker, an American, fixed a different problem almost as soon as we had stated it, and charged $50. You can limit your search to U.S. workers or open it to the world.

For writers, Scripted.com hires “subject experts” to write press releases, video scripts, blogs, Facebook posts and website content. The site gets rave reviews from company CEOs, who say that the writing quality is much better than they get elsewhere. The site has 80,000 writers and 1000 paying customers.

In general, a freelancer who is chosen for a job and delivers good work is usually called again on a regular basis. You build up a clientele and it can be a nice income.

Recently, for example, a Harvard professor wrote to the Economist magazine to complain that he couldn’t open a Microsoft Word document using Windows 8. He demanded that the “competition enforcers” look into it, calling it an abuse of Microsoft’s monopoly power.

Well this is an easy fix. We don’t know who or what the “competition enforcers” are, but “WordPad” comes with all versions of Windows and can open any Microsoft Word document. In fact, it is merely a simplified version of Word. Moving further on this subject, whenever something doesn’t open in Windows, you will often see a screen message that says something like: “What program would you like to use to open this document?” If it’s a Word doc, select WordPad. NOTE: To find WordPad in Windows 8, hover over the top right of the screen till you see “search” and type “WordPad.” In Windows 7 and older versions, click “start” and then “accessories.”

There are also lots of free word processors available, all of which will open Word documents and general text like email attachments. We’ve used OpenOffice, AbiWord, YeahWrite, KingSoft Writer and others. They all work fine.

However, Word and its imitators don’t make everyone happy. Bob remembers (and so does Joy though she doesn’t like to admit it) the good old days of DOS. This was the operating system back in the mists of time before Windows. The screen was black with green type, or sometimes blue with white type, which was the common look with old WordPerfect for DOS. It was easy on the eyes and conducive to long stretches of writing without strain.

To get back to this look – sort of — you could use Word’s page color option to change the background color. But this doesn’t get rid of the bright menu bars at the top and bottom of the screen, or the bright blue borders along the sides and bottom. Also, any text you paste into this new blue box comes in with a white background, defeating the whole purpose of having selected the blue background. So you have to then mark it with the mouse and do the color selection process again.

A Better Solution

There should be a better way, and there is. Bob despises Microsoft Word. He maintains it’s the worst word processor ever created – okay, just one of the worst.  The nub of his complaint is that it’s not designed for writers, which after all would be a fairly small market, but for typists. It’s for people who like to format things.

In short, MS Word, as we call it, is aimed at the majority of people who write short documents. A lot of its functions have to do with selecting formatting and fonts and type sizes. It lets you center things and create tables and make lists in pre-set style sheets, which are all designed to comply with some pre-approved look. Writers don’t do formatting – that’s the publisher’s job. Writers write. All that other stuff, like the tool bars at the top and the drawing tool bars at the bottom, are a distraction. They do nothing for the writer.

Since MS Word is for typists, what you, the writer out there, need and want is what’s called a text editor. These were initially created for programmers so they could edit computer code, and they are still used for that purpose. But for writers, they are the right stuff.

Bob’s favorite text editors are JDarkRoom and Q10. Other very good ones worth checking out are OmniWriter, PureText20, DarkRoom (not to be confused with JDark Room and Notepad++. There are more and you can find them all with a web search. They’re all free.

What you get when you use a program like JDarkRoom or Q10 is a plain black screen with green or white type, just like the old days in DOS. You can change it to a blue background and white type if you want, and there are a few other color combinations. There are no ribbons or toolbars and your writing fills the whole screen.

This is the way WordPerfect used to look back in the days before it went into a death spiral and was purchased for cheap by Corel, a graphics company. The problem was, by version six – and some, Bob included, thought it was really by version 5 – WordPerfect became, well, perfect. That was twenty years ago, and to this day, some ColumbiaUniversity departments, and a number of lawyers, still recommend the old WordPerfect for DOS.

Unfortunately for the company, becoming perfect meant there was no reason for the users to upgrade to new versions. Microsoft will never make that mistake. Some day, far in the future they’ll come out with Microsoft Word, version 50, which will add some weird feature that only one person in ten thousand will want.  Everyone will be charged the usual price for the upgrade, of course.

One final note: The absolutely, without a doubt, best word processor ever created was Atex, which was owned and then abandoned by Kodak. (Kodak management decisions are worth somebody’s doctoral thesis.) It was later revived as XyWrite, which worked on IBM desktop computers and was purchased by IBM. After a short time, IBM let it languish and die. After all, it competed with their in-house products. Old copies of XyWrite can still be found on places like EBay and they work if you’re willing to spend some time. A customized version of this word processor is still available, however, and is called Nota Bene. It is quite popular among academics because of its superb handling of footnotes and bibliographies. You can download a trial version at NotaBene.com. The phrase, by the way, is Latin and means to introduce a comment that further illuminates or expands what has been said.

