On Computers

I rarely carry a physical wallet. I prefer the digital kind, such as the new Apple Wallet. With this month’s update to iOS 15, iPhone’s latest operating system, Apple Wallet will store your driver’s license, car keys, boarding passes, tickets, vaccination card and any other form of ID. When you show your digitized driver’s license, it will automatically conceal your home address if you wish. To digitize any document to store in Apple Wallet or elsewhere, tap your phone’s camera app and snap a picture. I store mine using Google’s free app, “Stack” for Android. It makes documents quick to find. No more wasting time rummaging through Google Drive for my driver’s license . Eight U.S. states accept digitized ID […]

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Filed under: Apple, gadgets, Gmail, Internuts, mouse, robots, text messaging, Windows | Comments Off on STORING IDS ON YOUR PHONE

A sales rep at T-Mobile tried to talk my friend out of buying a case and a screen protector for her new smartphone. “Just get one or the other,” he said. Wrong! A modern phone’s Gorilla Glass is unlikely to crack. But it can get scratches. According to a scientist on Quora.com, it’s not your keys that cause trouble. Ninety-five percent of scratches are due to quartz. Yes, quartz. An ingredient in sand. Our surroundings have a lot of dust and sand particles. “When you see dust on your phone screen,” he says, “you try to clean it by rubbing it on your shirt, etc. When you do that, you put a scratch on your smartphone.”  You need a screen […]

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Filed under: apps, education, gadgets, Gmail | Comments Off on SAVE YOUR SCREEN

I feel like Thidwick, the big-hearted moose, throwing freeloaders overboard. My inbox is finally uncluttered, thanks to “OnMail,” a new email service. Every time a new sender is about to put mail in my box, I hit “block” or “accept.” If I hit “block,” they’re banished permanently, unless I unblock them later. It works better than labeling something “spam” in Gmail, which tends to bounce back. Even Gmail’s filters haven’t worked as well in my tests. OnMail has many other nice features. For example, it ignores “read receipts,” those notifications senders get when you’ve read their email. That’s to protect your privacy. If businesses know you’ve opened their messages, they’ll bombard you with more. (West Elm, I’m talking about you […]

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Filed under: email, gadgets, Gmail, health, tech support | Comments Off on TAMING THE EMAIL BEAST

After 11 years, my friend’s computer conked out, due to a hard drive failure. I tried to talk her into replacing it with a refurbished PC. No dice. Her first thought was taking it to a repair shop. Angie’s List said it would cost $300 for the drive and installation.  Not only did that sound like too much, but an 11 year-old all-in-one PC with a bad hard drive is likely to have other problems. So she got an HP Elitedesk 800 G1 desktop, which came with a monitor and mouse for $324 from Walmart. I was glad to see it had eight gigabytes of RAM and an Intel i5 processor. (You can compare processors at CPUboss.com.) Unfortunately, the Elitedesk […]

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Filed under: computers, email, Gmail, Internuts, photos, TV | Comments Off on BUYING A RENEWED PC

The first portable electronics gadget we ever had was a tape recorder, though we both remember the portable record player in a suitcase. Later, we both had Sony Walkmans. Did you know they’re still popular? Over 400 million Walkmans as of 2014– mainly used for listening to music on the fly — have been sold, according to TheVerge.com. In the 41 years since the first one, they’ve gone from cassette players to CD to Mini-Disc to MP3 to streaming music. Recently, we wondered why people still buy Walkmans, instead of listening to music on their phones. A reader told us the Walkman is superior. For one thing, you can store music in the “wav” file format, which takes up more […]

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Filed under: Amazon, apps, gadgets, Gmail, Internuts, music | Comments Off on THE WALKMAN LIVES

We’ve been trying out Google’s free “Backup and Sync” app. That’s how we discovered its sister app, Google One.  Google One backs up the stuff on your phone that isn’t automatically saved to your account online. That’s handy when you switch phones, since you can get everything back.  Thanks to Google One, we found an audio clip we thought was long lost. It was Bob’s best recounting of the time he faced a firing squad off the coast of Morocco, when soldiers on a remote island mistook him for the enemy. Before being shot over a cliff, the color of his passport proved he was an American. True story. You can get Google One at the Google Play store or […]

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Filed under: apps, backup, Gmail, Google, Internuts | 1 Comment »

We finally turned off a feature in Gmail that’s been there since the beginning and has been driving us crazy. It’s called “Conversation View.” We didn’t know you could turn it off. In conversation view, new messages show up at the bottom of the thread. If you have a ton of them, you scroll forever. For example, Joy’s friend Mary Lynn Funk went back and forth in one conversation for six months, all with the same heading. Half the time, Joy would lose the thread, unable to find the latest email, as she scrolled past long emails from three months before. Now those emails have been automatically separated into 49 separate chunks. It’s much more manageable. To turn it off […]

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Filed under: 3D Printing, apps, books, Gmail, Internuts, video | Comments Off on CONVERSATION VIEW

Joy left her Kindle Fire tablet in the gym. At first we thought it was somewhere around the apartment but it never turned up. So she decided to bite the bullet and buy Amazon’s “Fire HD 10.” It’s $150 and looks as good as an iPad for less than half the price. She got it in blue. She knew the old one had been stolen as soon as she turned on the new one; now there was one Portuguese and two Chinese dictionaries. Some circumstantial evidence is pretty suspicious. So she went to the “Manage your Kindle” section of Amazon and de-registered the old device. The Kindle Fire HD 10 and HD 8 come with Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. It […]

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Filed under: email, Gmail, Kindle, spam, tablet, trends, video | Comments Off on FIRE UP THE TABLET

Joy’s favorite part of Gmail is the “Undo” button, which allows you to call back an email that on second thought, you shouldn’t have sent. You can set it to hesitate for as long as 30 seconds, which allows for short naps. Now this second-thought-er is available in the free Gmail app for Android and iPhone. To try out the “undo” feature of the Gmail app on your phone, compose a message as you normally would. After you send it, look at the bottom of your screen. Tap “undo.” There’s also a new Gmail look available for your computer. If you’re a Gmail user this new version should pop up as a choice, meaning it will show you what’s new […]

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Filed under: apps, art, email, games, Gmail, Internuts, kids, magazines | Comments Off on SOMETHING NEW IN GMAIL

Topics in this column include: Finding Your Ancestry Online, Brain Teasers and other interesting websites, Getting a hacked Gmail account back, Fun Projects from Maker Lab’s new book, Sending birthday greetings online, Tips and Tricks for your cell phone.

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Filed under: email, Gmail, how-to, Internuts, science | Comments Off on FINDING YOUR ANCESTORS ONLINE