“Mia the Happy Helper” is a free iPhone/iPad/Android game for kids aged four to six. (We remember the first version from more than a dozen years ago.) Mia is a mouse on a mission. Sometimes she’s looking for hidden objects, other times she’s playing a small piano, sometimes she counts. The $2 version adds more missions.
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CCleaner, free for Android, gets rid of junk on your phone. We’ve used it on our computers, and the phone app is just as good. It got rid of 898 megabytes of useless files, almost a gigabyte. A $2 app for iPhone/iPad called “CCleaner Doctor” is made by a different company but does a good job too.
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USTechVets.org helps veterans transition into civilian jobs. It includes educational resources and a job bank. Their resume data base has almost a million resumes.
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Midomi.com listens while you sing or hum a tune and then tells you the name of it. Sometimes. It never did recognize our rendition of La Bamba, but was quick to get the Zulu folk song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” (Bob says the really tough question of the week is … “What was the song on the flip side of that 45-rpm record when it first came out?”)
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A company called “KnowRoaming” makes calls cheaper for international travelers by selling a $30 SIM card that automatically switches between providers to eliminate roaming fees. It’s thin and sits on top of your regular phone card, so you never have to take it out.
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A reader wanted to use his phone as a garage door opener. What a great idea. That way, if you got a ride home from someone else, and don’t have the opener, you can use your phone to open the garage. So can anyone else in your family who has the app on their phone. We found out how to do this through a video tutorial on Lifehacker.com. Search on “Monitor and Control Your Garage Door with Your Phone.” Our reader said he got it going with the help of his tech-savvy son. All you need is a smartphone, a Bluetooth headset, a $1 transistor from RadioShack and a soldering iron. Oh, and you might need a smart kid.
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Freelancer.com, claims to be the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace for freelance jobs and recently noticed some changes in the way listings are being posted. They looked at nearly 300,000 jobs posted in the most recent quarter and found that “Pinterest,” a social networking site where you pin items of interest onto your own virtual corkboard, is becoming more essential than Twitter and Facebook. Pinterest recently expanded “Promoted Pins,” which are bookmarked sites promoted by advertisers. Eighty percent of Pinterest 70 million users are women. The average user spends 98 minutes a month there. Pinterest is second only to Facebook in steering people to websites.
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Sometimes a cell phone message from a child or loved one is so special, you want to save it forever. A $20 app called “Voicemails Forever” does just that. The catch is, it only saves an hour’s worth. To save an unlimited number costs $40. If you’re techie, you can do this for free. First install the free Audacity software from sourceforge.net. Then connect your computer to your phone through the headphone port using “mini to mini” auxiliary cables.
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— If you look up a map in Google Maps while you’re connected to the Internet, it will still be there when you’re disconnected. That goes for directions too. — Your cell phone service provider will block certain text messages if you call and give them a name or number to block.
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