According to Strategy Analytics estimates for the first quarter of this year, Samsung made $5.1 billion profit on Android phones. Cell phone profits were 65 percent of their total profit. Second-place LG made $119 milllion.

So we got excited when we heard that, because we were about to take a flight. Unfortunately, the offer isn’t good for our Acer Chromebook, only those made by Samsung, HP and Lenovo. So, whoa, color us envious and disappointed.

If you have a Samsung Chromebook, the free 100 gigabytes of storage space is a really good deal. That’s ten times as much as you get with a Gmail account. )And more than enough to store your plans for the weekend.) The free Wi-Fi offered to Samsung Chromebook users is good for two years and provides 12 free GoGo In-Air passes. These normally cost $14 for one time or $50 a month. To get the free Wi-Fi offer, do a search on “Google Goodies.” If you don’t have a Chromebook, you can check out the regular Wi-Fi prices at GoGoAir.com.

It took us more than a minute to find the Amazon App Store on our Android phone. (On the Kindle Fire, just tap “Apps.”)  We had to go to “Settings” on our Galaxy S3 and tap “allow downloads from unknown sources.” What’s more, one of our security apps, the free “Advance Mobile Care” app, stopped the installation until we gave it the go-ahead.

The Amazon App Store asked for a lot of scary-sounding permissions, but we said okay because that’s the only way we could check this out, and in Amazon we put our trust. At least so far. Finally, we got the free app, which was a game called “Crazy Tanks.” Joy liked the patriotic tank music more than blasting away at other tanks. Now this is a pretty trivial app (except to the person who wrote it) but another day, another new one.

Here are a few other recommendations, all of which we tried and liked:

• Smart Voice Recorder: A free app for making recordings.
• Catch: A free app for notes, checklists, voice memos, and reminders.
• Office Calculator is a virtual tape calculator optimized for office tasks.
• ISSLive -all about the International Space Station.
• Handyman Calculator (For contractors and home owners. There’s a free and a $5 version.)
• Catch Sketch is an easy to use drawing program.

NOTE: There are about 800,000 so-called “Apps” — short for “Applications,” whether Apple or Android. As you might expect, most are pointless. It would probably take you a decade to check them all out, and by the time you finished there would be a million more.

Are they recording us without our knowledge? Taking our picture? Reading our contacts and sending unsolicited emails to our friends? “Even paranoiacs have enemies,” the reader said, using one of Bob’s favorite lines.

Before you install an app, ask yourself if the permission request makes sense. Remember: most permissions are necessary to make the app work. A common permission request, according to LifeHacker.com, is permission to access the Internet. Most likely, this is to display ads from the program supplier. It’s time to worry if the app asks for permission to read your files. These two permissions put together would let the app post anything you had there, including photos, to the Internet.

There’s an extensive description of the pros and cons of granting permissions at goo.gl/7Bqak. (What an address, huh?) If you don’t want to bother about things like that, stick with the most popular apps.  If in doubt, check the app’s description in iTunes or the Google Play store.

Finally … we recently installed Avast Mobile Security, which is free from Avast.com. It has a privacy adviser that can scan your apps and tell you if you’re safe. It tells you which apps track your location, which read information about your identity and which ones can read your messages, contacts and accounts. It can even verify a phone number before you call it. We have over a hundred apps on our smartphone, but Avast told us our phone is still safe from prying eyes.

The Thunderbolt lets you plug in half a dozen devices, including FireWire, Ethernet, stereo headphones and USB connectors. It’s $299 from Belkin.com. (Which seems awfully high to us.)    more

The results were stronger in some countries: 97 percent of Brazilians, 86 percent of Chinese and 70 percent of Indians thought this would make driving safer (they know their roads better than we do). In the U.S., 60 percent thought it would be safe. The Germans were skeptical –only 37 percent thought it would be a good thing. (They like to floor it on the Autobahn.) The Japanese were the most skeptical about the value of driverless cars, only 28 percent liked it. (Very dense traffic in Japan).

The bottle lamp’s shade is frosted white and there’s a silver on/off button. If you need light elsewhere, lift it out and drop it into another bottle.  We can imagine a whole room of these.

The LED light has no mercury and lasts up to 50,000 hours. The lamp consumes 1.2 watts, much less than an incandescent or fluorescent bulb. It’s on Amazon and Satechi.net. There’s a video of it at Satechi.net.